The utility sector has experienced several difficulties over the last few years, and as a result of the 2020 pandemic, the challenges for utilities have only grown manifold as companies work tirelessly to provide uninterrupted essential services. Providing safe and efficient last-mile services to customers while complying with evolving regulations, ensuring robust disaster readiness, and driving net-zero greenhouse emissions has become more difficult to achieve. Going digital on the Cloud is the only way utilities can cope with these challenges today.
The Growing Challenges of Utilities
Stiff competition, high churn, fluctuating customer demands, and climate change concerns have every utility company scouting for ways to survive and thrive.
Here’s looking at some of the top challenges plaguing utilities:
- Keeping track of the constantly changing and evolving regulatory requirements and effectively managing policies and procedures to ensure compliance
- Aggregating and managing the growing number of distributed energy resources (DERs) to enhance grid performance
- Constantly adopting innovations in Customer Information System (CIS) and Meter Data Management (MDM) across automation, IoT, and digitization
- Moving away from rigid business models towards those that promote sustainability and growth
- Driving efforts towards reducing maintenance and support costs across the highly cluttered environment
- Overcoming challenges across system configuration, integration, security, and scalability.
The Benefits of Adopting Cloud and Going Digital
As consumer expectations continue to evolve during this era of economic uncertainty and regulatory changes, utilities need to drive efforts to remain agile.
Relying on rigid proprietary systems and approaches to run the business will not help overcome the many inefficiencies or strengthen the customer experience.
Cloudification and digitization at every step of the journey are crucial to build state-of-the-art capabilities and keep pace in today’s changing business environment.
Here are the top benefits utilities can enjoy by adopting Cloud and going digital:
- Keep up with customer expectations: Embracing Cloud is a great way for utilities to deliver services that match the speed of customer expectations. Cloud not only reduces the growing burden on existing IT infrastructure; it also offers a way for services to be delivered in a quick, reliable, secure, and flexible manner. In addition, by using Cloud, they can exploit new methods of developing their business while reducing the reliance on costly, inefficient, and time-consuming IT systems.
- Improve system performance: As utilities struggle to keep up with evolving regulations and fluctuating market trends, Cloud provides them with the ability to improve their IT systems’ processing power and storage capacity. On-demand access to critical resources guarantees superior performance while also eliminating expensive charges to maintain a robust infrastructure. Automatic upgrades and security patches mean utilities can lower the cost of ownership (CAPEX), remain competitive, and easily meet changing regulatory requirements.
- Enjoy unlimited scalability: With time, every utility company is bound to require additional technical support to run its growing business. For such situations, Cloud comes in handy as it provides access to additional resources companies need when they need it. Such access to best-of-breed capabilities not only ensures seamless delivery of critical services, but it also helps strengthen customer satisfaction and brand loyalty while bringing churn to a minimum.
- Reduce maintenance costs and efforts: Cloud also helps overcome the challenges that bulky on-premises systems bring, especially with respect to maintenance costs and efforts. With Cloud, utilities can eliminate the need for time-consuming maintenance activities of their physical infrastructure and drive all their focus on strategic tasks. Cloud also helps companies in obtaining maximum value from their CIS and MDM landscape. It helps them achieve long-term operational ease and cost savings through consolidation and optimization.
Read: How Oracle Utilities C2M Solutions Simplify Meter to Cash
How RIA Advisory can Help
As a specialized business advisory and technology company, RIA Advisory specializes in digitization for Utilities, Banking, and Insurance industry verticals, focusing primarily on cloud implementations. With a team of 250+ experts with deep expertise in new-age applications and technology and over 25 years of experience in utilities solutions for the US utility companies, we offer a comprehensive range of specialized cloud integration consulting services for Utilities, right from project planning and implementation to post-production application management and support.
Our business philosophy is based on a close working relationship with our customers. We focus on delivering unmatched ROI for the organizations by building effective Cloud strategies that are key to the next generation Meter-To-Cash innovation. We are a one-stop-shop organization providing cutting-edge cloud-based IT solutions. We also offer the technology needed for digital CIS Billing and Smart Meter Solution, allowing our customers to serve their residential, industrial, or commercial stakeholders better.
We use our experience from banking clients and bring those learnings to the utility sector. Via robust strategic planning, we identify opportunities and leverage insights to create an engaging digital experience for users. Using our industry domain expertise, we help optimize business processes and workflows and use our digital technology skillset to build quality products, services, and experiences.
Our services for utility companies include:
- Business Consulting and Advisory
- Infrastructure Assessment and Roadmap Planning
- Smart Meter and Meter Data Management Implementation
- Cloud-based Digital CIS Implementation
- 24×7 Support for Cloud and On-premises CIS and MDM Systems
- Technical and Functional Upgrades of old CC&B and MDM systems
We are presenting our solutions and our learnings at the 2021 Digital + Cloud Summit. Let’s connect to discuss how we can help you achieve process excellence, increase agility, increase RoI, and reduce TCO in your meter-to-cash process.
