Interval Data Integration Process
Integration of your interval data into the Oracle Utilities Opower platform involves the following phases: sample historical file integration and 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.
Oracle Utilities recommends that you extract data from your production billing system. This ensures that the customer contact information and energy usage data you transfer to Oracle Utilities is as accurate and current as possible.
For smart meter interval data, Oracle Utilities recommends that meter read and usage data be retrieved from the utility Meter Data Management System (MDMS) after the validation, estimation, and editing (VEE) process has been performed. This ensures that data displayed by Oracle Utilities applications is consistent with data received by the billing system for final customer billing and processing.
Use Billing Quality Data
Oracle Utilities recommends that the data be of billing quality when possible. This is because we treat the data provided as the system of record for information, and we do not alter it for presentation to the customer or performing calculations. Lower quality of data will affect the customer experience and analytic calculations that may be presented to a customer.
Full Historical File Integration
Historical data only needs to be provided once at the beginning of the project. Oracle Utilities requests data history for all currently active accounts for at least 13 months in order to support robust data disaggregation modules. If historical data is not available for a full 13 months of history, Oracle Utilities requests the full amount of historical data that is available.
Incremental File Integration
Interval data should be transferred as frequently as possible, but no less than on a daily basis to ensure timely display of data for online applications. Iterative files should contain new usage data since the previous file.