Cobb Energy Implements Oracle® Utilities Customer Care and Billing to Improve Operational Efficiency and Streamline Billing Processes

Leading Utility Reduces Bill Processing Time by 80 percent

* Today Oracle announced that Cobb Energy - a Marietta, Ga.-based company providing diversified energy-related and non-energy-related products and services to residential and commercial customers - implemented Oracle(r) Utilities Customer Care and Billing to replace several inflexible and expensive-to-maintain legacy systems. The company is running this application on Oracle Database.
* With Oracle, Cobb Energy has greatly improved operational efficiency, reducing the time needed to complete nightly batch processes, including uploading meter reads and payments and bill creation, by nearly 80 percent - from 36 hours to seven hours.
* Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing allows Cobb Energy to monitor bill accuracy with much less manual effort and train staff efficiently on the application to increase user adoption.
* Cobb Energy has experienced a significant reduction in turn-around time for configuration changes - allowing the company to reduce its IT costs and bring its bill design in-house.
* Cobb Energy offers the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing application to other organizations, including Cobb Electric, Gas South and Interlink Controls on a hosted, application-service-provider basis, allowing access to a leading-edge billing system with less investment in infrastructure and personnel.
* Cobb Energy recently received the Expanding Excellence Award for “Best CIS Implementation” at CSWeek 2008.

Supporting Quotes

* “We are pleased to work with Cobb Energy as it leverages Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing to streamline its billing processes and enhance customer service. Oracle is committed to providing its utilities customers with applications that help accelerate implementation and maximize return on investment. Cobb Energy is not only improving its own business processes, it is leveraging Oracle to help other utilities do the same,” said Quentin Grady, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities.
* “We selected Oracle over nine other bidders based on the company’s industry expertise and the application’s functionality, usability, flexibility and ability to integrate with other software. Before we implemented Oracle, we needed to gather information from multiple screens to assist customers. Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing delivers at the fingertips of our employees the information needed to assist our customers. Our infrastructure and application transformation has touched every Cobb Energy department and affiliate, and we will leverage this platform for many years to come,” said Robert Arnett, vice president, technology systems, Cobb Energy.