Your customers are always changing. New business models. New facilities. New technologies. To keep pace, you will need to upgrade your customer care and billing system. Over the entire life of your customer care and billing system, upgrades are a significant cost. You can vastly reduce those costs, however, by choosing a product whose architecture is specifically designed for easy upgrades.

Prepayment for electric, gas, and water is a way of life for many countries - and for good reason. It helps customers budget their utility money and helps utilities avoid bad debt without the need to collect and track deposits. Prepayment has gained increased attention in the last several years. The primary reason is that customers switching from credit card billing to prepayment almost always reduce their electricity consumption.

The Smart Grid is a vision of a better electricity delivery infrastructure. Smart Grid implementations dramatically increase the quantity, quality and use of data available from advanced sensing, computing and communications hardware and software. As a result, they help utilities address two of today's most important business drivers: environmental concerns and power delivery constraints and disturbances.

Burdened by a homegrown, mainframe-based system, CHG&E relied heavily on radio dispatchers and paperwork to capture information and manage service calls. With its most recent Oracle Utilities Mobile Workforce Management upgrade, moved to a real-time work-order scheduling allowing it to immediately adjust schedules.

Hurricanes, ice storms, tornadoes and other disasters consistently result in extended outages and lengthy restoration periods for utilities all over the United States. Changing weather patterns and earlier, longer storm seasons have exacerbated the problem. Winter storms from New England through the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest required long and extensive restoration efforts. And hurricane Ike caused damage and lengthy outages from Texas to New York. In addition to the task of restoring power, these extended outages impact utility companies’ ability to maintain business operations and provide the high level of customer service that is expected in their industry.

Billing has always been a mission-critical operation for utilities. For the utility with environmentally-aware customers, its importance is increasing. By combining environmental and financial information, "green billing" helps customers understand the long-term environmental effects of their personal energy and water use.