McMinnville Water & Light (McMinnville, Oregon, U.S.) will be the first to deploy Innoprise Software's (Bend, Oregon) customer information system (CIS). This contract follows two years of intense effort to build the next-generation standard in platform-neutral, cross-functional enterprise technology.

McMinnville Water & Light is scheduled to go live with Innoprise CIS in December, replacing a legacy system that was no longer meeting its evolving business needs. Wes Thomas, key accounts manager for the utility explains that two key factors drove its decision to replace its legacy CIS/CRM systems — regulatory reporting and rate design. “With our old legacy software, simple requests such as new FERC reports and rate analyses take hours to complete and require costly programming changes.”

In terms of rate design, Thomas says, the utility's legacy systems are based on utility tariffs and billing structures of 15 to 20 years ago. “They will accommodate any number of billing scenarios, but it is still a finite number. With the new world of real-time and time-of-use billing, we need a software architecture that's wide open. And given the increasing costs to maintain, upgrade and integrate our legacy systems, replacing these systems seemed the only plausible strategy for IT and business success.”

The utility decided to deploy Innoprise CIS, which uses a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform with a services-oriented, Internet-native architecture that provides the flexibility to add new services, products and rate structures as business needs and regulatory demands change. It also provides built-in functionality for advanced features such as customer self-service, online bill payment, complex rating and billing, and Microsoft Office integration.
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