Technology Advisory & Systems Engineering for Water, Power & Public Utilities
Technology Advisory for Water, Power, and Public Utilities
Independent requirements, procurement, and oversight support for utilities replacing billing, asset management, and metering systems.
A publicly owned utility replaces its customer information and billing system perhaps once in a generation. The people who will live with the result have usually never done a conversion, while the vendor's implementation team has done many. The knowledge is asymmetric in every direction that matters: the vendor knows its own product's limits, knows which contract terms it cares about, and knows how these schedules usually slip. The utility knows its rates, its meters, and its customers, and has to keep billing every cycle while the replacement is being built around it.
The funding makes it harder. This work is paid for from rates, which means the budget was set in a rate study or a capital plan, approved in public, and cannot easily grow mid-project. A slipped go-live is not only an operational problem. It becomes a board or council conversation about why the number presented at the rate hearing was wrong.
What these environments look like
- A customer information system carrying rate logic accumulated over decades: tiered and seasonal rates, drought or fuel surcharges, several services on one bill, irrigation and reclaimed accounts, and district taxes or fees on the same statement
- Advanced metering infrastructure with a head end and meter data management, where interval reads must be validated, estimated, and edited before they can be billed
- Asset management, work order, and GIS systems shared with public works, usually on a different replacement cycle than billing
- Integrations to the general ledger, cash receipting, lockbox, payment processors in PCI scope, web self service, and interactive voice response
- Customer protections that vary by state: notice requirements before disconnection, restrictions tied to weather or medical necessity, payment arrangements, and low income assistance programs
- Staff who know every workaround in the current system but have no documentation of the business rules underneath it
- Capital funded through rates or debt, with cost of service assumptions and bond covenants standing behind the budget
Where HQT helps
- Requirements developed with billing, meter services, field operations, customer service, and finance in the same room, with rate rules written as testable statements rather than feature checkboxes
- A current state map of systems, interfaces, customizations, and data flows, so the scope of the replacement is understood before anyone prices it
- Solicitation content: scope of work, functional and technical requirements, a documented interface inventory, conversion expectations, and demonstration scripts built from the utility's own accounts and rate scenarios
- Evaluation support: scoring guides, reference check questions, and a cost model that makes subscription, implementation, and continuing costs comparable across proposals, so the rate impact can be stated honestly
- Contract exhibits: acceptance criteria tied to a clean production bill run, service levels, data ownership and export rights, responsibility for PCI scope, and a change control process
- Owner's technical representative services during implementation: deliverable review, configuration decisions, risk and issue tracking, and analysis of each change request before anyone signs it
- Independent verification and validation of data conversion, including parallel bill comparison and balance reconciliation, and a go-live readiness review before the first production bill run
How an engagement usually starts
Two triggers are common. The first is a vendor notice: the current version is approaching end of support, or the upgrade path requires a migration that amounts to a replacement anyway. The second is a metering program that outgrows the billing system, when interval data starts arriving and the customer information system can neither store it nor bill from it. A third and less comfortable trigger is a project already underway that has missed dates and needs an independent read before the next payment milestone.
The first step is usually short. Interviews with billing, meter services, and finance. An inventory of the interfaces, customizations, and reports actually in use. A comparison of the rate ordinance and tariff against what the current system does in practice, which is where most of the surprises live. The product is a defensible scope and a realistic range for cost and schedule, which is what a general manager needs before asking a board to fund the project rather than after.
HQT does not resell the platforms it helps evaluate, and it does not bid implementation work on solicitations it helped write. That independence is stated in the engagement agreement, because it is the reason to bring in an outside technical advisor in the first place.