A straight-forward service to report customer usage data
Rating: 9 out of 10
November 07, 2019
AB
Vetted Review
Verified User
1 year of experience
Oracle Utilities Opower is being used to send our customers' electric usage data. We send Opower daily reads for interval data and monthly reads for scalar data. The data is used to create and email usage reports to our customers in order to show them their usage from one week to the next. This tool helps us satisfy a state regulatory requirement that we share usage data with our customers.
- Provides week over week data to customers in an email.
- Provides suggestions to customers to curtail their usage and save money.
- Presents the data in an easy to read format.
Cons
- We have to run multiple batch programs to generate the extract files for Opower.
- The extract process is a little inefficient.
- We receive communication from multiple parties at Opower when there are issues. If issues came from 1 email address, that would be helpful. This is very nit-picky though.
- We are able to fulfill our state regulatory requirements fairly easily with the tool.
- The reporting to Opower is automated through batch programs so it doesn't require manual work.
- We sometimes generate and send the data to Opower but they report they didn't get it. This requires manual intervention to send the same file again.
I haven't reviewed or used any tools like Opower before. I've only been using the service for a year or so and find it to be straight forward. I don't see any real issues with it and the fact that it's now an Oracle product means that base integrations with the rest of the Utility Suite would be possible in the future.