Open-cis

Open-cIS is a GUI-based, full-featured, and comprehensive customer information and billing system (CIS) owned by Accenture. Open-cIS is designed on a flexible three-tiered (client/server/database) component object model (COM+) platform in such a way that it is not married to any one particular industry. Open-cIS was built - and continues to be built - exclusively using Microsoft technologies and is one of the most modern and most technologically advanced CIS systems in the world. In a marketplace where competitors own software specifically written for a particular business - for example, 'Zoracle Utilities' or 'ZAP ERP' - Open-cIS can adapt to any business in any industry no matter how simple or how complex. Open-cIS is a one-size-fits-all CIS solution and is a significantly less expensive option than its competitors because of its ease of implementation and ease of adaptability to changing business needs. To put it another way - "if you can name it, Open-cIS can bill it".

Open-cIS Benefits

Open-cIS has a highly flexible architecture that provides the power to configure Open-cIS to fit the needs of any business. As business needs change, changing Open-cIS is - in many cases - a matter of changing the configuration to meet a particular business need, rather than changing the code. Even today and in many businesses, large projects that require wholesale CIS changes are needed to meet new business requirements for things such changing market conditions or emerging technologies. These projects cost not only large amounts of money, but also require large amounts of personnel and can last months or even years. Not so with Open-cIS. Open-cIS can be configured - or reconfigured - to meet changing business needs and the cost is minimal compared to projects requiring large scale software changes. Open-cIS configuration and data migration tools make configuration changes easy to accomplish and do not require huge amounts of capital to implement. The flexibility of Open-cIS also has a cost benefit over enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. A business that buys an ERP system may end up paying for software it may never use. Because of the easy interface capability of Open-cIS, a business can purchase only the additional add-on software that it wants to implement and interface these applications with Open-cIS over purchasing an ERP system thay may do more than what the business wants or needs.

Using Open-cIS

Navigating Open-cIS

Since Open-cIS is a GUI system, you can navigate Open-cIS using a mouse. Open-cIS can also be used without a mouse using only the keyboard similar to navigating legacy mainframe CIS systems. Open-cIS business functions are accessed by pointing and clicking menus or pointing and clicking buttons.

Functionality

Open-cIS has seven entities - referred to as functional areas - that segment Open-cIS. They include - Customer, Contract, Premise, Premise Service, Device, Orders and Group. Each functional area has a functional area desktop (FAD) associated to it. A business can decide how much or how little of Open-cIS to use by enabling or disabling FADs. A business can further segment Open-cIS by granting or restricting access to a FAD for entire user groups. The concept of a contract in Open-cIS is the same as the concept of an account in other contexts.

The FAD concept is what enables Open-cIS from being too closely associated with one particular business and showcases its flexibility. Utility companies typically would use every Open-cIS FAD because of the extensive physical nature to their business (meters, wires, gas lines, etc...) with their meter-to-cash style of business. However, a retail company would only use the Customer and Contract FADs because they don't have physical infrastructure such as a utility. Depending on the nature of a business would dictate which FADs to enable and disable.

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Billing

As mentioned above, Open-cIS is a billing system that can bill any kind of service. At present and across the myriad of businesses that use Open-cIS, Open-cIS bills electric, gas, water, sewer, trash, loans, leases, rentals, products, equipment, insurance, rent, fees, advances, pledges/contributions, home service calls and product warranties services - to name a few. A contract can have one or more services on it with different billing frequencies (a service can even have no billing frequency which is what Open-cIS calls an on-demand service). Because of this, Open-cIS billing has two tiers - service billing and contract billing. Each service is billed independently of the other services on the contract and each service that gets billed is rolled up on the contract when the contract bills. By tiering Open-cIS billing in this fashion mitigates the restriction that other billing systems have which is that services of like billing frequency must be billed in conjunction with the contract. For example, a water utility might bill the water monthly, but bill the sewer quarterly. Open-cIS allows for these two services to be included on the same contract whereas other billing systems would require one contract (or one account) for each service - one contract for the water and one contract for the sewer. With Open-cIS, even though services may have different billing frequencies, the contract is billed based on the service with the highest billing frequency - or the service with most number of annual billing cycles. So, in case of the water/sewer example, the contract would be billed monthly because the water service would be billed twelve times per year and only include the sewer service every three months.

