Yarra Valley Water’s Oracle CC&B project finally goes live

How many consultants over how many years for how many millions of dollars?  We’ll probably never know, but there was a huge sigh of relief all round when Yarra Valley Water’s Oracle Customer Care & Billing project finally went live in July.  You would have to wonder at the impact on water prices when monopoly utilities such as the water companies spend what is reputedly $40 million on a water billing implementation.  The next cab off the rank for a water billing system is Allconnex Water in Brisbane, who you would have to hope will have more sense of the value-for-money proposition, and City West Water who have boldly decided it’s time to look at replacing all of their systems.  One of these days someone is going to be courageous (in Sir Humphrey Appleby’s sense) and select SAP for water billing – and then we’ll really see the dollars mount up.  At least the Yarra Valley Water experience of Oracle’s billing product (formerly SPL) has delivered a per-customer cost that’s nowhere near the stratospheric amount Aurora Energy in Tasmania is spending on the same product.  On the other hand, how much longer is Gippsland Water going to take before they finally decide they’ve done enough testing on their Hansen-8 product and go live with it?