ORACLE - Lee County Electric Cooperative Selects Oracle Utilities Solutions to Support Smart Grid Initiatives
Lee County Electric Cooperative (LCEC) www.lcec.net , a not-for-profit electric distribution cooperative serving a five-county area in Southwest Florida, selected Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management, Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway, Oracle SOA Suite, and plans to upgrade its existing Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing application, to support its customer experience initiatives. The utility is working with Oracle Consulting on the implementation and upgrade.
Using Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management and Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, LCEC plans to improve the information it presents to its 200,000 customers on monthly bills and through its Web self-service offering. The Oracle applications enable the utility to consolidate storage of interval metering data, allowing it to provide near real time usage and cost information to customers. The utility hopes to see a decrease in customer call volume through Web self-service adoption growth.
The utility will leverage the integration of Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management and Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing to improve its meter-to-cash process – enhancing master data synchronization, batch billing, bill cancel/re-bill and online billing. The integration will help LCEC reduce costs and accelerate time to revenue.
Additionally, LCEC selected Oracle Utilities Smart Grid Gateway to provide a single point of connection between existing and future smart grid devices and applications. The utility plans to use the solution to handle common advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) processes, including remote connect/disconnect and meter status. The solution will also enable efficient and timely flow of data to appropriate applications.
Further, using its existing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition solution, LCEC can easily organize consistent, relevant and timely data from across the organization to rationalize consumption and payment collection trends into integrated reports. These reports provide LCEC management with a holistic view of the current status of customers, payment collections and workload to improve decision making.
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“We are expanding our relationship with Oracle as we continue to invest in the company's technology stack to support our long term strategic roadmap and the LCEC business direction. The software’s interoperability should give us the scalability and functionality we need to improve our operational efficiency, streamline our processes, and enhance service delivery while empowering our customers with information to understand their usage,” said Frederic Kunzi, chief information officer, Lee County Electric Cooperative.
“We are pleased to support Lee County Electric Cooperative as it embarks on its smart grid initiatives. With Oracle, LCEC can organize vast quantities of consumption data generated by automated meters and turn it into intelligence that helps them run their business more effectively across every department,” said Rodger Smith, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities.