WELLESLEY – March 25, 2009 – The utility company of the City of Tallahassee is implementing meter-data-management (MDM) and customer-care solutions from leading intelligent-infrastructure brand Aclara to manage both daily and interval meter data and to provide customer communications. The contract with Tallahassee, Florida's capitol and the home of Florida State and Florida A&M universities, provides software licenses and maintenance for more than 240,000 electric, water and gas meter devices. Aclara will partner with Honeywell Utility Solutions, the project's prime contractor, to implement the city's systems.
The Aclara Software Meter Data Management System (MDMS) and Aclara Software ENERGYprism® were among the applications chosen by Tallahassee, Honeywell, and Honeywell's utility consulting firm Enspiria Solutions to support the City's advanced-metering-infrastructure (AMI). Additional Aclara solutions will perform advanced load forecasting, revenue-assurance assessment, and AMI-enabled load and rate analysis.
The utility companies and their customers should begin seeing operational benefits from the project's advanced MDM functions starting as early as this summer. For example, the MDMS will allow Tallahassee's electric utility to intelligently filter and throttle messages from the AMI system to more quickly identify the source of the outage, and intelligently route messages to and from its outage-management system.
Working with Tallahassee's AMI system, Elster's EnergyAxis® System, the MDMS will facilitate demand-response and price-responsive rate programs to encourage customers to conserve electricity, gas, and water. Plus, the MDMS will allow Tallahassee to offer pro-active, personalized alerts through communication devices such as e-mail, telephone, and in-home displays. Alerts will inform customers about bill-to-date, critical peak, and other customer-related data.
The ENERGYprism applications will let customers view and analyze through the web how they are using electricity, gas, and water. In addition, the application allows customers to analyze their bills, compares a home's resource consumption to that of similar homes in the neighborhood, and offers personalized conservation recommendations tied to specific dollar savings. Tallahassee's contact-center representatives will use an ENERGYprism user interface tailored specifically to help agents use the AMI data to more effectively resolve customer inquiries.
“In addition to customer analytics, the Aclara solutions will empower customers and help them understand how they are using resources,” said Reese Goad, utility services director for Tallahassee. “We can unlock the value of advanced metering data with on-line tools that allow our citizens to view their electric usage hourly and gas and water usage daily.”
The city's commitment to Aclara's MDMS and customer-service applications is an indication that these solutions can add comparable business benefit to municipal, investor-owned, and cooperative utilities as well as their customers.
“At Aclara we believe that successful resource-conservation efforts will hinge on the availability of information to utilities and customers that is both understandable and actionable,” said Dave Zabetakis, General Manager of Aclara Software. “In this regard, Aclara offers a wide range of applications to gas, water, and electric utilities that allow them to understand how resources are being used and deployed.”
Media contact:
Nancy E. Talley
Marketing Communications Manager
216-896-8657
