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City Water Light and Power goes live with CIS Infinity

Largest municipal utility in Illinois strengthens customer service, cost-management with new CIS solution

City Water Light and Power (CWLP) is pleased to announce that CIS Infinity® is now live, ending the implementation on-budget at the multi-service utility. Replacing an aging legacy system that had reached its limitations, CIS Infinity provides the flexible solution required to serve 70,000+ Electric and Water customers, and provide billing services for Sewer and Sanitation customers.

“We’re the largest municipality in the State, and the 37th largest municipal utility in the United States,” says Al Monson, Director of Finance at CWLP. “We needed a solution that could handle the strict requirements of our rate structure and our demanding transaction volume.” Each month, CWLP processes approximately 1,000,000 cash, billing and adjustment transactions, and 78,000 bills.

Now that CIS Infinity is live, “residential and commercial customers are experiencing the service benefits and efficiencies that Advanced worked with us to implement. Our previous system had come to the end of its product life. We needed a system that could respond to the complex demands of our customers.”

“For example, our new clear and flexible billing format can display per-kilowatt and per-unit costs, and can distinguish between the sewer/sanitary charges CWLP collects for the City’s Public Works Department and the Springfield Metro Sanitary District.”

“Our employees conducted extensive testing during the implementation,” continues Al Monson. “CIS Infinity proved to be a fast, scalable solution for the 100-plus users that became proficient in its use.”

Mark Edwards, Software Specialist at CWLP, reports that performance was a key business requirement. “With an Oracle database on a UNIX platform, CIS Infinity has demonstrated tremendous performance in both test and production environments.”

“We’re in a position to make real customer service gains while meeting our cost-management objectives,” explains Todd Renfrow, CWLP’s General Manager. Over time, savings are expected to come from taking full advantage of a fully configurable CIS solution that grows to meet changing business requirements. “We plan to interface CIS Infinity fully with our other automated customer service tools: Interactive Voice Response, GIS and Outage Management. These features will augment CWLP’s long standing commitment to superior customer service.”

CWLP has implemented their rate structure with CIS Infinity’s Rate Engine™ technology, facilitating accurate billing for a wide variety of residential and commercial accounts. In Mr. Monson’s view, “Precise billing is not only a huge customer service benefit; it’s also a huge factor in forecasting costs and generating revenue.”

CWLP is a multi-service company that provides Electric and Water services, as well as street lights, security lighting, fire protection, maintains company meters, and bills for Sewer and Sanitary services. Annually, CWLP processes over 900,000 bills: approximately 876,000 regular bills, and 24,000 adjustment bills based on customer requests. They have 112,000 accounts, of which 78,000 are active.

More about Advanced: Advanced Utility Systems Corporation is a privately owned and operated software and services company in Toronto, Canada. The company has grown from its 1997 start-up to serve more than 60 North American and Caribbean water, electric, and natural gas utilities with its billing and customer information solution, CIS Infinity®.

For more information, contact:
Philip Playfair
Chief Marketing Officer
Advanced Utility Systems Corporation
(416) 496-0149 x229

Al Monson
Director of Finance
City of Springfield