ATLANTA, Feb. 6, 2004 -- Indus International Inc., a provider of Service Delivery Management (SDM)™ solutions, announced a new license agreement with the City of Garland, Texas, for an integrated customer information system (CIS)/customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise asset management (EAM) solution.
The license demonstrates the recognition by leading utilities and municipalities of the benefits of a joint CIS/CRM and EAM solution made available by Indus' acquisition of the Global Energy and Utilities Solutions division of SCT Corporation last March. The agreement represents more than $3 million in licenses and services and was signed during Indus' third fiscal quarter.
The City of Garland's electric utility is the third largest utility in Texas, serving more than 75,000 customers. The city also owns and operates water and wastewater treatment services and offers solid waste and recycling services to meet both residential and commercial needs. The city's Customer Service department handles the billing for all these utilities, as well as setting up service for new customers.
In order to meet the growing needs of each of these departments and offer best-in-class customer service, Garland chose to replace an out-dated CIS and billing system with a comprehensive CIS/CRM and EAM solution from Indus. Garland chose the Indus solution in a competitive bid process over offerings from other leading enterprise software vendors.
"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 Randy Welch, director of management information systems at Garland. "When our users saw the Indus solutions demonstrated, they became extremely excited -- not only over the information they would have at their fingertips, but possibly more so over the ease of use and flexibility of user views for greater efficiency. We found that Indus provided the most complete solution from a technology and functionality perspective for both CIS/CRM and EAM demands."
Garland has licensed both the Indus Advantage™ Customer Management Suite, including utility-specific customer relationship management functionality, as well as the Indus PassPort™ solution for enterprise asset management. By implementing a complete solution from a single vendor, the municipality will have a knowledge-based infrastructure in place for greater optimization of key resources.
Furthermore, the integrated system will provide a more effective service management solution, enabling efficient and cost-effective service delivery by integrating and optimizing the process and information flows from the customer call to field service scheduling and dispatching; to asset, inventory and parts management through customer billing. As a result, Garland can achieve improved efficiency and customer satisfaction through real-time optimization of their customer service, asset management and field support functions.
"We are thrilled to welcome the city of Garland into the Indus family," said John Gregg, executive vice president of field operations for Indus. "Clients like Garland will have a step up in the industry by implementing industry-specific functionality enabling real-time responsiveness to action requests from the customer to the plant. The two solutions together will offer greater optimization of assets and result in higher return on investment. With the Garland license, it is obvious that 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."
"The city realized that to partner with Indus really meant to benefit from both the wisdom of the years of experience in implementation history at Indus as well as the industry vision that comes from expertise in the market," said Bill Dollar, city manager of Garland, TX. "The City of Garland employees are dedicated to providing excellent service to their customers. This combination of experience and vision makes Indus solutions highly desirable in today's economy."
About Garland, TX
Garland, Texas, population 221,000, offers the atmosphere of a small town plus all the conveniences of a larger metropolitan city. Located 15 miles northeast of downtown Dallas, Garland is the second largest City in Dallas County, the 10th largest city in Texas and the 83rd largest in the United States - a self-sustaining city covering 57 square miles.
About Indus International
Indus is a provider of Service Delivery Management (SDM) solutions, which help clients in a broad array of industries optimize the management of their customers, workforce, spare parts inventory, tools and documentation in order to maximize performance and customer satisfaction while achieving significant cost savings. Indus customer, asset and workforce 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 solutions have been purchased by more than 400 companies in more than 40 countries, representing diverse industries -- including manufacturing, utilities, telecommunications, government, education, transportation, facilities and property management, consumer packaged goods and more. For more information, visit http://www.indus.com.
