Gartner defines configure, price and quote (CPQ) applications as software that enables sales organizations to automate and optimize the creation of quotes and capture of orders. A CPQ application is a sales tool that captures the new goods and services a customer wants to buy or the changes a customer wants to make to existing goods and services. While generally focused on assisted sales channels, CPQ capabilities such as product configuration and pricing must be shared with the self-service commerce channel. The new purchases and changes must be priced and a binding contract must be formed with the customer before sending an order to downstream fulfillment systems.
MDMS products are IT components of the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). The core MDMS is responsible for cleansing, calculating and providing the data persistence of commodity consumption data. Additional MDMS capabilities now include disseminating metered consumption data for internal as well as external use. Meter data can be used to support billing, as well as analytics use cases, such as load profiling, consumption tracking, forecasting, asset loading and revenue protection, including the detection of tampering, theft or leakage. Beyond supporting internal utility needs, MDMS plays a role in open consumption data by supporting the sharing of consumption data with customers, partners, market operators and regulators. In most markets, data sharing is done with standardized data exchange formats.
The COTS utility customer information system market is composed of software solutions that address utility M2C and legacy commodity-centric customer service business processes. M2C functions covered include: Account management Order processing Product and service management Rate design Billing Credit and collections Accounts receivable Statement preparation Payment processing Customer service Revenue analysis For traditional commodity-focused customer service, CIS supports multiple client interaction channels, including call center and interactive voice response and voice response units. They also support some digital engagement channels (such as text, apps, social media, and virtual assistants and chatbots) for some customer self-service needs (such as bill inquiry and payment, self-service scheduling, and outage reporting). Some solutions go much further, providing increasing capability in customer engagement and experience and even some total experience capability.