California Water Services was awarded the 2025 Oracle Utilities User Group (OUUG) Customer Excellence Award for successfully implementing the Customer Cloud Service (CCS) system. 

Cal Water was running on an aging Oracle Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) solution (v2.4), using it to create and record all customer contacts, “meter to cash” transactions, and customer field activities, and to provide key information for creating the Company’s financial statements. They engaged TMG, an RIA company, in Q1 of 2023 to upgrade and transform the legacy CC&B environment and key business processes used by the utility to manage billing, customer information, and service interactions. This transformation leveraged advanced technologies from Oracle, including cloud-based infrastructure, automation, data analytics, and modern security capabilities to improve operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and agility to support the rapidly evolving industry demands of Cal Water.

A material solution driver for Cal Water was to reduce its on-premise footprint and the cumbersome maintenance requirements of physical systems and to embrace cloud infrastructure for CIS. They also wanted to reduce/eliminate system customizations wherever possible in a “return to native” approach and take advantage of new and enhanced solution capabilities that would allow the Company to continue to meet its regulatory requirements and high customer service standards. Cal Water was also willing to make reasonable business process changes rather than customizing CCS to conform to every aspect of its legacy CC&B software and associated processes.

"The California Water Service and TMG team members put forth an incredible effort over 22 months to launch a complex, cloud-based customer service and billing application. We are grateful for all our vendors' support and look forward to utilizing CCS to enhance our employee and customer experience further," stated Micahel Luu, SVP of Corporate Services and Chief Risk Officer at Cal Water.

The outcome of this mission-critical project was a very successful, hiccup-free migration to Oracle’s Customer Cloud Service (CCS) CIS platform, enabling Cal Water with a scalable, flexible, and secure platform for the future. Additionally, CCS changes Cal Water’s IT team paradigm from maintenance-driven work to forward-looking support for more strategic goals while giving Cal Water IT transformative benefits, including agility, cost optimization, and access to cutting-edge technology from Oracle.

This project was a significant transformation effort for all involved parties. It included People, Process, and Technology elements with not only an enterprise system and platform migration but also a large organizational change management initiative to address the various changes in functionality, technology, and business processes and to ensure successful adoption and sustainability for Cal Water long term.

People and Process Transformation

The Organizational Change Management focus included two major pillars for this program. One was the development of a robust knowledge transfer plan, and the second was the identification and cataloging of a large number of change impacts on the Cal Water organization, with the mitigations associated with those being incorporated largely into change plans and training areas. Additional highlights of the People and Process transformational changes included:

• Re-align and optimize key business processes related to smart metering, work order dispatching, and financial reporting.
• Redefine key roles and responsibilities to enhance internal and external customer experience and technical support.
• Streamlining of business processes to better align the 4 Cal Water organizations: LPC processing, collections, severance, and write-offs.

Technology Transformation

The IT and Technology Transformation included a significant paradigm shift away from legacy thinking associated with on-premise, customized technology support mindsets to adopting a cloud-based solution with robust support workflows and DevOps practices by Cal Water. This will yield immediate benefits to Cal Water’s IT function with reduced IT workloads, elevated security, business continuity, disaster recovery, and an innovation-first posture in the future - all with sustainability and reduced overall costs for CIS. Cal Water realized immediate benefits from the following in this TMG-led project:

• Realignment of initial technology scope - including removing 30 algorithms
• Rewriting of COBOL objects into OUAF-supported code and removal of custom code with a retrofit to OUAF standards, including audit algorithms
• Removal of custom database objects, including tables, stored procedures, and views
• Refactoring of file-based integrations to use OUAF-supported base plugin-driven batch processes
• Refactoring of 100+ real-time integrations to use OUAF-supported web services and MuleSoft
• Reimplementation of various meter readings and billing validations to use configurable VEE rules
• Reports and Data Warehouse streamlining and optimization, including reducing/eliminating custom table maintenance and stored procedures for 99% of the existing reports and implementation of 123 BI Publisher reports while migrating ~20 reports to a Snowflake Data Warehouse

The success of this large and complex project is a testament to Cal Water’s forward-looking vision, determination, and drive to modernize its core enterprise systems while simultaneously undertaking the often painful and difficult tasks associated with the streamlining and optimizing business processes required for successful adoption and sustainability of a modern, cloud-based CIS (Oracle CCS), and to move itself as an organization into the future.