This section describes new and enhanced features in this release of Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, including enhancements in the following functional areas:

This section describes the new and enhanced batch processing features in this release, including:

The frequency for committing processed records to the database has been increased for specific background processes.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

Exchanging and signing encrypted files requires the sender and recipient to share keys. In a previous release, the batch processing framework was enhanced to implement file encryption and decryption using PGP standards. Digital signatures are also supported, using the standard 'Sign' option.

New batch parameters have been introduced to the following batch controls to specify the external and internal keys to be used for encrypting and/or signing outbound files and decrypting and/or verifying the signatures of inbound files. The file adapter automatically encrypts, decrypts, signs, and/or verifies the file data based on the existence of these parameters:

Refer to each batch control's parameter descriptions for further information. This helps protect the contents of a file from being read by anyone who doesn't have the encryption key.

To enable this feature, refer to the Parameters Supplied To Background Processes of the Framework Administrative User Guide for more information.

If not performed already, system administrators should set/grant users/grant access to the following application services:

This section describes the new and enhanced contextual insights features in this release, including:

You can use the following insight types to surface contextual insights for a customer's account in Oracle Customer Experience for Utilities:

These insights can help elevate customer service interactions by providing additional information about the customer in the most appropriate screens.

To enable this feature, refer to the Insight Groups section of the Administrative User Guide for more information.

You can use the Unpaid Account for Person Details Capped (C1-PER-NONPAY-CARD-DET) insight type to display a non-payment details contextual insight for a customer in Oracle Customer Experience for Utilities.

This helps elevate customer service interactions by providing additional information about the customer in the most appropriate screens.

To enable this feature, refer to the Insight Groups section of the Administrative User Guide for more information.

These insight types allow you to surface contextual insights for a customer in Oracle Customer Experience for Utilities:

This helps elevate customer service interactions by providing additional information about the customer in the most appropriate screens.

To enable this feature, refer to the Insight Groups section of the Administrative User Guide for more information.

You can use the Prepaid Billing Enrollment (C1-PBILLENRL-LIST) insight type to surface a prepaid billing enrollment contextual insight for a customer in Oracle Customer Experience for Utilities.

This helps elevate customer service interactions by providing additional information about the customer in the most appropriate screens.

To enable this feature, refer to the Insight Groups section of the Administrative User Guide for more information.

This section describes the new and enhanced credit and collections features in this release, including:

When a severance process is cancelled, an algorithm based on the application-owned Severance Process Template – Post Cancel algorithm type, SEV POST CAN (Reconnect service if service is cut and cust. Pays), is called if plugged in and checks to see if the severance process has a completed ‘disconnect’ severance event. If so, it creates a "reconnection" severance process using the Reconnect Severance Process Template defined in the algorithm parameter. This typically occurs because outstanding debt has been paid and the related service agreement is no longer eligible to be on the severance process.

In this release, the application can now initiate a near real-time service reconnection following the cancellation of a disconnection-related severance process. The updated SEV POST CAN (Reconnect Service if Service is Cut and Cust. Pays) algorithm type includes an additional parameter that enables you to define if a batch process should be submitted for each newly created reconnection severance process to activate all severance events whose trigger date is on or before the supplied business date. The submitted batch process is based on the new Trigger Severance Events for a Severance Process (C1-SESP) batch control.

Previously, the application called a SEV POST CAN-based algorithm when a severance process was cancelled to determine whether the process has a completed disconnect severance event. If the event existed, the application created a reconnection severance process using the Reconnect Severance Process Template defined in the algorithm parameter. The creation of the reconnection severance process typically occurred when the outstanding debt had been paid and the related service agreement was no longer eligible to be included in the severance process.

This improves customer satisfaction by initiating prompt service reconnection following payment of a customer's outstanding debt.

To enable this feature, complete these steps:

A new To Do Type, Trigger Severance Events for a Severance Process Errors (C1-SETSP), is provided to create To Do Entries for object-specific errors detected by the above batch process.

The application captures a history of arrears (amount owed) for accounts under an active collection activity – those with an active collection, severance, or overdue process. An arrears history record is created upon the respective process’s creation and a subsequent record created each time there is a change in the amount owed or other relevant data captured for that active collection activity’s account, until the collection activity becomes inactive.

The key information captured is the amount still owed for the collection activity, the cancellation threshold amount, the amount owed before being adjusted by future payments, and the reason the arrears history record was created.

There are a number of plugin spots responsible for capturing arrears history. These are called when the collection activity processes that collect on debt are created, system processes that monitor ongoing collection of debt, and by some system events such as payments or other credit financial transactions, creation of pay plans, and so on. These plugin spots include:

The system uses child maintenance objects that extend their parent object to capture arrears history records for an active collection activity. Arrears history records are stored in the following tables:

This feature will enable efficient inquires of debt under collection for a person or business, and also support utilities who want to analyze payment patterns for debt under collection.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

Update implementation-specific algorithm types for these system events to leverage new inputs and populate outputs to create Arrears History records:

Run these background processes (batch controls) to create the initial Arrears History records for active processes:

This section describes the new and enhanced customer information features in this release, including:

The In Service Date label replaces the Install Date label in the Main tab of the Service Point page.

