Case study: Enhancing communications with streaming technology

3-minute read

We brought our expertise and experience in

• Palantir Foundry
• Apache Flink
• Java
• API and solution architecture

Powering West Coast communities for 100+ years

Founded over a century years ago, this West Coast utility provides electricity and natural gas to more than 16 million people across 70,000 square miles. With a workforce of over 20,000 employees, the organization manages an extensive infrastructure, including more than 100,000 circuit miles of electric distribution lines and over 40,000 miles of natural gas distribution pipelines.

Tackling communication inefficiencies

The utility’s existing outage notification system was outdated, slow, opaque, and often inaccurate, leaving customers uncertain about the company’s awareness of and attention to outages. This lack of confidence often resulted in a high volume of unnecessary service calls—amid confusion about which notifications customers received, when, and for what reason. To address these issues, the utility needed a modern solution that could handle real-time data processing and effectively manage a comprehensive range of outage scenarios, from the simplest to the most complex.

Delivering a modern, robust communication system

Logic20/20 designed and implemented a cutting-edge streaming engine using Apache Flink within Palantir Foundry to revolutionize the utility’s notification system. Our team developed a series of Flink clusters to manage both stateful and stateless business rules for tackling complex conditions like outage mergers and splits.

By integrating the new system with the utility’s Distribution Management System (DMS), Preference Management System, messaging system, and machine learning models, Logic20/20 ensured seamless data flow and customer communications. Using actual production data, our team built the development pipeline to uncover edge cases and guarantee robustness. They employed rigorous testing to identify and rectify faults, ensuring the system’s resilience and accuracy.

Transforming outage management and customer satisfaction

By delivering improved initial outage notifications and real-time updates, our work with this utility led to a 10-percentage-point increase in customer satisfaction scores immediately post-implementation. The enhanced capability to handle complex outage scenarios has improved overall service reliability and boosted customer trust. Looking ahead, plans are in place to extend the system to cover all types of outages, including planned outages and public safety power shutoffs, further expanding the benefits of this modernized communication system.

A brighter future for customer communication

Through their partnership with Logic20/20, the utility has ushered in a new era of customer communication during power outages. By implementing a cutting-edge streaming engine and integrating it with existing systems, we addressed critical pain points and significantly improved customer satisfaction.

The system’s success in managing complex outage scenarios and enhancing operational efficiency underscores the potential of advanced technology to transform essential services. As the utility plans to extend the system to cover a broader range of outage types, the foundation is set for continued innovation and improved customer trust in the years to come.