OpenText Rate Case Management

Whether your business operates in a competitive or regulated environment, utility companies need to investment in their business while at the same time charge a fair and reasonable price for their service. However, because margins are often impacted by the substantial operating costs of generation, distribution, infrastructure upkeep, manpower, and regulations, this often requires prioritizing expenses and developing strategies to recover costs, which can lead to a rate case filing. Yet the process of building the rate case submission is an intricate and daunting task that most companies often struggle with.

Every document in the submission needs to be accurate, pass legal review, have an audit trail, support the submission requirements, and meet the deadline. Typically, deadlines are tight, email inboxes are clogged, and proper document version control is non-existent.

OpenText Rate Case Management enables a systematic, end-to-end approach for managing investments and expenses in order to optimize rates and ensure compliance with regulatory agencies and interveners. Built on the robust OpenText Enterprise Content Management (ECM) suite, the solution provides a centralized and integrated framework that is able to receive, process, organize, store, and publish data from a variety of different departments including, finance, engineering, customer service, administration, and corporate planning.

Features

The key features of OpenText Rate Case Management include:

• Scan and Archive Data and Documents: OpenText Rate Case Management allows you to capture all documents from any source -- paper, email, web & desktop. The solution helps to reduce database size and manage documents and archived data with its robust replication, caching, encryption, and digital signature/time stamping capabilities while offering flexible storage in optical, magnetic WORM, SAN, NAS hardware from your vendor of choice.
• Manage your Documents with Eease: Control content and automate manual controls with the content-centric document management, collaboration, and workflow capabilities of OpenText Rate Case Management. Leverage document tracking and control features including versioning, advanced access control, audit trail functionality, document rating, feedback and reviews, as well as powerful search and discovery capabilities. Manage the rate case process from either a browser or from popular desktop applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Excel.
• Automate Processes and Integrate Systems: OpenText Rate Case Management features multi-thread workflows with dynamic routing, user notification, document change monitoring, graphical workflows, and automatic processes within workflows via XML. And because Rate Case Management can be integrated with other business systems data, can easily be securely shared.
• Improve Compliance: OpenText Rate Case Management's built-in records management capabilities, allow your organization to establish a trusted repository for electronic & physical records that is DoD 5015.2, Chapter 2 certified.
• Project Management Capabilities: With Rate Case Management, clear project responsibilities and deliverables can be established and tracked. Best practices can be standardized by making use of templates, and projects can be simplified using the solution's phase-based structuring approach to rate cases.
• Collaboration: The solution's collaboration rooms help to maintain virtual workspaces for teams, workgroups and communities. Collaboration features such as discussions, and chat capabilities help to further connect people with processes accessible anywhere via a web browser.
• Complete Integration with ERP Solutions: Integration into your ERP system ensures that business-related information related to the submission is available from any location regardless of its ingestion point to the solution. The value of having an integrated solution allows all the key stakeholders involved in the rate case to have a comprehensive view of the content throughout the entire process.