Utilities are waking up to the urgency of building brand loyalty and observing customer behavior to cater to their unmet demands in a bid to prevent losing them to nontraditional competitors. Utilities are looking for better tools that enable their customers to service themselves better and gain their loyalty in return. “Another aspect the utilities are looking into, besides just selling the commodity, is the method to gain upselling revenue streams. This is done by selling products and services that are complementary to the commodities offered,” says Bashir Bseirani, CEO, CTO, and Co-founder, Avertra. For instance, an energy utility can contact a customer to offer them a brand new energy efficient water heater at a competitive price, and this adds to the different streams of revenue in addition to the commodity.

The ideology behind Avertra’s launch in 2007 was to add positive disruption to the utility space by bringing in a “younger, millennial point of view”. In a bid to help utilities overcome their fear of complex integrations by relying on the right resources, Avertra ensured their integration services were one of the fundamental tenets for enforcing innovation in the utilities solutions space. With early beginnings as a services only organization that focused on SAP consultant services, staff augmentation, business management consulting, and business process re-engineering, the firm continues to evolve into newer streams within the utility industry. From a services standpoint, the company has also helped utilities identify how to mark their assets in the field operations, to put together replacement schedules for these assets, mobile workforce management scheduling and planning, along with GIS integration and mapping.

Delivering SAP Support

Avertra’s delivery of SAP expertise helps utilities streamline their operations, agility, and improve connectivity. With implementations that cover all ERP and SAP for Utilites modules, Avertra’s consultants are experts in complete lifecycle implementations starting from project scoping and blueprinting to offering live support and performance optimization services. In one of the instances, Avertra helped an energy utility firm, Peoples Natural Gas Company, by simplifying their SAP support in the billing area through optimization of the rates engine. After optimization of the billing schema, maintenance for the internal support team was reduced by nearly 50 percent. The rate engine/billing schema originally consisted of 600 steps and was reduced to only 200 steps after the optimization. Avertra’s SAP support helped the firm’s customers in expanding their understanding of key billing engine concepts and design practices so that they could support it themselves in the future. That is just one of many examples of how Avertra adds value through its services division.

A Backwards Compatible Product Line

The extensive experience on the services side has allowed Avertra to identify the white spaces and gaps in products that service, transform and optimize the utility industry. This has triggered the setting up of a products division within the firm that would focus on the irregularities within the ‘construction to cash lifecycle’ for utilities. The inception of the MiUtility family of products was a light-bulb moment for Avertra as it brought about the realization of wanting to introduce their own technology and products in the utilities space, in addition to addressing the service issues. The firm’s MiUtility suite powered by their Grove technology platform is an easy-to-deploy solution with end-to-end capabilities that optimizes operations, facilitates business driven customer service, offers enhanced communication and customer engagement, and simplifies billing and payment.“The way that we've built our product to be scalable and flexible solution allows us to integrate it with IBM’s AS400 or a Mainframe Application,” delineates Bseirani.

Tracking Omni-channel Communication

The MiUtility customer self-service/eBilling Web portal and mobile applications not only eliminate call center, print and distribution costs but also help its utility customers cut internal costs as well. The Mikiosk application can be deployed in areas like universities and congested zones where a utility wants customers to be able to sign up for service, view and pay their bills, and take care of their self-service needs while they are on the go.