Con Edison, New York, New York, United States: The CORE program

Written answers to the questions

Consolidated Edison, Inc. (ConEd, “The Company”), in partnership with Infosys, implemented Oracle Customer Care and Billing (CC&B), a modern, flexible application capable of performing critical meter-to-cash processes with greater efficiency, scalability, and extensibility compared to the existing landscape.  Oracle CC&B will provide the foundation to bill all 3.7 million customers and enable ConEd to continue leading and delivering the evolution towards clean energy over years to come.

The CORE program was ambitious undertaking to replace systems which have been used at the Company for over 50 years and is considered the most complex business and technology integration project in The Company’s history.

These primarily focus on the team’s success and the success of the implementation considering the many unique and challenging circumstances surrounding ConEd as a utility.

• ConEd operates in a complex and high-stakes media and regulatory environment in New York City with some of the most complex commercial customer rates and regulatory mandates in the country. In addition, the stakeholder landscape is vast and highly political, comprising many external stakeholder groups and customer advocates that work on behalf of customers to monitor and enforce checks and balances on ConEd billing and customer service practices. The CIS Program was particularly complicated because of these factors and achieved success in managing the environment and stakeholders throughout the pre and post Go-Live timelines.
   
• The team set a higher bar than other utilities for testing for billing accuracy at 99.97% bill accuracy threshold across all billing cycles. The team achieved this despite having some of the most complex billing rates in the nation for the large commercial customer base in the city of New York.
   
• ConEd’s integration landscape is one of the most complex for a utility in North America comprised of 686 integration points across 140 applications. The team successfully worked within this environment to build the future system.
   
• Stabilization metrics for timely billing of customers on their scheduled bill date were met from the outset of the project and have performed consistently above targets from the start of stabilization, avoiding billing delays for customers.
   
• There have been no increased regulatory complaints, decreased customer satisfaction, or major billing issues for customers, and call centers achieved pre Go-Live baseline performance within 2 months of Go-Live.
   
• Training was delivered to over 2,400 end-users in a completely digital format and end-users ultimately achieved a high level of proficiency prior to Go-Live, enabling call center productivity and service level agreement metrics to stabilize after approximately 1.5 months.

Quality of the effort

Despite many challenges, the project overcame any obstacles, and the effort culminated in a successful “big bang” implementation in October 2023.

• ~150 Subject matter resources who participated in the ~250 business design workshops that took place in 2020 and 2021. These individuals continued to play critical roles throughout the build and test efforts of the program by providing their subject matter knowledge of the current state processes and future state requirements of the new CIS.
   
• ~150 IT team members who worked on internal system integration modifications to align with the Oracle CC&B solution.
   
• ~80 Change Champions who, prior to Go-Live, served as the “eyes and ears” of the Change Management team, helping to communicate essential information to impacted business groups around what the implementation of the new CIS would mean for them. The process for identifying these individuals was collaborative with the 20+ departments from which they came, and their roles began early in the program (in Q3 2020) to support transparent sharing of information and ongoing engagement of all impacted stakeholders.
   
• ~30 Business Implementation Leads (BIL) who participated in Business Readiness activities, which began in 2022 and ran up until Go-Live. These individuals were mid-level managers with day-to-day operational ownership within their departments, and they were selected by their leadership to fill the BIL role, which required them to meet monthly – and then, as Go-Live approached, bi-weekly – with the Change Management team to review readiness within their departments and to discuss/document gaps and associated mitigations that could be put in place to manage readiness gaps.

• Project Risk & Issue Management: A robust risk and issue management process was tracked and managed by the ConEd PMO team to identify risks derived from project activities, business dependencies, and resource constraints.
   
• Internal Audit: Ensured that the local regulatory commissions were aware and satisfied with the health of the program during key phase gates. The focus of this audit group was the program’s planning, testing outcomes, and training preparation to ensure that the business was ready for day-one operations. 
   