This provides a more intuitive label to describe the service point’s availability for service.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

This section describes the new and enhanced customer interaction features in this release, including:

The Customer Activity History zone on the Customer 360 portal now includes reported outage calls in the list of account-related events to provide a more comprehensive view of your customer's activity.

Additionally, uou can now exclude specific activity types from the list of account-related events to display for a customer. The activity types to exclude can be configured in the Activity History Configuration master configuration.

This helps to reduce call handling times and allows common account queries to be handled more efficiently.

To enable this feature, complete these steps:

You can now create template-based notifications that can be sent to individuals or businesses a without related account.This is useful, for example, for sending digital confirmations associated with requests for new service or outages in public locations.

Note that these template-based notifications only apply to the following application-owned business objects:

No steps are required to enable this feature.

The following plug-in spots still require an account ID:

You can now update the Customer Contact Type on an existing customer contact record in edit mode. The change in Customer Contact Type is only supported when the original and new type both reference the same business object. In addition, you will not be able to select a Customer Contact Type that meets any of the following criteria:

In addition to the above, you can now add tags to classify a customer contact. Tag values are captured as characteristics where the Characteristic Type has the characteristic entity set to both Characteristic Tag and Customer Contact. On a customer contact, these tag values are displayed and maintained in the new Tag section, while other customer contact-related characteristics will continue to be displayed and maintained in the Characteristics section.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

If an implementation wishes to prevent users from changing the Customer Contact Type on existing customer contact records, you can configure the Prevent Customer Contact Type Change feature option to Y on the Customer Information Options related feature configuration.

This section describes the new and enhanced DataConnect features in this release, including:

The Bill Segment Lines and Bill Segment SQ data extracts now include the Bill Identifier for each record.

The data in these billing-related extracts can now be easily matched or correlated with data in other billing-related extracts.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

If your implementation uses these extracts to integrate to other solutions or applications, consider modifying your data mapping or ingest capabilities to take into account the new data.

This section describes the new and enhanced Digital Self Service Integration features in this release, including:

The Question tab of the Customer Service Request Type portal enables you to define one or more questions to appear during the flow of self-service initiated start, stop, and transfer service request processing based on the applicability to the customer and/or services being started/stopped. You can also group questions based on where they appear on the user interface. For example, you can distinguish questions for starting service from questions for stopping service when processing a transfer service request.

The responses to these questions can be inputs to service eligibility criteria processing that determines one or more of the following:

You can also configure the questions to update specific fields or entities on applicable master records (for example, Person, Account, and more) with the captured responses during the processing or completion of a self-service initiated start, stop, or transfer service request.

To enable this feature, refer to the Questions and Response Processing section of the Administrative User Guide for more information.

New and enhanced entities are available for self-service initiated start, stop, and transfer service requests, which adds greater flexibility for:

The following were added to support self-service initiated requests:

To enable this feature, refer to the Self-Service Start/Stop/Transfer Overview and Self-Service Start/Stop/Transfer sections of the Administrative User Guide for more information.

This section describes the new and enhanced Payment Processing features in this release, including:

You can choose to validate all your customers’ new bank account details prior to their first use for automated clearing house electronic payments using NACHA. This is regardless of whether the bank account details are entered via self-service activities, agent-assisted manual one-time payments, or added to the Account - Automatic Payment (CI_ACCT_APAY) table via the application.

Previously, Web Debit Account Validation functionality was provided to support validating a customer's bank accounts entered through the following means:

To support bank account validation when details are added to the Account - Automatic Payment (CI_ACCT_APAY) table, the following updates have been made:

To enable this feature, refer to the Web Debit Account Validation section in the Administrative User Guide for more information.

This section describes the new and enhanced rate and billing features in this release, including:

The Use Percent field on the SA / SP tab indicates the percentage of a metered service point's consumption that is to be billed under that service agreement. This field now provides a consumption percentage accuracy of up to two decimal places.

This improves the allocation of usage to a service agreement, from a shared service point or points, enabling more accurate billing of usage-related charges.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

The Rate Engine Configuration master configuration enables you to instruct the application to evaluate Rate Schedule, Bill Factor, and/or Seasonal breaks, for when pricing changes, to determine the date break information to stamp onto a service agreement's related usage request. Additional date break information will allow usage calculation rules to derive more precise billing determinants to enable bills to be calculated more accurately.

To enable this feature, complete these steps:

This only applies to calculation rule-based Rate Schedules and supports the following types of rate calculation rules:

The Alternative Bill ID is assigned to newly created and completed online bills after the processing of post-completion algorithms.

This aligns the process of assigning an Alternative Bill ID to an online bill with that of batch billing.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

The Detailed Description field allows you to add more descriptive text to a rate schedule. For example, a detailed description to explain the structure of the rate and provide a high-level summary of calculations without having to look into the calculation rules.

