Add Marketing Capabilities to CC&B Without Touching It!

Texas utilities needed to add vast new capabilities to CC&B and other leading utility billing systems.  They just did not want to touch the code.

Rather than spending millions of dollars bringing in consultants to build a new customer system tied to CC&B – and risk a billing system problem, they chose to use Fractal to build a parallel billing system.

The parallel system was deployed in less than 45 days at a cost of less than the annual CC&B maintenance.  The first huge benefit was that billing errors ended.  If both systems agreed, the bill was correct.  If not, the bill was checked before it saw the customer.

Here are some of the marketing and sales capabilities our Fractal utilities added without ever touching CC&B:

• Give customers (residential, commercial, industrial) easy access to their data (both billing and meter data) via a web portal that can be accessed from the desktop or mobile device.
• Give Key Account managers, the customer call center, the finance group, the demand management (demand response) group, and various internal data analytics teams easy access to customer’s data (both billing and meter data) via a web portal that can be accessed from the desktop or mobile device.
• Provide a forecasting tool to customers so that as rate changes are announced customers can forecast their next year’s bills for budgeting purposes.
• Provide a forecasting tool to the finance department so that as rate changes are being proposed, the financial impact to the utility can be measured.
• Provide a tool for quickly developing new rate models and running them over multiple years of data for all customers and recalculating all bill for all customers for those years.
• Provide a tool for easily incorporating changes to load forecasts (based on weather, efficiency program projections, etc.) and using those updated load forecasts to recalculate/forecast all bills for all customers.
• Provide a quality assurance check of both meter data and calculated bills (down to individual line item detail) to catch potential errors before a bill is sent to a customer.
• Enable every customer service rep to answer the most detailed questions on both existing bills and forecast “best rate plan” for future use.
• Ability to do “what if” analysis and other compute intensive tasks without overwhelming the legacy system-of-record.
• Ability to operate the system behind the firewall in their own data center, and/or in an outsourced data center, and/or in the cloud (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc.) so that other programs and analytics packages that are cloud-based can be integrated with the system.