Customer Relationship Management

Open Smartflex provides utilities with the capabilities needed to deliver superior customer experience to meet or exceed key performance metrics, or even as a differentiator in the market. This set of capabilities streamlines and integrates the marketing, sales and post-sales processes, enhancing the quality and effectiveness of companies’ customer relationships and eliminating the need to bolt-on an external CRM package, which in turn, can help a utility avoid significant costs and risks. While the so-called best of breed dichotomy has been used in utility CIS environments, typically the effort fails to meet original expectations. With Open Smartflex, utilities are provided with a customer engagement center that includes the latest self-service technology, applications for the management of advanced sales and customer service, and a multichannel marketing hub to define campaigns and multidimensional segmentation.

Related Challenges

Mobile Worforce Management

Open Smartflex empowers utility field crews to daily work in a timely, efficient manner enhancing customer satisfaction by ensuring the responsiveness and priority of the jobs being completed. The solution’s features include support of on-demand planned work, mobile work orders, field crew required asset management and support of third-party operations. With Open Smartflex, utilities can automate processes to efficiently manage internal and third-party work orders while optimizing the use of resources, resulting in reductions in operating costs, and improved effectiveness. In addition, utilizing integrated mobile technology, field workers are empowered with the tools needed to do their job, no matter where they are, enabling a paperless environment.

Related Challenges

Operation Support Management

For utilities offering telecommunications services along with their traditional commodities, Open Smartflex provides the means to reach higher levels of automatization and efficiency by integrally managing network inventory, including number ranges and IP addresses, as well as the connection/disconnection processes of both utilities and telecom services. The solution helps service providers ensure complete connectivity among users, timely activation of services, distributed service provisioning and high-quality connections, reducing complexities and integration costs by supporting different communication platforms, multiple vendor applications, and a variety of standards and technologies.

Related Challenges

Meter Data Management

Open Smartflex meets advanced meter data requirements outside of traditional meter-to-cash process, regardless of what meter is installed. The solution supports the storage and management of interval consumption , Validation, Editing, and Estimation (VEE) , events management, and usage aggregation, and other features required for large-scale deployment of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and the associated vast amount of data. Therefore, the solution is a key enabler for the deployment of utility smart grid technologies to meet the challenges of market transformation, emerging disruptive technologies, and data-driven innovation. As a technology-agnostic solution, Open Smartflex incorporates the Multispeak protocol to be interoperable with various vendor head-end systems , including industry leaders such as Itron, Landis & Gyr and Sensus. By communicating with the head-end system, Open Smartflex collects data, such as meter reads and network events, and can issue commands to smart meters, including remote connect and disconnects.

Related Challenges

Customer Information System

At the core of the product, Open Smartflex offers a set of customer-focused applications to achieve highly effective business operations. The solution supports the management of commercial and operational processes including sales and customer service, the setup of rates for any customer class and level of complexity, real time charging (for telecom services), meter information management (including AMI/Smart Grid support), advanced billing, the management of administrative orders, payments, and collections. Relaying on Open Smartflex, utilities can quickly respond to customer requests, market and regulatory changes, and diversify beyond traditional utility services to new, innovative services to drive incremental revenues. Over the course of its development and through a wide range of client implementations, Open Smartflex has assembled a substantial catalog of industry successful practices, and due to the maturity of the product, assures a high level of business requirements fulfillment without significant modifications, provides for a more efficient implementation, and reduces TCO for our clients, one of Open’s most important ongoing objectives.

Related Challenges

Analytics Platform

For utilities to make smarter decisions, Open Smartflex brings the ability to apply analytics to the vast amounts of data that the company collects and analyzing the data in near real-time. The solution offers a generous set of prebuilt dashboards and metrics. These queries go directly to the database and eliminate excel spreadsheets, reducing inconsistencies and errors that typically occur when exchanging data with disparate applications. Open Smartflex also provides tools to enable the creation of customized dashboards, reports and key metrics for each operational/organizational unit, empowering utilities with the visualization capabilities to run a data-driven business.

Related Challenges