Major Texas utility plugs in Oracle Customer Cloud Service to enable smart meters, enhance customer experience, and simplify technology infrastructure

EL PASO, Texas and AUSTIN, Texas, May 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- To better serve its 460,000 customers, El Paso Electric (EPE) has upgraded its customer information system to Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service. By migrating to an integrated customer billing and meter data management cloud platform, the utility created a foundation for enhanced service offerings that will also support its smart meter rollout. EPE teamed up with Oracle Consulting Services as a major participant in the implementation.

"El Paso Electric's mission is to transform the energy landscape, and technology helps us drive efficiency, customer experience and security to capture opportunities in our evolving industry," said Cheryl Mele, VP of Customer Care and Communications, El Paso Electric. "EPE selected Oracle's SaaS technology to provide the flexible scale to support our smart meter rollout while realizing value from the massive data sets that come with a smart, connected network. With the Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service integrated solution, we expect to regularly leverage new functionality to drive our business and process optimization strategies.  While a typical technology migration of this nature can require up to six months to return to pre-migration customer call handling times, we returned to near normal times in under one month with an intuitive tool and outstanding contact center representatives." 

EPE is a regional energy provider engaged in generation, transmission, and distribution. It powers approximately 460,000 customers in a 10,000 square mile area of the Rio Grande Valley in West Texas and Southern New Mexico. The utility's smart meter project launches this month and is expected to fully replace all existing meters by 2025.

Following a 'true' cloud approach
As part of its Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) rollout, EPE needed a meter data management (MDM) system to support and process interval meter data. Instead of installing a separate MDM system, the utility decided migrating to Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service for an integrated customer and MDM platform was the best option. The utility now benefits from a clear, consistent view of its customers' energy use to help ensure it can continue to deliver the most reliable electric services.

With the implementation, EPE is also benefitting from automated patching and product and security upgrades. All of this is reducing costs and IT burden to allow EPE's Customer Information System and IT personnel to focus more time on implementing incremental functionality that will benefit the business. 

"With Oracle's modern SaaS meter-to-cash solution featuring an advanced MDM and intuitive dashboards, El Paso Electric has streamlined its operations. As El Paso Electric moves forward with their meter transition, they will benefit from reduced service rep training time, faster call resolution, and improved overall service levels," said Dave De Maio, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Client Services for Industries. "Oracle's deep industry expertise and collaborative approach was instrumental in helping EPE confidently transition to the cloud. The scale, agility, security, and simplicity of the Oracle Cloud will continue to help increase the flexibility, reliability, and efficiency of their critical business applications."

EPE's implementation followed the Oracle True Cloud Method, a reliable, collaborative approach to cloud implementation designed with customer training engrained in all phases of the project lifecycle. This methodology uses continuous knowledge transfer as a cornerstone to help customers develop self-sustaining internal capabilities critical to maximizing their cloud investment. The implementation was further enabled by Oracle's library of complementary implementation assets.

Learn more about this and other successful projects at Oracle Utilities or Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service and join the discussion on the Oracle Utilities blog.

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SOURCE Oracle