City of Moreno Valley leaps into the cloud with the help of ESC Partners, E Source, and Oracle

Utility benefits with better customer service and smart city groundwork for economic, population, tech growth

WEBSTER, NY — March 13, 2023. Recently, the City of Moreno Valley (California, USA) went live with Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service (CCS), a complete customer care and advanced metering solution, under the guidance of ESC Partner’s implementation and support services. This combined investment in Oracle products and ESC Partner services is foundational to the City’s long-term strategic plan to boost customer engagement and satisfaction while additionally adapting and preparing for increasingly more sophisticated grid and metering technology.

Moreno Valley’s vision to embrace smart meters set this project into motion, as the city utilities team wanted to get the most from the data that smart meters would provide. To achieve their goal would require a billing system update and a way to tie those meters and that billing system into a larger data-driven software system as well.

“We looked into a variety of separate options, but ultimately decided what we needed was a connected platform that could adapt with us as we explore and grow as a utility,” said Jeannette Olko, Electric Utility Division Manager with the City. “We all knew we wanted to enhance our customer services and give customers a way to monitor their usage better—simpler, easier. We also knew we wanted a system in place to help us restore outages more quickly. The a-ha moment was when we sat down together and realized those weren’t two separate paths; instead, it was a single one.”

That single path forward also resulted in additional benefits that have grown from the project: a lot of combined efficiencies, an ability for the utility to grow into leading the operations side of their business, and an unprecedented level of resiliency and reliability on the grid side that the city hasn’t seen before but is now a huge part of that single vision of the future.

“We’re definitely doing a bit of futureproofing with this project,” Olko added. “Customer benefits are the lead here, but there so many beneficial subsidiaries to being proactive over reactive with this program. As a leading example, as the city moves into battery storage, we’ll really be able to optimize some of the technology and software areas we’re putting into place today.”

Along with Oracle as the software provider and ESC Partners as the services/support partner, the City of Moreno Valley also worked with E Source on this project.  E Source helped the City identify gaps and find the right people with the right capabilities to fill those gaps, along with supporting the team with client-side project management and testing services throughout the project.

 “We’re particularly proud of the Moreno Valley project here at E Source. It’s rare that we see a city or a utility so willing to take a new path without the safety net of lifting over the same strategies from their legacy systems. The team here truly looked ahead to their needs and their customer needs over the next 20—even 30 years—with this vision,” said Christina Schueneman, Director of Professional Services with E Source.

“Moreno Valley prides itself on providing safe, reliable, and economical public services and is at the forefront of using technology to continue to achieve these goals,” said Brad Kitchin, Group Vice President at Oracle. “With Oracle’s cloud-based CCS, which includes customer care, billing, and advanced metering solution, smart cities like Moreno Valley will be able to better able serve customers today, while building a flexible foundation to capitalize on new opportunities to come.”

“I can’t tell you how proud we are of the City of Moreno Valley and our work with them on this project,” said RJ Kumar, CEO of ESC Partners. “They practiced what we always preach at ESC: Begin with your end results in mind. And those results are fantastic. They moved into the cloud completely without customizations—mostly thanks to their willingness to let go of legacy processes and thinking. They’re making both prosumers and regular consumers happier with streamlined, more in-depth user access, and, most importantly, they haven’t siloed themselves into a corner. MVU is poised and ready to evolve as their vibrant city evolves. We could say that makes them a smart utility; we could say that makes them the cornerstone of a smart city. In the end, though, that just makes them smart—period, full stop.”

READ THE FIRST STEP IN THE MVU CUSTOMER JOURNEY HERE.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Jeannette Olko is now retired from the City of Moreno Valley.

ABOUT THE CITY OF MORENO VALLEY (Moreno Valley Utility/MVU): A public power utility established in 2001 by the Moreno Valley City Council, Moreno Valley Utility (MVU) serves more than 7,500 customers within its service area, providing customer service, meter reading, billing, emergency response, and other services to new commercial and residential developments.

ABOUT ORACLE:  Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com. Learn more about Oracle Energy and Water solutions here.

ABOUT E SOURCE: We’re a solutions-based research, consulting, and data science firm that has been a change agent in the utility sector for more than 30 years.

ABOUT ESC PARTNERS:

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