City of Baltimore is live on UMAX

ATLANTA, December 19, 2016 – Itineris and the City of Baltimore marked an important milestone in recent days as the City reached two months of successful operations with its new, live UMAX® customer information system (CIS), technology used to manage customer service and billing operations for the City’s Department of Public Works.

The UMAX project is a key component of the City’s larger BaltiMeter initiative to improve billing performance and customer service through the implementation of new smart meters and a modern CIS to replace its more than 30-year-old billing system.

21st Century Customer Service

“Over the past few years, the Department of Public Works has taken on several major initiatives to bring our water and wastewater operations into the 21st century—including a rollout of new meters, implementation of our new UMAX customer information system and major improvements to our billing processes, such as moving from quarterly to monthly billing,” said DPW Director Rudy S. Chow, P.E.

“As an integral part of this new future, we are very pleased with how smoothly our transition to UMAX has been and are already seeing improvements to customer service and billing,” Chow continued.

Baltimore City DPW Chief of Customer Support and Services Maria DeChellis detailed some of those improvements, “We are able to provide our customers with far more information about their water consumption, giving them a much better understanding of how they are using water, and where they can reduce usage and eliminate leaks. From our standpoint, UMAX helps us to triage the customer concerns so we are better able to identify, and more quickly respond to, emerging issues.”

A modern technology platform

UMAX is built on Microsoft’s cutting-edge ERP platform Dynamics 365®, of which the City is implementing an earlier version—Dynamics AX 2012—for its financial and other enterprise resource planning systems. This native integration with the City’s Microsoft technology platform will translates into:

• faster, more reliable data movement throughout City departments
• greater flexibility in adapting processes to future business and customer care needs
• improved billing and customer self service
• new reporting and business intelligence capabilities
• enhanced user experience for City employees
• enhanced Front Office call center portal for quick call resolution

The shared platform also enables the City to leverage other Microsoft technology investments it has in place, such as Windows PCs, Windows Servers, Microsoft cybersecurity tools, Exchange, SQL Server and Microsoft Office.

Partnership for the future

Moving forward, Itineris will continue to support the City’s transition to UMAX and rollout to all customers—including the 200,000 customers in Baltimore County that the City services and bills for, which will be transitioned to the new system in Summer 2017.

Following the completed rollout, Itineris will continue its long-term relationship with the City of Baltimore, providing UMAX support and maintenance for a contracted 10 years.

Itineris President for UMAX North America and Baltimore native Burrell Kilmer noted, “This is a time of important change for Baltimore City DPW, both in facing its billing and infrastructure challenges today and the changes coming to our industry in the years ahead. Itineris is grateful to be a long-term partner to the City as it continues working to improve the lives of its citizens.”