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1. The functionality must be offered as a stand-alone product and not only as part of the vendor-specific CIS/ABS and/or AMI head-end system.
2. The stand-alone product must be able to accept meter readings from any meter data collection method (or the vendor must be able to develop an interface within a reasonable amount of time).
3. The stand-alone product must be able to interface, with two-way data sharing, with any utility legacy or vendor supplied CIS, outage management, work force management, GIS, or other key utility IT system (or the vendor must be able to develop an interface within a reasonable amount of time.)
4. The data must be persistent, and versioned.

Without these four key elements of MDM, all that has been accomplished is to rename a former product to catch the wave of interest in MDM. Besides CIS/ABS and AMI vendors, UtiliPoint has seen firms that engage in transaction management and billing data presentation also claim to provide MDM, and we are left asking, "If it wasn't true meter data management yesterday, what qualifies it as MDM today? How are you meeting the requirements listed above?" SAP has developed a standalone module known as Energy Data Management in order to isolate meter data from its customer care and billing system. Another CIS vendor, SPL, agreed that MDM cannot reside inside the CIS and be marketed as MDM. Guerry Waters, Senior VP of Product Management of SPL said in a recent interview with UtiliPoint,

"SPL is committed to providing MDM in ways that help utilities maximize the value of meter data to the many strategic applications that need it. Our meter data management functionality—which we provide today as an optional add-on module in our Customer Care & Billing application, but which we intend to provide as an independent module—keeps pace with emerging utility demands to interface with applications that lie both within and outside our enSUMIT product suite."

Wouldn't it be useful if other vendors would provide such transparency to the utility market? Why is it so important for MDM to be independent of CIS/ABS (or other utility IT systems) and the head-end of the AMI systems? Dawn Welch, Software Manager of the AMI Project for San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E), recently filed testimony with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), and addressed this issue:

"The future direction of SDG&E for enterprise integration is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents, in our case the MDMS and the utilities legacy applications. The loose coupling of the interfaces provides SDG&E a more cost effective way to develop and maintain systems over a longer period of time. As systems change and are replaced, loose coupling allows exchange of information to translate into less impact between systems as the changes occur. SDG&E ultimately plans to use a product for its enterprise middleware (EM) that will manage integration between applications. Integration will be accomplished application-to-EM rather than the more traditional, application-to-application. The EM will be responsible for moving data between applications. The overall goals that SDG&E plans to accomplish with the EM are as follows:

1. Isolation from communications programming.
2. Robust middleware for high performance distributed application integration.
3. Network topology agnosticism.
4. Standard message queuing interface built for Company platforms.
5. Synchronous or asynchronous service.
6. End-to-end message auditing, logging and monitoring.

SDG&E believes that it is prudent to implement the EM during this project to reduce the future risk and costs of system change as new technologies emerge over the next 15-20 years and beyond."¹

SDG&E is looking to make MDM the system of record for meter data for all other utility applications and to perform the VEE functions for the meter data coming in, no matter what the source of the meter data. Welch also states in her testimony that:

"A single source of data for AMI related information is essential to the roadmap SDG&E is building to achieve SDG&E operational benefits. It is anticipated that a data warehouse will be a central feature of our new MDMS and act as the source for all other utility applications. Once the data is retrieved through our new AMI technology it will undergo a VEE process designed from SDG&E's business rules and then stored in the AMI repository. The repository will contain new, historical and changed information and act as the original source of meter reads for other utility legacy systems." ²

UtiliPoint has no issue with AMI providers including VEE in their head-end software as an option. In fact, UtiliPoint has found this to be very useful in pilots of technology or dynamic rates. However, head-end software which includes VEE and accepts meter reads from only their own AMI product should not be confused with MDM (by the vendor or utilities.) Itron's MDM, for example, can draw meter data from several different AMR systems.

"The reality is that there is not at this time a one-size-fits-all AMR/AMI solution that can cost-effectively address the varying data collection needs of utilities across all service territories and customer classes," said Philip Mezey, senior vice president of Itron's Software Solutions Group. "That's why it's imperative that a true meter data management system be agnostic to the multiple collection systems that bring the data back. This ability to 'stand-alone' with respect to the collection systems, operate as a single repository for meter data of all types, scale to support large volumes of data, and interface easily with legacy utility systems are the essence of an MDM system's value. If these basic requirements are not met, it's not true meter data management."

For example, one of the functions that will be included in the MDM is framing the billing determinants. SDG&E is planning on offering a critical peak rebate (called "Peak Time Rebate") on a voluntary opt-out basis to residential customers and small commercial and industrial customers (< 20 kW). To bill this rate, the CIS system needs the following: total usage for the billing period and the usage reduction during the critical peak periods, as measured by comparing actual usage to the "PTR Baseline." With these two billing determinants, the CIS system can produce the critical peak rebate bill. The MDM system has to meet scalability requirements of pulling in 1.4 million sets of daily interval reads and 900,000 daily gas reads, and provide to CIS the billing determinants for roughly 70,000 electric accounts and 45,000 gas accounts, and handle all of the other ad hoc queries and other interface requirements. Scaling to this requirement is another reason why some of the functionality currently residing in CIS needs to be transferred to MDM.

SDG&E plans to pursue working with an MDM vendor as opposed to developing their own MDM product. Welch indicated that:

"After evaluating responses from SDG&E's RFP process, SDG&E has determined that there are several third party packages that meet our requirements in the area of MDMS and data integration (i.e.: analysis resulted in the 'buy' decision). SDG&E plans to further question these MDMS companies about their solutions and determine the best fit for our legacy systems and the new AMI network." ⁴

As the relatively new market for MDM develops, it is important for utilities and other energy providers to watch out for CIS systems and AMR head-end systems that have been repackaged as "meter data management." Be sure to ask questions about how the software was developed, what functionality was key in its construction, and the degree to which the software is captive to a single vendor's system. Watch out for those "new and improved" labels that some have slapped onto their existing products.

Anyone who would like to discuss what is and isn't MDM is welcome to join UtiliPoint at the first meeting of AMI MDM on April 24^th and 25^th at Metering Americas in Atlanta. Go to www.AMIMDM.com to learn more. Utilities, vendors, and consultants must pay a small annual fee to cover the costs of the workshop, but the annual fee is waived for regulators and consumer advocacy groups.

¹ Page DW-8, Chapter 10 Information Technology Systems, Prepared Supplemental, Consolidating, Superseding and Replacement Testimony of Dawn Welch, San Diego Gas & Electric Company, Application of San Diego Gas & Electric Company (U-902-E) for Adoption of an Advanced Metering Infrastructure Deployment Scenario and Associated Cost Recovery and Rate Design.

² Ibid, Page DW-6

³ Ibid, Page DW-3

⁴ Ibid, DW-2