Cincinnati Water selects Wipro as IT partner to streamline its billing and services

US based utility Greater Cincinnati Water Works (GCWW) has selected India based information technology company Wipro as its partner to improve its CRM, Billing and Service Bureau operations.

At present, GCWW serves more than one million people across the US states of Ohio and Kentucky supplying 133 million gallons of water per day.

According to the terms of the deal, Wipro will be designing, constructing, hosting and deploying a Customer Information System (CIS) for the water utility in a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model.

The IT leader will also offer maintenance service for the implemented solution for five years, it said.

The firm is offering its services in an Opex-based, pay-per-use pricing model, which is associated with the customer volume served by the US utility.

Wipro CIS is based on Oracle’s Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) platform, which allows benefits of contact management, billing, metering, account management and self-service options for the customers.

CIS is expected to reduce the costs for the water utility as compared to other solutions. The pre-configured technical accelerators for data integration and data migration offered by Wipro is likely to reduce the time for implementation of the solution. It will also reduce the transition risks for GCWW.

The solution comes in a pay-per-use commercial model, which will make it easy for GCWW to offer CIS-as-a-service for other small and medium sized water utilities.

GCWW commercial services superintendent Gary Wiest said: "Not only does the service bureau solution align with our strategic business plan, it also allows us to offer a tier 1 solution to utilities that might not have the means to procure the CC&B solution."

City of Cincinnati director of water & sewers Tony Parrott, said, "The service bureau strategy is one of the ways in which we can provide an exceptional billing system for our customers and other utilities."