Avertra: Fueling Innovation in Utilities

Having started its journey as a boutique IT company enabling digital transformation for the utilities industry, Avertra today has grown as a global technology and consulting company catering to every unique need of the industry. The company provides scalable and affordable integration, product development, and consultancy services to utilities for achieving operational excellence.

We spoke with Bashir Bseirani, co-founder and CEO, help our readers understand the strategic innovations that Avertra brings to the market.

1. Please elaborate on the market challenges and the rising industrial trends today.

With over eight years of experience as a consulting services company, we realized that the industry lacked an integrated, modern, and easy-to-use solution for unlocking the full potential of their IT investments. Avertra set out to build a system that could provide an innovative layer to the traditional ERP systems used in the utilities industry. The main goal was to create a relevant solution to reduce the implementation struggle as well as outperform traditional billing and ERPs.

Governing different types of projects, integration management, deployment, customization, and design across diverse systems is complex, inefficient, as well as costly. Often, this can be attributed to the lack of necessary resources to support the implementation and integration of an ERP solution into their environments. We decided to develop our utility platform which focuses on optimizing and streamlining as well as automating the complete project lifecycle.

2. Please give us some insights into Avertra’s innovative solutions.

Utility services are traditionally used to running long and time-consuming projects. They lack systems in place to analyze the behavior and other aspects that truly drive decision making. This is where our MiUtility stands a mile ahead. MiUtility is a proprietary enterprise technology suite designed specifically for the utilities industry. We leverage a modern architecture to build the solution with a very smart UI, which helps to enhance how our customers and their end users execute and monitor the business processes in areas like finance, customer service, contact center management across the entire organization. With MiUtility, utilities can now focus on the customer experience as well as their workforce enablement without having lengthy projects. MiUtility’s web portal and mobile app allows managing every stage of the customer lifecycle—from applying for service to managing account information, monitoring usage, and paying bills.

3. How does Avertra’s team interact with the customer and deploy the solution?

Avertra’s key focus is delivering a tangible visible benefit to the utility with our products. Customers engage with Avertra using multiple methods. One is through direct solicitation, which includes analysis of inception, construction, transition, and products.

Avertra’s key focus is delivering a tangible, visible benefit to the utility with our products

In the inception phase, we focus on facilitating enterprise business modeling. This starts with putting together all the journey maps needed for the particular project. Next, we assess the requirements of the project with a few simple questions—what is the extra layer that needs to be reduced? What’s the intended ROI? What are the KPIs that the client wants to see?

Once we understand the scheme of things, we provide the clients with representations from a technical as well as an automation standpoint.

A key part of our inception is education—educating the customer about the value and the benefit of automation and showing them how fast it can handle complex scenarios with an agent-less execution of the process. The process integrates around eight systems including the billing, identity management, deposit management, and more.

4. Please shed some light on your implementation techniques.

Electric or gas connection transfer is a cumbersome process wherein the agents spend more time performing analysis than porting the customer. We developed a series of processes and business logics to enable customers to initiate connection transfer without the support of an agent, making the job much easier for the consumers at the end of the day.

Once the design, architecture, and different integrations are covered, we assemble these pieces to create an implementation strategy. Within four weeks, the customers are able to see tangible results of the new implementation.

5. Please share a case study that highlights Avertra’s value proposition.

One of the largest utilities in Washington was faced with challenges to manage their customer programs that focused on helping low-income customers to pay their bills. The utility had assigned third-party agencies for finding these customers, administering the programs, and then distributing funds. While these agencies required extensive training to consume and capture complex customer information, the client had no visibility into the process on the agency side. The utility wasn’t able to segment their customers based on the demographics and occupants. Moreover, agencies had to go through a lengthy and slow procedure to log in through a VPN as well as a remote desktop to access the application. We introduced an end-to-end solution that allowed the agencies to access customer information using our product. The agencies now can seamlessly access customer information rapidly and create integration with agency’s scheduling systems. Customers can enroll into the program digitally without having to call an agency to know about how the funding is being allocated.

6. Could you elaborate on your roadmap in terms of innovations, expansions, and technological advancements?

Moving forward, we have been seeing a constant change in the market. Utilities are adopting certain levels of automation and digitalization to eliminate barriers involved in paper-based business processes.

We have recently partnered with two universities to begin R&D initiatives, as well as have a program to train and enable their students. We are committed to our goal to grow our market share as well as to continuously deliver innovation. We also plan to open a reseller program, hoping to increase our market share by adding partners.