The Big Picture of External System Integration

Many utilities use other systems to coordinate work that goes out to the field. The following are examples of functionality provided by fieldwork management systems:

  • Defining crews, skills, availability for work
  • Scheduling appointments
  • Tracking individual field activities, usually utilizing handheld devices to get up-to-the-minute status
  • Balancing the workload

Since Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing can generate many work orders, you can integrate it with your external systems. The most common type of external system used to coordinate fieldwork is a Workforce Management (WFM) system. However, some companies may set up their business such that certain field activities should be sent to other types of systems. For example,

  • Maybe new meter installations are the responsibility of the Asset Management system. A field activity of this type originated in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing should be sent to the asset management system. That type of system may support its own crew dispatching logic or perhaps it performs some simple processing for the field activity and then interfaces the field activity to the WFM system.
  • Outage related field activities are typically sent to an outage management system. The outage management system uses information from several outage calls to determine the source of the outage problem. The outage system may support its own crew dispatching logic or it may integrate with a WFM system to dispatch a crew.

The following diagram illustrates the typical integration with an external system:

The following points describe the diagram:

  • While speaking with the customer and entering information into the system, information about available appointments may be accessed from an external system and displayed on an Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing user interface. Information about the appointment that is booked with the customer is sent to the external system.
  • Information about new field activities created in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing is sent to the appropriate external system using XAI. The external system performs the dispatching and tracking for the field activity.
  • Intermediate field activity states may be interfaced from the external system to Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing.
  • Completion information is interfaced from the external system to Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing.