Client Case Study :: City Utilities

The Client:
City Utilities of Springfield is a customer-owned utility serving southwest Missouri for more than 50 years with electricity, natural gas, water, and public transportation services.

The Project:
Blue Heron provides around-the-clock maintenance and support services for City Utilities' customer information system, CISPLUS from SPL WorldGroup. SPL provided maintenance and support from the time of system implementation in 2001. When the maintenance and support contract came up for renewal in early 2003, City Utilities issued an RFP for the services, as well as time and materials pricing for system enhancements.

Blue Heron's Role:
City Utilities received one-year contract bids of $428,000 from SPL and $63,000 from Blue Heron Consulting. On April 1, 2003, Blue Heron and City Utilities entered into a contract whereby Blue Heron provides 24x7 maintenance and support for City Utilities' CIS system. City Utilities is able to accrue significant savings because of its decision to forego a software upgrade for several years.

Blue Heron's successful track record with SPL WorldGroup products gave City Utilities the confidence to break away from the system vendor. "Stellar references" and contract flexibility were other important factors, says Kelly Laurie, City Utilities' IT business consultant. City Utilities was able to negotiate a contract that met its specific service-level needs.

Benefits for City Utilities
Through its maintenance and support savings, expected to total more than $350,000, the Utility was able to move forward with needed system enhancements. Among other projects, Blue Heron designed a data archiving and purging solution, as well as a mechanized process for discarding old data. "We hope to see some performance gains, but more importantly, it will reduce our need for Unix disc space, which is very expensive. We're going to try to defer some capital expenditure costs here," Laurie adds.

Blue Heron's initial one-year contract is expected to save the Utility approximately 84% in maintenance costs and 66% in support and system enhancements.