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CONTACT INFORMATION
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oregon’s McMinnville
Water & Light First to Deploy Innoprise CIS Software
ORLANDO, FL and BEND, OR—September 29, 2004
- Innoprise Software, Inc. today announced that McMinnville Water
& Light has contracted with the company as the first to deploy
Innoprise CIS. Innoprise CIS is a Customer Information System announced
in May following two years of intense effort to build the next generation
standard in platform-neutral, cross-functional enterprise technology.
McMinnville Water & Light is an electrical and water utility
located 45 miles southwest of Portland, Oregon.
The utility is scheduled to go live with Innoprise CIS in December,
replacing a legacy system that was no longer meeting its evolving
business needs. Wes Thomas, key accounts manager for the utility
explains that two key factors drove its decision to replace its
legacy CIS/CRM systems — regulatory reporting and rate design.
"With our old legacy software, simple requests such as new
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) reports and rate analyses
take hours to complete and require costly programming changes,"
he explains.
In terms of rate design, Thomas says, the utility's legacy systems
are based on utility tariffs and billing structures of 15 to 20
years ago. "They will accommodate any number of billing scenarios,
but it is still a finite number. With the new world of real-time
and time-of-use billing, we need a software architecture that's
wide open, and given the increasing costs to maintain, upgrade and
integrate our legacy systems, replacing these systems seemed the
only plausible strategy for IT and business success."
As a result, the utility made the decision to deploy Innoprise
CIS, which uses a Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE™)
platform with a services-oriented, Internet-native architecture
that provides the flexibility to add new services, products and
rate structures as business needs and regulatory demands change.
It also provides built-in functionality for advanced features such
as customer self-service, online bill payment, complex rating and
billing and Microsoft™ Office integration. As a result of
the new software, Thomas says, "We expect to achieve payback
in approximately one year."
About Innoprise Software
Innoprise Software, Inc.™ provides enterprise software for
the specific business challenges of utilities and local government
agencies. For the last two years, the company has teamed with a
core group of customers and concentrated all of its resources on
developing next generation software for CIS, financial management,
community development and work management. For additional information,
visit www.innoprise.com.
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