This enables you to provide more user-friendly information to help understand the rate.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

These new batch controls enable you to perform specific billing-related transactions via background processing:

The updated Complete Single Bill (C1-CPLBL) batch control aligns the conditions to complete a bill with the online function for bills whose accounts have a small number of service agreements. Refer to the Detailed Descriptions associated with the Select Records and Process Records algorithms for more information.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

You can now configure the Stepped Service Quantity rate calculation rule with negative steps where the step configuration can be from high to low. For example, you can configure a 0 to -200 step, -200 to -400 step, and so on.

Additionally, these updates to the creation and maintenance of stepped service quantity rate calculation rules improves the user experience:

This reduces the effort to configure and maintain rates schedules for calculating charges for solar generation customers (prosumers).

To enable this feature, refer to the Defining Calculation Rules section of the Business User Guide for more information.

The enhanced Rate Check portal can retrieve and use multi-item details for rate calculation purposes. Details may be retrieved from a related bill segment or from service points linked to a service agreement. Item details are populated in the Items section with the following information:

For a service agreement’s type where bill determinants are required, the Items subsection appears in the Usage Periods section for each respective usage period. This may be automatically populated as follows depending on the selected Usage Request Method:

For a service agreement's type that does not require bill determinants, an Items section appears for the entire bill segment period. This may be automatically populated as follows:

In both scenarios or if no service agreement is specified, you can manually override or populate the item details if required for your specific rate calculation scenario.

In addition to the above, the Rate Check – Main tab includes the following improvements:

No steps are required to enable this feature.

This section describes the new and enhanced start, stop, and transfer service request processing features in this release, including:

Start and transfer service requests submitted through agent-assisted process flows, based on the Start Service Request Process (C1-STARTSERVICEREQUEST) and Transfer Service Request Process (C1-TRANSFERSERVICEREQUEST) process flow types, now support CIS Division processing.

Additionally, Customer Service Request Types based on the Start Service Request Type (C1-StartServiceRequestType) and Transfer Service Request Type (C1-TransferServiceRequestType) business objects instruct the application to issue a warning of any mismatch between the customer service request type's CIS Division and other CIS Division-related configurations when the CIS Division value is not null or empty.

If the Control by CIS Division configuration option on Installation Options is set to ‘Yes’, the application prompts you for a premise via the new Move-to Premise dialog box when the Start Service link is clicked (for example, from the Premise Tree sidebar portal zone). Once a premise is selected, a process flow and related parent customer service request are initiated based on the configuration defined on the start service-related Action Method for the premise's CIS Division (if configured).

On initiated process flows, the following updates have been made to specific panels:

On the initiated process flows, the following updates have been made to specific panels:

To enable this feature, complete these steps:

This section describes the new and enhanced user interface experience features in this release, including:

The toolbar search box allows you to easily search and retrieve Premise records using a wider range of address-related information (for example, apartment number in a complex). The address search now queries by:

Additionally, the search results from a unified search, when an address filter is applied, now displays customer accounts at a location with active service agreements first, followed by accounts with inactive service agreements. The application populates the area below the toolbar search box with search results matching your criteria. A service agreement is considered active if it has an "Active" or "Pending Stop" status.

This reduces call handling times and provides efficient handling of common account queries.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

The Calculation Rule portal has a View Rules link that allows you to view all rules in the same group in a new zone.

This replaces the rules-related Sidebar portal zones and therefore frees up space on the Sidebar portal to more consistently display critical customer information and reduce the need for scrolling.

No steps are required to enable this feature.

This section describes the new and enhanced web services features in this release, including:

These new REST API Inbound Web Services expose various customer-related entities and data, and provide the capability to create, manage, and view that data:

The following updated REST API Inbound Web Services also expose various customer-related entities and data, and allow you to manage that data:

To enable this feature, refer to the Oracle Utilities REST API for Metering and Customer Information documentation.

This section describes the new and enhanced miscellaneous features in this release, including:

New Outage Event portals allow you to display an outage event's details reported from an external outage management system (such as Oracle Utilities Network Management System). Outage event notifications may be interfaced from any outage management system using the Outage Events Notifications (C1-OutageEventNotifications) inbound web service.

A query portal allows you to search for a specific outage event. Once you select an outage event, you are bought to the maintenance portal to view the selected record and the following portals zones may be displayed:

This feature allows customer agents to be aware of outage events, enabling them to respond efficiently enhancing customer service interactions, without depending on real-time integration requests to an external outage management system which may not have the required customer account information.

System administrators should review and determine which user groups should be granted access to one or more of these application services:

The Payment Method (PYMNT_METHOD_FLG) lookup now allows implementations to add implementation-specific values.

This allows alternative methods to be defined for reimbursing a customer (for example, via electronic funds transfer or credit card).

No steps are required to enable this feature.

The Payment Selection Status (PYMNT_SEL_STAT_FLG) lookup now enables you to add implementation-specific values.

This enables additional statuses to be defined and used when reimbursing a customer via an A/P Request (adjustment).

No steps are required to enable this feature.

The following business objects have had their application services updated to specific application-owned values where the Application Service ID was previously set to the generic F1-DFLTS application service:

The C1-CustSvcRqstPhysicalBO business object's application service was updated to C1-CSREQ where the Application Service ID was previously set to C1-CSR.

These service program application services were updated as follows:

No steps are required to enable this feature.