Harnessing Technology
for the Modern Utility
By Dan Byrnes
GVP Product Development, Oracle Utilities
ORACLE ARTICLE
|
SEPTEMBER 2015
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HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY FOR THE MODERN UTILITY
Around the world, utilities are facing similar sets of challenges. Their objectives focus on driving greater efficiency
within their workforce, their assets and their network, and driving greater operational efficiencies across their
businesses. Equally important, they are focusing on improving the experience that they offer to their customers, and
increasing the options they have for their customers to interact with them, as well as the educational and the
informational programs they offer their customers. And they have to do all of this with similar or, in many cases,
declining IT budgets.
At the same time, they’re also being asked by the business to innovate and drive new operational programs (such
as power efficiency or conservation voltage reduction) or new customer programs (such as energy efficiency or
demand response). To do these things with existing legacy systems means they are spending much of their time
tying together existing applications and attempting to maintain a legacy infrastructure that is straining with the
increased demands upon it.
In order to meet these objectives, utilities are increasingly replacing legacy systems that no longer meet their
growing needs and are taking bold steps to modernize major portions of their entire technology platform. For some,
the major goal in modernizing is increased operational efficiency. Others make the move in order to drive innovation
throughout their business. Still others are modernizing in order to increase their ability to prepare for future growth
and market demands. For many, taking steps to modernize encompasses all three of the above.
In doing so, many of today’s utilities are taking advantage of Oracle Utilities’ world-class, leading-edge solution suite,
supported by a common, integrated applications platform designed to meet the new utility business process
demands. Here are two of their stories.
Increasing efficiency and driving innovation throughout the business
Two of the biggest barriers to a utility’s ability to innovate are time and cost. For example, a utility’s customer
information system (CIS) is essential to its ability to service its customers, and supports a wide variety of utility
business processes. And yet, a recent study undertaken by IDC Energy Insights for Oracle Utilities indicates that
many North American utilities “are still working with legacy custom-built system or systems that were replaced or
updated as part of Y2K. These systems are ripe for replacement, given advances in underlying technology, changes
in regulations, acquisitions, the need to accommodate new pricing structures, and the retirement of the workforce
supporting legacy systems.”1
Replacing a CIS has in the past been viewed as a challenging undertaking, in part because of its integration with so
many utility business processes, and in part because implementation costs have been daunting. But the motivation
for replacement continues to increase, whether it is to standardize the application infrastructure across multiple
service territories, to accommodate new pricing structures and an AMI system, or to better address new and future
customer expectations. But there is good news:
According to IDC Energy Insights’ recent study, today’s CIS implementation costs have decreased. “The price per
customer is now lower—averaging $42.81 per customer versus a commonly cited range of $60-$75 per customer,”
the report notes.2
Another barrier to utility innovation is risk: utility IT teams spend a lot of time integrating their applications and then
managing those integrations back to their existing in-house applications or other third parties, and they spend a lot
of time maintaining the integration, maintaining the movement of data between the applications, and maintaining
upgrades. A truly integrated applications platform—one that is both flexible and extensible—allows a utility to move
1 “CIS: Meeting Today’s Need for Low-Cost Implementations,” Jill Feblowitz and Marcus Torchia, IDC Energy Insights, April 2015.
2 Ibid.
1 | HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY FOR THE MODERN UTILITY
forward at its own pace, adding new applications as they are needed. As well, it allows utility IT teams to shift their
focus from integration fine-tuning and maintenance to driving new innovation in the utility’s business processes and
in customer experience.
One utility with its eye on continued, innovative growth is Orange County Utilities (OCU), which provides water,
wastewater, garbage disposal and recycling services to more than 210,000 customers in central Florida. The utility
consistently strives to improve customer service and satisfaction, and is dedicated to leveraging innovative ways to
achieve those improvements.
“We knew that a key to long-term growth and success required leveraging technology to drive more automation
across our organization,” said Rosemary Whitacre, OCU’s program development supervisor. “We brought in
engineers and consultants to help us draft our automation plan. We identified where we need to be in 20 years, and
the plan details the path to get there.”
The OCU automation plan includes overhauls of several technology systems across the organization, one of which
was its CIS. “Our previous system allowed for too many behind-the-scenes changes to go undocumented and as a
result had become arduous to maintain. We needed a CIS that could grow with us and keep us current with industry
technology,” Whitacre said.
The utility also needed a CIS that delivered functionality to specifically support the business processes unique to
utilities. In its previous system, OCU had to link deposits to services. However, as a multi-service utility, it needed to
be able to link deposits to customer accounts instead, to streamline account management operations and visibility.
As well, the utility’s previous system could not fully support the collection of capital fees, which resulted in reporting
outages that impacted the business process.
Whitacre cited ease of implementation, flexibility and configurability as key reasons OCU decided to implement
Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing (CC&B). “[It] is such a good, flexible technology that houses our data and
does so many things we wouldn’t have been able to do with our previous CIS. It will allow us to grow in the ways our
customers want and need to see us grow. Our main goal for the automation plan is to keep current with the market
and technology. As we continue rolling out the major pieces of the plan, CC&B will allow all of the systems to work
well together,” she said. As the utility moves forward with its next step—an AMI initiative—Whitacre added that “the
CC&B system affords us the opportunity to integrate with a meter data management system and gives us a
complete picture of each customer, from the plant to the tap.”
