Old Dominion Electric Cooperative

Zencos helps ODEC keep SAS admin & support costs low and service levels high

The Old Dominion Electric Cooperative (ODEC) provides wholesale power to 11 not-for-profit distribution cooperatives in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware – serving 1-million-member customers in the rural and suburban portions of those states.  ODEC saved its customers millions by using SAS Analytics to forecast energy demand. With better forecasts, the cooperative is keeping costs low and service levels high.

So, when it came to supporting and maintaining their SAS forecasting application, ODEC turned to Zencos to provide highly skilled, dedicated and cost-effective SAS support.

The specialized skills required to maintain a SAS environment fell outside of ODEC’s IT staff.  “Our IT team has deep expertise in Windows, but the SAS expertise needed to maintain our forecasting application and keep up with the volume of analytical requests from business users was a challenge”, says Jim Finn, ERP Systems Manager at ODEC.

With SAS expertise and service continuity being top priorities for ODEC, ZenGuard provided the skilled resources ODEC needed within a dedicated support model. “Having a dedicated team makes all the difference. Our ZenGuard team knows our systems, knows SAS inside and out, and are highly responsive and easy to work with,” said Finn.

In addition to the IT team, business users at ODEC saw tremendous value in ZenGuard as well.  “ZenGuard provided highly skilled resource during several SAS outages, upgrades & installations. It was helpful and valuable to have two resources available to keep our system running with the best performance possible,” said David Hamilton, Manager, Load Forecasting, ODEC.

ZenGuard provided ODEC a comprehensive range of services to keep their application running with optimal performance and position them for future growth.

Services included:

• System maintenance
• System troubleshooting
• System upgrades
• General report support
• Knowledge transfer & best practice advice

“ZenGuard helped us cost-effectively maintain our SAS environment.  We received a high level of service, and the expertise our business required without the expense of hiring an in-house resource,” said Finn.