Challenge
The meter-to-cash process involves a series of steps for the billing and payment cycle of utilities such as electricity, gas, water, and other services. An efficient management of this process is critical to the financial performance of a utility and can help improve customer services. Revenue generation and sustainable growth are top goals for water and energy utilities, but they are unlikely to be achieved without automating processes for the data exchange between smart meters, MDM, and customer care and billing.
Meter data management plays a critical role when managing data from various sources. Challenges emerge in ensuring data accuracy, quality, and synchronization with billing systems. The complexity of data validation, estimation, and editing (VEE) processes adds another layer of complexity. Billing systems rely on this meter data to generate accurate bills and support various rate structures and customer segments. Aligning billing cycles with meter read cycles, handling complex tariffs, managing exceptions, and ensuring timely and accurate billing requires effective and automated processes for data exchange, synchronization, and mapping between the multiple head-end system, MDM, and billing systems. Data discrepancies, data loss, and synchronization issues can occur, leading to billing inaccuracies and customer disputes.
ideal solution
The ideal solution for smart meter to cash processes can be seamlessly achieved through a modern iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service). Utilihive iPaaS offers a comprehensive set of features built for utilities to optimize and streamline the entire lifecycle of smart meter data to cash operations.
By leveraging Utilihive iPaaS, utilities can easily integrate data from smart meters into their billing and revenue management systems, eliminating manual processes and reducing the risk of errors. Utilihive offers flexibility and elastic scalability in its integration layer, enabling real-time data processing and harmonization from diverse data sources from smart meters, IoT sensors, operational systems, and ERP platforms. The intuitive user interface and low-code configuration support empower organizations to easily design and configure complex workflows and business rules, ensuring efficient data transformation and validation logic. It also offers advanced error handling and monitoring capabilities, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of big data in a production setting for utilities of any size.
How we add value
An automated and optimized meter-to-cash process allows utilities to accurately measure customer consumption/production and ensure data is free of errors for accurate billing determinants that achieve reliable revenue recognition. With many different departments and automated processes, a meter-to-cash process relies heavily on the integration between operational systems like HES, MDM, Market Communications and CC&B systems.
Utilihive offers utilities and partners a full library of pre-configured integration applications or energy data flows that support meter-to-cash process automation. This library of pre-defined and configurable orchestrations or integration flows are designed for widely used smart metering or smart grid integration processes, that can be customized using the Utilihive (F)Lowcode DSL. Utilihive EVE offers a rules engine to ensure data quality and accuracy. End to end monitoring capabilities helps operational teams proactively resolve any data or message errors, events and alarms.