• External Audit: The Company’s external auditor conducted quarterly audits to assess risk to compliance deficiencies & risk to the program delivering on schedule. The focus of this audit group was on the program’s planning, testing outcomes, and day-one regulatory compliance.
   
• Internal & Third-Party Quality Assurance (QA):  A Quality Assurance team comprised of ConEd & third-party resources was responsible for assessing the tactical and strategic health of the program. This team provided monthly and quarterly reports focused on the overall health of the solution and the business throughout the program. The QA team focused on monitoring project’s management, schedule, resources, scope, activities, and methodologies; contractual obligations; internal and external dependencies; and the business’ readiness to take on the solution. The QA team coordinated directly with Internal and External audit organizations to ensure alignment across key risks impacting the program.
   
• Internal SOX PMO: Partnered with the internal and third-party QA teams to ensure that financial SOX controls were correctly designed, documented, tested, and understood by the control owners in the business.

Each layer of risk management was established to provide holistic oversight to all components of the program from regulatory, compliance, and project delivery to help the program achieve successful outcomes.

The primary business case for this project was driven by a focus on medium- and long-term financial and non-financial benefits. From a cost benefit analysis, the Company projected the following for 2024-2040*:

 

Type	Category	Description	Amount (in millions)
Cost Avoidance	Process	Operational efficiencies	$12
	Technology	Ease of use of new Oracle platform and mainframe replacement	$706
Cost Reduction	People	Headcount reduction and training	$186
	Technology	Budgets to maintain and support legacy applications	$324
*Numbers incorporate inflation calculations.

Meeting these metrics allowed the Company to avoid customer disruption, and financial penalties associated with these regulatory metrics, which include a maximum annual fine of over $75 million dollars.

 

 

 

CECONY Contact Center Metrics*
	Target	Week 1-2	Week 2-4	Week 4-6	Week 6-8
Percentage of Calls Answered in 30 seconds	>66%	47%	57%	77%	87%
Average Handle Time (seconds)	<450	686	620	552	495
Average Speed of Answer (seconds)	<131	584	308	136	43.25

 

*Data excludes weekends & holidays

 

CECONY CSAT and Billing Metrics
	Target	Month 1 October 2023	Month 2 November 23
Customer Satisfaction** (scale of 1-5 with 5 exceeding expectations)	>3.75	3.93	4.13
Bill Completeness (Percent bills completed on schedule)	>98%	98.7%	98.4%

 

 

O&R Contact Center Metrics*
	Target	Week 1-2	Week 2-4	Week 4-6	Week 6-8
Service Levels (SLAs)	>71.5	90%	98%	85%	96%
Average Handle Time	<537	668	595	600	601
Average Speed of Answer	<158	39	3.9	7	4.6

 

*Data excludes weekends & holidays

 

O&R CSAT and Billing Metrics*
	Target	Month 1 October 2023	Month 2 November 23
Percent of Customers Satisfied	92.6% (Year End Average)	93.8%	92.6%
Bill Completeness (Percent bills completed on schedule)	>98%	99.6%	98.8%

 

Despite these challenges, the project overcame any obstacles, and the effort culminated in a successful “big bang” implementation in October 2023. The team is currently in post-Go-Live stabilization (Oct 2023 – March 2024); and is on track to achieve all stabilization metrics within the targeted time period.

Total 298 words used.

CORE replaced ConEd’s existing CIS systems with Oracle CC&B, a modern, flexible application capable of performing critical meter-to-cash processes with greater efficiency, scalability, and extensibility compared to the existing landscape.  Oracle CC&B will provide the foundation to bill all 3.7 million customers and enable ConEd to continue leading and delivering the evolution towards clean energy over years to come. In addition to supporting ConEd’s long-term strategic outlook, CORE also immediately generated real tangible benefits for system users and customers. These immediate enhancements helped foster positive sentiment from users and customers contributing to the successful outlook CORE has experienced to date. Examples of these enhancements include:

• Real time results of billing when employees create bills in the system (vs. overnight batch runs in the prior CIS)
   
• The improved interface between the MDM and CIS allows for the billing of complex multi-metered accounts by making a simple request to the MDM through the front end of the CIS system (vs. the need to manually enter readings for each meter in the legacy system)
   
• Real time payment processing, allowing customer payments to post to the system faster and avoid customer inquiries and confusion
   
• More options to search for a customer (by meter, address, name, prior account number, current account number etc.)
   
