CPS Energy has found a replacement for its 23-year-old computer software system.
The municipal utility’s five trustees unanimously approved a 10-year, $70 million contract Monday morning with the Austin-based tech company Oracle, which will provide CPS Energy with a new enterprise resource planning system — a software system that helps a company run its entire business.
The utility will now begin the process of seeking a partnering company to help it with implementing the transition, said Evan O’Mahoney, CPS Energy’s chief information officer.
Since 2001, CPS Energy has operated on the enterprise resource planning system created by Germany-based company SAP SE. The company is now sunsetting the system due to its age and limitations and will phase it out completely by 2027.
“As a result of a lot of the challenges that we have working with our legacy technology, we have deployed additional applications over time — many of which require integrations to effectively move data around our technology ecosystem,” O’Mahoney told the utility’s board Monday. “Now, as a result, our processes are somewhat fractured and often require quite a bit of manual intervention across our various workforce team members to complete their daily assignments.”
The new system would allow CPS Energy to implement a variable rate structure if it should later choose to do so, O’Mahoney noted. The utility has been unable to implement such a structure while using its current system, a point of dispute for local environmental advocates who have been pushing the utility to charge heavy electric users at varied rates.
The utility issued a request for proposals seeking a new software provider in January 2023, and received 10 vendor responses, O’Mahoney said. These providers were ranked based on what they could provide CPS Energy, with the top three companies getting to present a week-long demo each, he said.
“During due diligence, we took a very hard look at the underlying architecture of the technology that was being proposed,” O’Mahoney said. “We also wanted to ensure that we conducted a deep dive relative to the security aspects of these technology solutions.”
CPS Energy’s staff landed on Oracle for its cost-effectiveness, its headquarters location in Texas, and due to its track record working with other utility providers, he said.
“What we’re getting with Oracle is truly an integrated modern utility platform,” O’Mahoney said. “This new technology platform will enable experiences for our customers that not only are the things that we’re doing today … We will also be able to enable new product services and rate structures through the use of this new technology.”
