Flexible billing tools meet customer demands

As energy suppliers face increasing demands from customers under competition for more informative billing services, the information technology tools used by suppliers to deliver these services must become more flexible. The system described in this article shows how utilities can adopt these new tools today, to the benefit of their customers tomorrow. Energy Interactive, Inc. developed a software system called the Energy Billing Options Support System (Energy BOSS) as a key-customer billing system. It can operate on its own or as a complement to an existing customer information system. A description is given of the software components. The primary focus is on the software´s implementation, including discussions of software architecture, database structure, hardware and database platforms, distributed processing, and other design issues