Capgemini Accelerates Digital Transformation at City of Kitchener with Customer Information System for Property Tax and Utility Operations

The technology initiative will enable the City of Kitchener’s property tax and utility operations to retire legacy systems that are becoming increasingly costly to maintain and integrate, and will offer customers more insight into their property tax and utility usage. The new CIS will include SAP Customer Relationship Management and Billing, providing the utility operations with a modern technology platform to automate its billing management process and simplify how property tax, gas, storm water, rental equipment and water, as well as other operational data, is aggregated and shared with citizens.  

The CIS supports the management of all customer and financial data for the property tax and utilities operations, including 72,000 property tax accounts and 80,000 utility accounts for gas, water, sewer, storm water, and rental water heaters. The CIS produces over 910,000 utility and 138,000 property tax bills and supports the management of more than 1 million system transactions annually.

“Our utilities operation is an invaluable service to our citizens and one that has experienced enormous transformation in recent years, leveraging new technologies to improve service delivery,” said Dan Chapman, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer, City of Kitchener. “Our long-term success is contingent on managing, aggregating and sharing relevant data and information that leads to more informed decision making for our utilities operators and employees, and more importantly, our citizens. That starts with revolutionizing our customer information systems, the heartbeat of our operation.”

With the new CIS based on SAP software, the City of Kitchener will be able to leverage a solution that integrates with the city’s existing technology applications and infrastructure. As a result, the city will be able to garner richer data insights to fuel innovation with the goal of getting ahead of utility maintenance requests and giving citizens more real-time data on their household energy usage.

“Municipalities are challenged to improve billing processes, which only increases as IT systems age and consumers demand new information about their consumption and conservation opportunities,” said Brad Little, Corporate  Vice President, Energy & Utilities Leader for Capgemini North America. “We look forward to supporting the City of Kitchener on its digital transformation journey to help revolutionize how it shares data with its citizens.”

For this project with the City of Kitchener, Capgemini Canada leveraged its global expertise to help transform operations to better address shifting customer demands and business models, and knowledge of SAP software implementation methodology from past UtilityPath and SAP projects. For more information on Capgemini’s Global Utilities practice and services, please visit http://www.capgemini.com/utilities.

About Capgemini

With more than 180,000 people in over 40 countries, Capgemini is one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services. The Group reported 2015 global revenues of EUR 11.9 billion (about $13.2 billion USD at 2015 average rate). Together with its clients, Capgemini creates and delivers business, technology and digital solutions that fit their needs, enabling them to achieve innovation and competitiveness. A deeply multicultural organization, Capgemini has developed its own way of working, the Collaborative Business Experience^TM, and draws on Rightshore^®, its worldwide delivery model.

Learn more about us at www.capgemini.com.

Rightshore^® is a trademark belonging to Capgemini

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