Preparing for future growth and market demands
Just as OCU detailed its 20-year path to the future, so, too, are other utilities paving the way with forward-thinking
technology choices. Based in Anchorage, Alaska, ENSTAR Natural Gas is one of the oldest companies operating in
Alaska, and provides natural gas to 137,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers, accounting for over
57 percent of the state’s population.
The legacy CIS that ENSTAR was using was a highly customized platform that left the company unable to pivot and
evolve as business needs changed. ENSTAR also found that the lack of embedded, standardized best practices in
its CIS was contributing to process inconsistencies within various offices in the company. Inconsistencies fed
inefficient operations, made training more difficult, and added a layer of complexity to handling errors and issues that
arose. As the utility looked at its goals, and what challenges and changes it saw coming in the future, it defined two
major business priorities: preparing for the future and implementing consistent processes. Christina Veltkamp,
ENSTAR’s customer service manager, explained: “We started looking at the big picture for the organization, future
growth, and what we wanted to do within the organization. With the legacy system that we had, we really didn’t have
the functionality that we needed. We also had done so much customization that we put ourselves in a box. We
2 | HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY FOR THE MODERN UTILITY
needed to limit customization as much as possible; we had a commitment as a team that we would only customize if
it was a tariff or Alaska statute issue. That was our No. 1 initiative.”
To further prepare for agility and growth in the future, ENSTAR looked for a CIS that would itself be capable of
agility. “We took a step back and said, ‘This is where we want to take our company, this is what we see coming our
way. We need to have a system that is compatible with this,’” she said.
After a successful implementation of Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management, ENSTAR selected Oracle
Utilities Customer Care and Billing (CC&B) as the base for its new CIS, and Oracle Utilities Customer Self
Service(CSS) as the CIS self-service application.
ENSTAR was up and running quickly with Oracle Utilities CC&B. Out of the box, the application addressed
ENSTAR’s major business priorities, and the team was able to limit customization to addressing tariff and policy
issues, something that had been identified as a key commitment. “Ninety-five percent of out-of-the-box functionality
worked for us. The ability to configure gives you so many options that you don’t need to do so many
customizations,” says Veltkamp. “We found that through the configuration we got pretty much everything that we
needed. There was very little that we had to customize.”
As well, with the comprehensive web portal provided by Oracle Utilities CSS, ENSTAR delivered online
communication and account management channels to its customers, nearly doubling its web portal usage in less
than a year, and supported the rollout of its paperless billing program.
The successful limitation of customization throughout the utility’s new CIS also prepares ENSTAR well for future
agility: it will no longer be boxed in when upgrades are required. Instead, it will be able to seamlessly adopt new
functionality as it becomes available.
This out-of-the-box functionality also allowed ENSTAR to standardize processes for more efficient operations,
another key focus for utilities, as mentioned earlier. The best practices that are embedded in Oracle Utilities CC&B
processes helped guide adoption of best practices across departments at ENSTAR, allowing all departments to
follow standardized procedures that came with the solution. “This really drove consistency. This really helped get
everything streamlined with training, as well,” Veltkamp said.
Various day-to-day operations became much more efficient with the new CIS, too, as the standard embedded
business processes and platform integration mean backend processes have become much more efficient. For
example, the best practices it has followed in Oracle Utilities CC&B have already led to a dramatic decrease in credit
and collections processes, and Aaron McClune, ENSTAR’s CIS administrator, has an eye on streamlining those
processes even further. “I am excited to come in every single day just to see what else I can learn,” he said.
Technology that looks to the future, too
Just as today’s utilities are firmly committed to modernizing and driving innovation in their business processes, so
too is Oracle Utilities focused on continued innovation moving forward. Today’s world-class, leading-edge solution
suite covers meter to customer to field work to network management, and is intelligent, connected and complete in
its breadth of operational areas covered. But we aren’t stopping there.
Already a market leader in analytics today, we’re continuing to invest in advanced analytics around reading and
responding to all the sensor data that is coming in from the grid and from meters. We are using that data to provide
analytics for distribution operations, preventative asset maintenance, transformer load management, and failure
prediction for network and asset points. We also have a deep and broad analytic data warehouse across the entire
domain of applications we have for asset, work planning, customer service, and more. As well, we continue to
embed more and more analytics into each solution application across the board.
3 | HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY FOR THE MODERN UTILITY
Utility consumers expect applications and information to be available through phones, tablets and other mobile
devices, and employees expect the same. We are delivering responsive design in our applications to support a
better user-experience on devices like iPads and Android tablets, including features such as screen reconfiguration,
zooming, the ability to use gestures, and the like.
It is our commitment to listen to utilities’ needs and drive innovation for their future that keeps us—just like
ENSTAR’s Aaron McClune—excited to come in each day with new ideas to better support our utility customers.
Learn more about Oracle Utilities integrated applications platform and innovative solutions here:
Oracle Utilities Integrated Platform white paper and Oracle Utilities Customer Solution brochure.
4 | HARNESSING TECHNOLOGY FOR THE MODERN UTILITY
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