At its recent Customer Edge Summit, Oracle Utilities customers American Electric Power (AEP), City of St. Petersburg, and Essential Energy were recognized for using modern digital technologies to simplify operations, transform customer experiences, and maximize asset performance.

“The energy and water sectors are in a period of exceptional change. To meet the new challenges, our customers are ambitiously modernizing their operations to boost performance by create better experiences for customers and employees,” said Creighton Oyler, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Utilities. “This year’s award winners all found innovative approaches to amplify the capabilities of cloud-based solutions and achieve breakthrough business results.”

Strategic Vision Winner – American Electric Power (AEP)

Powering 5.6 million customers across 11 states, AEP regularly develops new ways to produce and deliver safe, reliable, and affordable energy and transform customer experiences. By embracing the Oracle Utilities platform across its business, the utility has strategically moved from aging systems to modern SaaS products that improve customer interactions and engagement, automate processes to create employee efficiencies, and consolidate applications for lower total cost of ownership.

As part of its customer-focused vision, AEP continues to simplify customer experiences through digital, self-service tools and to provide education and assistance around energy usage. For example, by implementing the Opower equity and affordability solution to assist low-to-moderate income (LMI) customers, the utility can now better identify households at risk of not being able to make payments. AEP can then proactively engage with eligible customers to educate them about, and encourage them to enroll in, payment assistance programs. Additionally, the utility continues to modernize its critical business operations, including a planned migration to Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud Service and Oracle Utilities Customer Experience for Utilities for meter-to-cash and call center agent desktop support. This will help enable AEP to more fully realize the value of its grid investments and to provide the high-quality service that its customers expect.

Innovator Winner – City of St. Petersburg

The City of St. Petersburg (“St. Pete”), home to more than 260,000 residents, faced unprecedented challenges in the fall of 2024 when Hurricanes Helene and Milton struck in close succession. In response, city leaders demonstrated exceptional resilience and innovation, leveraging Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Cloud Service (Oracle Utilities WACS) to streamline recovery efforts and FEMA reporting. Originally implemented to address the Public Works Department’s need for a robust enterprise asset management solution, the technology proved invaluable during storm recovery. St. Pete used Oracle Utilities WACS to efficiently manage over 500,000 assets, track nearly 50,000 timesheet entries, and generate FEMA-compliant reports at the push of a button.

Oracle Field Service provided the utility with dynamic field service management, enabling the right resources to be dispatched at the right time, helping to improve efficiency and service delivery. City leaders built on these successes by leveraging the Oracle solution to update maintenance records and condition assessments, providing actionable insights for future asset management. Sanitation and other departments are now rapidly adopting Oracle Utilities WACS to improve their own operations, helping St. Pete set a new standard in municipal asset management and disaster recovery.

Initiative of the Year Winner – Essential Energy

Essential Energy operates and maintains one of Australia’s largest electricity distribution networks, covering 95% of New South Wales and parts of southern Queensland, and serving more than 900,000 customers across regional, rural, and remote communities. Faced with aging technologies from three predecessor organizations, the utility needed an agile, cloud-based Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solution to strengthen its core and systemize end-to-end asset and works management processes for its 3,000-plus employees as they progress through the energy transition.

Essential Energy implemented Oracle Utilities WACS as the core of this initiative, redesigning and aligning its end-to-end processes for managing assets throughout their lifecycle. With a new asset and work breakdown structure as a system of record, the utility can access data insights not previously possible. Examples include automated forecasting and preventative maintenance generation and standardized and codified failure profiles from inspections, condition assessments, and rectifications. By retiring old systems and conducting thorough training, the utility has successfully simplified employee operations in a project that represents its largest-ever change management initiative and one of the world’s largest WACS implementations.

Learn more other successful projects at Oracle Utilities, join the discussion on LinkedIn, and visit us at Booth #3712 during DISTRIBUTECH.