History

In 1998, a group of twelve ex-Andersen Consulting employees were hired by [http://www.nwpsc.com National Water & Power (NWP)] to form National Water & Power Technologies (NWPT). NWPT was charged with developing a new CIS for NWP and for NWP's multi-family resident billing business. The result of NWPT's efforts was Open-cIS - the newest, most modern, most technologically advanced, most flexible and most configurable CIS ever developed. The company name National Water & Power Technologies was changed to Open-c Solutions in 2000 and Open-c Solution's CIS product was christened Open-cIS. This trademarked billing software name remains to this day even though Open-c Solutions was absorbed in to Accenture as a result of Accenture's purchase of the Open-cIS asset from NWP in 2005.

Prior to the implementation of Open-cIS at NWP, Open-cIS had grown from its original twelve employees to over fifty employees who were involved in research and development, designs, coding, testing, migrations, implementation services, and deployment.

In 1999, AquaSource - a water division of [http://www.dqe.com Duquesne Energy] installed the earliest version of Open-cIS to run AquaSource's disparate billing systems as a single platform. In 2000, [http://www.integrysgroup.com Wisconsin Public Service] chose Open-cIS for to replace its aging and inflexible AS400 system. WPS would convert to Open-cIS in October 2005. In 2001, [http://www.washgas.com Washington Gas] chose Open-cIS as its choice to replace its no-longer-supported legacy billing system for its deregulated customers. WG would convert to Open-cIS in 2002. In 2003, Open-cIS was finally installed at NWP and would replace NWP's custom CIS CBASS (customer billing and service system) which had outgrown its usefulness and also prevented NWP from growing its multi-family residential billing business. Also in 2003, Washington Gas Energy Services (WGES) chose Open-cIS as its choice to replace its no-longer-supported legacy billing system for another subset of deregulated customers for Washington Gas. The WGES implementation would be the first fully outsourced arrangement for Open-cIS and would be installed in 2004. Testament to the fact that Open-cIS is not limited by industry segment, in 2006, a major consumer electronics retailer began using Open-cIS for billing customer service calls. The next year, a major warranty administrator began using Open-cIS for its warranty billing business. Both companies continue to grow the role of Open-cIS in their business. Signifcantly, each of these most recent implementations were completed in less than 3 months.

Motivation - The Market

The twelve people who were originally involved with the development of Open-cIS recognized that the days of custom installations in the utility billing market were numbered. As employees of Andersen Consulting, this group recognized that a product-model CIS would be more easily marketed to utilities and retail businesses in search of a product CIS since this was the direction the market was headed. After leaving Andersen Consulting, this group found a willing partner in NWP. Even today, most CIS installations are custom installations - the CIS is written specifically for the client and any repeatibility is lost since there is no way to leverage installations between clients. Open-cIS was developed from the ground up in order to solve this problem and was one of the first truly product CIS solutions to come to market. Open-cIS is flexible enough to be installed at any utility, retailer, marketer, hybrid or deregulated company without having to make customizations specific to each business.

The Future

Today, Open-cIS is wholly owned by Accenture having been purchased from NWP in 2005. Accenture continues to support the existing clients who use Open-cIS and clients continue taking Open-cIS releases in order to continue expanding their businesses. Part of the impetus for Accenture's purchase of Open-cIS was to provide a way for Accenture to enter new markets that they had not been able to penetrate previously.

References

* [http://accenture.tekgroup.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=4185 Accenture press release announcing Open-cIS purchase from NWP]
* [http://www.cisworld.com/profiles/openc.htm Open-cIS at CIS World]