• Real time information about the status of field activities, improving the ability to respond to customer inquiries

Since the new Oracle CC&B system would be consolidating functionality across the different operating companies and commodities, additional governance processes were needed to maintain the new system such as:

• Centralized and consolidated configuration management repository across operating companies and commodities.
   
• Streamlined billing rate management through automation, to reduce manual effort and risk of entry error.
   
• Change governance process including both operating companies to streamline the decision-making process and achieve alignment where possible.

Total 262 words used.

The legacy Customer Service IT portfolio was comprised of over 100 applications, at the core of which was the ConEd legacy CIS, a mainframe-based application implemented over 50 years ago, which had been continuously modified over several decades. The legacy CIS and its ancillary systems comprised just over 20 percent of the entire ConEd IT application portfolio and supported over 2,400 users from functional areas, such as Customer Operations, Customer Energy Solutions, Electric and Gas Operations, Rate Engineering, Legal Services and Corporate Accounting. ConEd’s legacy CIS and sub-systems are highly complex and interdependent to deliver critical customer service functions, such as billing, energy-usage management, outage communications and demand-side management. 

CIS replacement programs touch all the utility meter to cash business processes, and the CORE program is no different. The CORE program impacted the following functional areas, each requiring careful consideration of the uniqueness of the organizational structure and its diverse operating companies, trusts and divisions:

• Combination utility billing (Electric, Gas, and Steam)
   
• Customer, Premises, and Account Management
   
• Customer Self-service (Website, Apps, Virtual Assistants, and Interactive Voice Response)
   
• Credit and Collections Management
   
• Financial Management and Accounting
   
• Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Meter Data Management (MDM)
   
• Billing Management
   
• Complex Billing
   
• Rates Management
   
• Usage Management
   
• Value Stack Management (VDER and CDG)
   
• Supplier Management
   
• Inventory/Asset Management
   
• Service Order Management
   
• Payment Management
   
• Outage Management
   
• Red Flag Management
   
• Document Management
   
• System Security

The impacted business processes culminated in the program documenting over 5,500 functional and technical requirements requiring 382 enhancements, 200+ reports, and 250+ master/admin configurations to bring the business solution to life in Oracle CC&B.

Total 229 words used.

The CIS system has laid the foundation to enable future customer service improvements such as continued enhancement of the Company’s self-service channels, which are supported by the enhanced interfaces implemented by the new CIS system to process customer transactions. A significant expansion of customer analytics capabilities is planned, which will leverage the rich data provided by the new CIS, and provide operational and customer benefits. A replacement of the legacy systems which support the deregulated market is also planned and the key functionality will be added as new Market Transaction Management (MTM) modules to the new Oracle CCB system. Finally, additional use of Robotic Process Automation (RPAs) to support automation of tasks and faster resolution of customer exceptions and operational efficiency. Overall, the new CIS enables and is the center of the Company’s Strategic CX portfolio of investments that is planned over the next five years.

Post Go Live metrics 

No increased regulatory complaints or degradation of customer satisfaction

Call centers achieved pre-Go-Live baseline performance within 2 months
 

Bill completeness was > 98.5% at Go-Live and continued through stabilization
 

Customer satisfaction score > 4 for five consecutive months
 

PSC Complaint rate within target for five consecutive months
 

Average completion time for Nightly Batch = 3.6 hours (6-hour metric goal)
 

Unbilled accounts have grown since Go Live, but are now coming back down and trending to steady state