The premises functionality of Siebel Energy is used by administrators, such as distribution network planners, field service engineers, field service operations managers, and managers of customer service representatives. It is also used by end users, such as customer service representatives.

This chapter explains the concept of a premise and describes procedures you can use to manage the creation and maintenance of premise records. It also describes typical procedures that end users might use when working with premise records.

A premise is an address that identifies a physical location, such as a building, apartment, land parcel, and so on, to which energy services can be delivered. In Siebel Energy, a premise acts as a grouping of service points.

A premise record stores the address of a building, apartment, or land parcel to which your company offers energy services. Siebel Energy also stores nonservice addresses that are associated with particular customers, such as billing addresses outside the company's service territory. Nonservice account addresses have a variety of uses, but premise records are specifically used to track addresses at which a company might offer services. Premise records are never deleted from the system and can therefore be used to track asset and service usage even if the premise becomes unoccupied.

Premise records also track service points and meters. A service point is an asset that is installed at a particular service location and represents a network delivery point, such as a gas pipe.

A meter is a serialized item of customer premise equipment, such as a gas, electric, and water meter, that measures service usage. More than one meter can feed into a single service point, and service usage is accumulated and billed at the service point level.

Several procedures in this chapter involve an association between a record, such as a service point record, and a meter. It is assumed for this chapter that product and asset records for meters have already been entered into Siebel Energy. For more information about setting up a product, see Product Administration Guide.

For more information about setting up an asset, see Siebel Field Service Guide.

Premise and meter information can be imported into Siebel Energy either periodically in batches, using Siebel Enterprise Integration Manager, or through real-time integration with a third-party application. Premise information can also be entered manually.

Every instance of a service delivered to a particular premise needs a unique identifier, called a service item identifier. Services provided through a physical network connection (for example, a gas pipe) use the Service Point as the service item identifier. For companies that prefer not to differentiate between service points and meters (companies that use only the meter entity), the Service Point acts as the meter ID.