Blog Archives

Christmas & New Year office hours

8/12/2014

Christmas / New Year office hours

We will be closing the New Zealand office from noon on Wednesday 24 December 2013, and reopen 9.00am Monday 5 January 2015.

The US office will be closed 25 & 26 December and 1 & 2 January.

Support calls over the break

During the Christmas / New Year break we offer a very limited 'out of hours' service. Calls are monitored by Answer Services who will forward urgent requests for help to the Directors or senior staff who may be available; there are no guarantees as to who that might be.

Answer Services direct number is +64 4 494 1758.

We would appreciate your help in limiting calls during the break to Emergencies only until the office reopens. Please note that callouts during this time are not covered by our support contracts, so any calls for assistance will incur "out of hours" fees, which can be significant, even on non-statutory days.  As a precaution we recommend that no major software updates or changes to your SCADA system be undertaken in the week or two prior to Christmas, if it can at all be avoided.

We trust you enjoy your summer break and look forward to catching up again early in the New Year.

Organisational changes

8/12/2014

Welcome to Jan Le Roux

Earlier this year we welcomed Jan Le Roux to our staff. Those customers who attended this year's training courses in September will have met Jan. He joins us as Senior Project Manager with extensive experience of communications infrastructure projects for Ericsson in Uganda, Nigeria, Iran and South Africa. Most recently he was with 4RF as Director of Global Systems Engineering. Jan is now Project Manager for our Bangladesh projects.

Abbey Systems NZ office organisational changes

Effective the beginning of 2015 we're making some changes to our Applications Engineering processes.

Jan Le Roux will assume responsibility for the Project Management contractural side of all of Abbey Systems' significant SCADA projects. Customers can expect to hear from Jan where their jobs involve coordination of hardware, firmware, software or configuration and programming changes, or use of external contractors.
Graeme Clover will be semi retiring and reducing his hours with us to part time three days a week. For customers this means he won't be available every day for support assistance, but will continue to be involved in areas of his special expertise, such as injection controllers and load management systems. We wish Graeme all the best in his semi retirement as we know there will be a lot of "training" involved of the steam variety. He's also most welcome to come back and help us with our training courses.
James Grant will take the Lead Applications Engineer role and with Jan be responsible for service delivery to the customer.

Smart Grid Project in Bangladesh

8/12/2014

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve begun delivery of a NZ$8M project that will supply smart power meters and a load management system to the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BDPD). This is our second big win in Bangladesh, having successfully completed a $6.4M contract to provide a SCADA system for 34 substations in the Chittagong region in 2011. One of the key factors in winning the contract was our track record in Bangladesh; having worked closely with the BDPD in the past, they know we can be trusted to supply innovative and reliable solutions, as well as understanding the unique environment they operate in.

We are the lead in a consortium with EDMI of Singapore and Totaltel Pty of Bangladesh, and together we will supply and install the meters, along with connection to the SCADA system that Abbey Systems supplied to Chittagong in 2011. It’s a sophisticated metering system, which has several unique features; enabling the BPDB to view metering data remotely in real time, as well helping to locate illegal power connections, which are a considerable issue in a country where a significant amount of power and income is currently lost through these connections.

Connecting meters sites to the SCADA system will allow comparisons to be made between how much energy goes out on each feeder and how much energy is actually used by customers - helping to identify areas where there are illegal connections. Since maintaining infrastructure in Bangladesh can have its problems, each meter communicates with control room through two paths: GPRS (a type of mobile data service) and WiFi. The WiFi network is owned and operated by BPDB and the GPRS is owned and operated by a local provider. This diversity of paths ensures that at least one way of communicating with the control room is available at all times. At the control room, meters are grouped according to the feeders that they are connected to and the energy and power values are compared with the energy and power flowing out through the feeder. Voltages along the feeder are also monitored to determine line loss and loading characteristics. We are approximately 20% of the way through delivery of the project and will keep you updated as it progresses.

Christmas & New Year office hours

Organisational changes

Smart Grid Project in Bangladesh

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