By Catherine Viola
November 1, 2010
Many energy retailers today rely on charging and billing systems that were designed to handle simple flat-rate or volume-based tariffing and batch processing of usage data based on quarterly or monthly billing cycles. These systems were not expected to accommodate complex charging schemes based on hourly or half-hourly interval data produced by smart meters, nor to handle consumer microgeneration or future smart grid requirements such as roaming accounts for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).
To cater for these envisaged smart grid service innovations, utility retailers will need modern billing, charging and customer care systems capable of processing large volumes of transactions in near real time and of handling a wide variety of usage-, time- and event-based tariffs, as well as enabling flexible new service creation, discounting and promotions.
Suitable systems are being developed by traditional utility systems vendors, such as SAP, but there is also an opportunity for vendors from the telecoms sector, which already has sophisticated billing and charging models, to address the smart grid sector. These vendors have proven credentials in processing real-time transactions at scale, and can readily demonstrate the applicability of their products to smart metering scenarios. The emergence of these vendors as credible suppliers to the smart grid sector will bring about a change in the supply-side dynamics of the utility billing and customer care systems segment.
Meeting the Challenges of Smart Grid Charging and Billing assesses how utility billing and customer care systems will need to evolve to cater for the new pricing models and services that smart meters enable. It includes:
- A review of the charging and billing system requirements implied by new pricing models (including key learning points from the telecoms sector).
- Commentary on issues such as revenue assurance and fraud management, and the role that billing and other IT systems will have to play.
- Comparison of billing and charging system vendors, their market positioning and their technologies.
- Profiles of billing systems vendors, including Convergys, Intec, Junifer Systems, LogNet, MetraTech, Nokia Siemens Networks, Oracle, SAP, Smart Grid Billing, SunTec, Telcordia, and Utilibill.
(The above text is the Executive Summary from this analyst report in which LogNet Systems is profiled.)