Understanding External Applications

External applications are applications and systems that are external to the Oracle Utilities meter data products, and can include customer information systems such as Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, outage management systems such as Oracle Utilities Network Management System, or other types of applications.

External system service providers utilize processing methods to specify how the system sends and creates data used by the two applications. For example, when Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management is integrated with Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, an external system representing Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing would specify how usage requests are received and processed by Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management.

Refer to Understanding Process Methods for more information about processing methods.

External Applications Impact Data Import and Export

External Applications are configured to identify how a particular external system communicates data with Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management. This includes:

• The identifier type used to locate devices and measuring components. These are used both on import and export of data.
• The date/time format used in various data imports (i.e. whether or not the date/time format includes time zone information).

Please refer to the embedded help for more information about these fields.

Each external application can be associated to an external system which is used to define the messages that can be sent to that service provider and how each message is sent.