Introducing Sage EMS

Sage EMS – Energy Management Suite – is the first and only integrated suite of back office applications for the Australian Energy Market, proven to scale for IMRO. This document provides an introduction to the features and capabilities of Sage EMS, and can assist utilities in assessing their current capabilities and needs for the evolving energy market in Australia. Sage EMS Components Sage EMS comprises:

• Meter Data Management
• Configuration Management
• NEMMCO Settlement Reconciliation
• NUoS Invoicing & Settlement
• Billing Support (provision of aggregated meter data to external billing engines)
• C&I Billing
• Exception Management
• Comprehensive Analysis and Reporting

Sage EMS Customers

Sage EMS is an Australian Designed, Developed and Australian Owned suite developed specifically for participants in Australian Energy Markets.

Sage EMS is suitable for any participant – from the smallest independent retailer to the largest integrated utility.

Sage EMS is cost effective – inexpensive to purchase, inexpensive to implement and inexpensive to operate.

Sage EMS supports retailers (both as FRMP and LR), NSPs (as LNSP, MPB/C) and MDPs (as MDP, MPB/C) and provides support for specific roles such as RP.

Predecessors to Sage EMS have been used by CitiPower (Network and Retailer), and Origin Energy is currently using Usage – designed and implemented by Sage Utility Systems – for B2B and billing aggregation, and Sage has just completed implemetation of Sage EMS for Origin for metering and settlements. Sage EMS is the fourth generation of metering management systems built by Sage personnel, and is by far the most advanced yet.

Who should consider Sage EMS?

Independent Retailers and new market entrants who require a low cost system that can scale cost-effectively with market growth – either outsourced or in house.

Incumbent Retailers who want to minimise the impact of Interval Meter Roll Out (IRMO) on their downstream systems such as trading, pricing and billing systems that work well with basic meter readings or aggregated interval readings – especially for those customers still on default tariff structures.

Retailers entering FRC for the first time that need to ensure that the dramatic increase in churn – both won and lost customers – is handled by an automated system that does not require an increase in human resources to manage.

Network Service Providers either entering FRC or facing IMRO that want to ensure that their cost to server per connection point is maintained or reduced, rather than increased.

Retailers already established in FRC who need to improve the accuracy and automation of their trading and settlement reconciliation processes and reduce the human resources required to manage this area of their business.

Sage EMS: Proof-of-Concept Implementations

The best way to assess if Sage EMS is right for your organisation is to see it running – on your network, with your data. A Proof-of-Concept (PoC) implementation will typically cost approximately 10% of the total implementation project cost, and will demonstrate meter data loading capacity and performance, settlement and exception functionality, and key interfaces – usually to billing systems. A PoC can usually be completed in six to eight weeks, and the server utilised can then be either returned to normal use (e.g. as a standby DR server), or utilised as the development server for the full implementation of Sage EMS.