Data Transfer Process Overview

Transferring your data to the Oracle Utilities Opower platform generally involves the following phases:

Sample historical file integration
Full historical file integration
Incremental file integration

In each phase, your Delivery Team will work with you to integrate, validate, and approve each of these files. The files will contain the same columns, and will follow the same formatting and naming standards. The files will only differ in the number of customers included and the periods of time they cover.

Phase 1: Sample Historical File Integration

Your Delivery Team will work with your technical lead and data extract engineer to review our data specification and map your data elements to the fields in the Oracle Utilities Opower data file format. Your engineering team then generates a sample historical data file.

The relatively small size of the sample file allows your Delivery Team to quickly analyze and diagnose issues. Your Delivery Team will provide you with a list of any issues found in the sample file and ask that you provide an updated file. This process is repeated until a sample historical file passes diagnostic testing. It typically takes several rounds of sample file generation, analysis, and feedback to approve a sample historical file.

Phase 2: Full Historical File Integration

After the sample file has passed validation, we can begin the process of generating, validating, and approving a full historical file. This file needs to include actual production data for all active and inactive customer accounts for a specific timeframe (typically January of the previous year). Full historical file approval typically requires several rounds of generation and validation. The approved historical file will be loaded into the Oracle Utilities Opower production application, and the data within it will be displayed to customers in reports, email messages, alerts, and web applications.

Phase 3: Incremental File Integration

After your Delivery Team approves and loads the full historical data, the team will generate an incremental file that includes any new customer information and data recorded since the most recent record in the full historical file that was delivered. After the first set of incremental files are approved, your team will schedule an automated file transfer. During this transfer, your system will push ongoing incremental files to the Oracle Utilities Opower SFTP server.

Note: The number of phases you need to follow may vary slightly depending on which Oracle Utilities Opower products you are implementing and which data transfer standards are required for those products. See Data Transfer Standards by Product for an overview of which products require which data standards. Also, note that the type of data that you must extract from your system can vary, as well as the frequency with which you must transfer it. In addition to the overview here, you should read the data integration process documentation for each individual data transfer standard. See Welcome for links to each one.