30 Years
30th Anniversary of the company was marked with Alberta’s first and only privately owned retailer of electricity; Welcome to Spot Power.
30 years ago, Imperial Oil & TransAlta pioneered the first electronic billing (EBL) file process in Alberta. The electronic file (replacing thousands of individual paper invoices) was used as the source input data file processed by the invoice validation application known as the Electrical Power Supervision System (EPSS). Madeline Low, one of the founding partners in UTILITYnet, who at that time owned SoftLogic, was contracted to support the IT development & maintenance of the system. As it remains today, the objectives of EPSS are focused on three core business needs:
- Invoice Validation
EPSS automated the process of validating the correctness of utility invoices against various filter thresholds. Today, behind the scene, ISIS is the automated module application developed by UTILITYnet that is used to process plus validates all wires, settlement, and power pool invoice statement data.
- Financial Link
EPSS streamlined the journalizing of electrical power utility invoices to the company's general ledger. Bridges have been built to automate the posting to most financial systems including SAP, JD Edwards and D&B.
- Energy Management
EPSS provided a number of energy management reports for use by both corporate and field personnel. During the last few years, the need for energy management has been expanded to include a variety of risk management analytical tools.
SoftLogic obtained the marketing rights to EPSS from Imperial Oil and over the following 10 years firms the likes of Shell, Chevron, BP, CNRL, Gulf, TransCanada and Pengrowth licensed EPSS.
SoftLogic was reorganized and Utility Network & Partners Inc. (UTILITYnet) was launched, acquiring the intellectual property rights of EPSS from Imperial Oil.
The Alberta government embarked on unbundling and deregulating electricity generation, wires operations and retailing. As the electricity industry restructured the roles of the utilities changed hence framework was set for customer choice and new Retailers and Self-Retailers to entered the market. UTILITYnet re-focused, from simply marketing and providing IT support for EPSS: the company built a data center facility designed to provide on-line access to load settlement information, revenue assurance data; and retailing back office business services to companies wanting to take advantage of new opportunities brought about by deregulation. The various applications developed by UTILITYnet to meet this business need is collectively referenced as the Retail Invoice Settlement System (RISS).
UTILITYnet developed and launched an integrated suite of Web Services to support the needs of it clients in the management and stewardship of their energy portfolios. Billing agent services were provided to a wide cross section of clients in a variety of industries; Oil & Gas, Industrial & Manufacturing, Residential & Property Management, Provincial Educational Institutions & Municipalities, Hotels & Retail Stores and Agricultural & REAs.
Of particular note; ZYNXX.com was launched as a service to REAs offering MDM plus Retail Member Billing services. At the same time the company invested in three other major ventures:
- In concert with BP, UTILITYnet launched GreenReport, an IT application focused on calculating and monitoring GHG emissions.
- Participated in the launch of SEE Consulting, Bangalore India, an outsourcing IT consulting service company; and
- Launched Alberta’s online Site Catalog. Today this resource is used as the central repository of all electricity and gas metered sites in the province.
The company undertook the re-development of RISS and ZYNXX and invested heavily into the second generation of the base architecture of the system; creating the client interface as an enhanced ‘Web Service’ offering. RISS and ZYNXX, evolved into an online Business Intelligence system.
Investment continued with the expansion of the data center hub, installation of UNIX servers, conversion to Oracle 10g and designing the UNETgrid. The UNETgrid is a feature-rich dashboard and KPI application that allows clients to manage the stewardship of their business unit, in aggregate or by cost center. Plus, from a single portal; users can launch any number of business applications ranging from automatically enrolling a site with multiple Wires Providers, generation of Work Orders, management of Hedging Strategies, generation of retail invoices, managing pre-authorized payments, to extracting monthly EPSS electronic consolidated financial files to post directly into the clients GL. (A total integrated Utility & Retail system in a box.)
Today, UTILITYnet is a data rich company with a totally integrated system. Our focus continues towards streamlining operational controls as we move forward on the ‘third generation’ of the systems IT architecture to be built upon many of Google's base classes. 2009, the 30th anniversary of the company was marked with the launched Spot Power.
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