ATLANTA, July 22, 2003 - Indus International Inc., a provider of customer and asset management solutions, announced a new license agreement with Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility (AWWU), the largest water and wastewater utility in Alaska.
AWWU chose the Advantage Customer Management Suite including utility-specific customer relationship management functionality as the first step in an aggressive initiative to provide world-class customer service to its 51,600 water and wastewater customers. The agreement represents more than $2.4 million dollars in licenses and services and continues Indus' market-leading momentum in winning more contracts in North America than any other vendor in 2002.
AWWU chose the Indus solution in a highly competitive bid over offerings from leading ERP vendors, such as Peoplesoft, to replace AWWU's antiquated mainframe-based CIS and billing system. AWWU recognized the urgent need to install newer, more advanced technology that is less expensive to maintain and more flexible in order to adapt to evolving technology and customer expectations.
"When we began our search for a CIS/CRM vendor, we were primarily concerned with finding the vendor with the right technology and functionality to elevate our users to the highest level of customer service available in the industry," said Mark Premo, general manager for AWWU.
"We found that Indus provided the most complete solution from a technology and functionality perspective. Indus' Banner CIS and the complete Advantage Customer Management Suite was the most robust solution and most closely fit our business environment and technological vision. Therefore, we are confident that the Advantage Suite will help us to be able to achieve our operational excellence goals. All of these facts made Indus the best choice in terms of functionality, cost effectiveness and technology."
"The industry is responding tremendously to our continued commitment to excellence, both from an operational or 'process-centric' perspective and from a customer satisfaction perspective," said John Gregg, president of Indus Utility Systems. "As a result, clients like Anchorage Water and Wastewater are selecting Indus because our solutions are the only ones that provide the flexible, robust functionality required by today's utilities. Progressive companies like AWWU are adept at leveraging advanced technology to improve their business, and what they have found is that the Advantage Customer Management Suite is the most complete utility-specific CIS/CRM solution available today. This confirms Indus' position of leading the industry in providing advanced customer management solutions to utilities, as recognized by research such as that conducted by Chartwell Research1 and bolstered by recent wins at progressive companies like ONEOK."
Like all Indus offerings, the Indus Advantage CMS Suite is the result of acute industry vision focused around helping customers achieve operational excellence. The ActionPoint Management capabilities of Indus solutions allow customers to quickly respond to customer needs through ready access to key knowledge where it matters most - at key decision-making points in the workflow.
As a result of Indus' ActionPoint Management vision, customers can achieve real-time responsiveness to action requests from the customer to the plant, enabling Indus clients to vastly improve their responsiveness, accuracy, and customer satisfaction, thereby achieving world-class performance at breakthrough cost savings.
About AWWU
Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility is the largest water and wastewater utility in Alaska serving Anchorage, Chugiak-Eagle River, Peters Creek, Eklutna and Girdwood. The Utility collects water from two major surface watersheds, Eklutna Lake and Ship Creek, and several deep underground wells. AWWU has more than 52,000 water customer accounts, serving approximately 216,800 residents.
About Indus International
Indus International provides value to its clients by delivering ActionPoint Management, a business improvement program which delivers all the information needed by an end user to make the best decision possible at the point where that decision is made.
Indus asset and customer management software products, professional services and hosted service offerings improve our clients' profitability by reducing costs, increasing capacity and competitiveness, improving service to their customers, facilitating billing for services and ensuring regulatory compliance.
Indus asset management solutions are used by more than 300,000 end users in more than 40 countries and diverse industries -- including manufacturing, utilities, telecommunications, government, education, transportation, facilities and property management, consumer packaged goods and more.
And, Indus customer management products and services are used by nearly 200 customers to support more than 70 million utility accounts worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.indus.com.
1 "The Chartwell Report on CIS Installations in North America 2003," Chartwell Research, May 2003.
