Project Background
The Ontario Energy Board (OEB) regulates the province's generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity and distribution of gas. It oversees the electricity and gas providers to protect the rights of the consumers. In addition, the OEB ensures the sustainability of energy systems. Internally, the OEB has a workforce of approximately 180 people and operates out of one single location on multiple floors.
The IT infrastructure is a combination of physical / virtual servers that utilizes MS Windows Server 2019 for Active Directory, Domain Controllers, DNS, DHCP, E-mail, File, Print and for various Application servers. Most servers in Production and all servers in Development and UAT are on a VMware 6.7 virtualized environment. Servers are connected to a HP 3PAR that store all the data. OEB has moved to Office 365 and Azure Disaster Recovery.
Energy sector entities (Applicants) submit their request for new licenses, renewals, or amendments to licenses. The information on this process is detailed on our oeb.ca website: https://www.oeb.ca/industry/licensed-companies-and-licensing-information
The current process utilizes PDF forms and email.
In the project, the selected vendor will digitize and automate the Licence application submission process. A process workflow and the existing PDF forms will be provided.
Purpose and Objectives
Objective: Automate the Licence application submission process to be in line with OEB Digital first strategy.
Purpose: One of the primary tools the OEB uses to regulate the energy sector are licenses. Applicants can request the following licenses: Generation Licence (includes Feed-in Tariff Program), Storage Licence, Electricity Retailer Licence, Electricity Wholesaler Licence, Unit Sub-Metering Licence, Distribution Licence, Transmission Licence and Gas Marketer Licence by completing the necessary forms. In addition, an applicant may seek to amend a licence by submitting a request to the OEB.
The Licensing Team which is part of the Industry Policy & Compliance department reviews and processes these requests and provides a licence or make amendments accordingly. This process has been manual to date as it relied on simple pdf and paper-based forms which made data extraction and manipulation cumbersome and time consuming. As part of OEB's Digital first strategy, this process needs to be automated to streamline the licensing process and make it more efficient while ensuring it is accessible and AODA compliant.
The goal of this project is to digitize the licence application submission process through a user-friendly portal. This will allow us to centralize our licence data and enhance end-user experience for our stakeholders.
The selected vendor will code, test the data / database / Integration, go through User Acceptance Testing (UAT), provide necessary documentation and training before implementation into Production on OEB Infrastructure (servers/operating systems/databases).
Full details of the RFS document is available only through MERX at www.merx.com or 1-800-964-6379, MERX reference number 0000211466.
