Product Enhancement Request

332857058.doc

332857058.doc
Initiator:

Neal Nawrocki

Date of Request:

25 April 2007

Product:

Customer Care and Billing

Status:

Lodged

Cross References
PG&E MDSS Studies Document and PPT
http://www.californiaenergyefficiency.com/
10802 Marketing Program Management

Business Requirement
Brief Description:
Conservation (or Energy Efficiency) and other conservation efforts are becoming
more important to utilities, especially in resource constrained areas such as
California and South Africa. The Energy Policy Act increased the importance of
demand side conservation programs and we expect this to be a continued trend
globally.

Use Cases:
Conservation (or Energy Efficiency) Program functionality as required for PG&Es
business model is not standard enterprise CRM functionality.
This statement is made as these types of programs along with their stringent
reporting requirements around energy savings are extremely specific to the Utility
industry, and not generically useful to other industries.
Since the U-GBU CC&B offering is not designed to address the wider CRM market
but rather is specifically targeted at the Utility industry, there is benefit of us being
able to provide such functionality to our wider utility customer base in a generic
fashion.
The essence of Conservation (or Energy Efficiency) programs is generally to provide
rebates to customers based on eligibility and verification of newly purchased
appliances and hardware that are rated to conserve demand for energy. Customers
have to submit a rebate application to the utility with receipts and the utility has to
administer and report on the programs.

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Detailed Description:
Note: Most of the requirements for Conservation Programs overlap with those of
Marketing Program Management. Basically these are marketing campaigns and are
mostly inbound, although can be outbound.
Most of these campaigns involve a customer requesting a rebate (either via the web
or by mailing in a form), and the company must verify that the customer is actually
eligible for the rebate (based on multiple factors), ensure that the rebate paperwork is
processed correctly so that the program can be properly reported on (conservation
programs are often tightly audited due to the concept of giving money away to
people), and provide the actual rebate amount either as a check or a refund on the
customers account (note that sometimes the person claiming the rebate may not
even be a customer, but they may still qualify for the rebate because the money is
generally provided by the government not the company itself the company just
manages the programs for them).
Because of the tight auditing requirements on conservation programs, it is also very
important to be able to analyse the results in BI and to use this to generate reports on
for example actual vs budget (dollars, savings, etc).

The key difference to normal Marketing Programs is the need for a matrix type of
structure to support the following information and logic:

Product eligibility

Expected savings (e.g. kWh)

Rebate amount

Etc

Because conservation impact is very changeable based on various factors, this sort
of matrix is required to ensure that conservation information is properly tracked and
reported on.
E.g. At PG&E, the inputs for this matrix include:

Climate zone

Building vintage

Building style

E.g. At PG&E, outputs from this matrix include:

Eligible products, energy savings (per year), rebate amount

o

E.g.

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CFL model #532B, (2.5kW savings/year), $3.50

CFL model #242J, (10.2kW savings/year), $10

AC unit model #923TY (1.5MW savings/year), $125

The information in this matrix must be easily accessible for purposes of:

Determining eligible products for a prospect

Determining the associated factors (like savings and rebate amounts) as

these are required in calculations afterwards.

The information in this matrix must also be possible to be easily maintained by a user
via online screens (and optionally via external tool like Excel, and uploading this
data).

Sources of Information:
Company

Location

Contact

Date

Category

Doc Ref

PG&E

Sales Impact
Timeline:
Current Business Solution:
Company

Method

Comments:

Competitor Status:
Company

Status

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Comments:

Market Impact
Services affected:
Service

Customer Base

Markets affected:
Market Region

Priority

Potential 3rd Party Integration Partners

Company

Product

Relationship:

Technical
Design Review:
Prod Mgt

Expected Volume/Load Requirements:

The matrix could be very large

Batch Frequency:
N/A

Purge/Archive Requirements:
N/A

Conversion Tool Impact:

N/A

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Licensing:
N/A

Documentation Requirements:
N/A

Upgrade Issues:
N/A

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