Citizens Energy Group is a broad-based utility service company that provides natural gas, thermal energy, water and wastewater services to about 900,000 people and thousands of businesses in the Indianapolis area.
Founded in 1887 as Consumers Gas Trust, a public charitable trust, the company originally drew natural gas from local production fields for distribution to customers.
Centric Consulting and Citizens started working together in 2018 when Citizens selected Centric as a support and maintenance provider for their Oracle Work and Asset Management (WAM) system. There was a large backlog of software and process break-fix tickets and enhancements that our functional and technical expertise addressed in a timely manner. We continue to provide Oracle WAM-related services on an annual support agreement basis.
In early 2019, our role expanded to provide Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) related services. This included bug fixes, minor functional enhancements, reporting platform migrations and business process consulting services related to HR, Payroll and Supply Chain. We continue to provide Oracle EBS-related support and enhancement services.
By October 2019, Citizens selected Centric as a Microsoft 365 service provider to help their employee experience. We helped Citizens determine the rollout and governance model for migrating from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Together we planned and delivered an on-premises SharePoint migration to SharePoint Online for over 1,500 sites and associated workflows.
We also modernized 62 SharePoint Online sites, led the custom development of several departmental applications leveraging the Microsoft Power Platform and led the development of an adoption and change management strategy for these initiatives. These Microsoft 365-related projects spanned several years, and we continue to provide Microsoft 365 services under an annual Managed Services model.
In early 2020, we helped Citizens pilot a robotic process automation (RPA) project, which resulted in establishing a strategic RPA program built on the UiPath RPA platform. We guided Citizens’ leadership to establish this RPA program by putting in place processes, tools and governance to effectively develop and deploy RPA bots in a streamlined fashion.
We provide US-based architects, program management expertise, as well as RPA design and development resources from our Centric India team through its offshore development center based in Gurgaon, India. We continue to provide RPA-related services, having released 12 bots into production. Many of these automations provide utility solution-specific functionality, both customer facing and internal (for example, helping automate Oracle C2M customer information system-related processes).
As part of our role in providing services to numerous Citizens’ lines of business, Centric has also provided services in the areas of Salesforce CRM enhancement and support, Application Portfolio Management, Microsoft Server Security and Oracle Primavera Unifier BI Publisher reporting.
What began as an engagement to deliver work and asset management system improvements has evolved into a series of projects that have positioned Citizens for long-term, sustainable growth.
In addition to the technical knowledge and process improvement Citizens has gained, Centric’s continuing relationship with the utility demonstrates the strength of our client-focused approach. Many of our consultants are now as much a part of Citizens’ workplace as the Citizens employees themselves. We help them anticipate needs, identify problems and find solutions. The work we have performed for Citizens now serves as a model for other companies in the energy and utility sector that leverage professional services for business transformation.
“It has been a pleasure to work with everyone that we have met at Citizens. Our cultures and approach to working together as partners, rather than a rigid client and vendor relationship, have resulted in a mutually beneficial relationship that continues to create business value for both firms. We look forward to working together and producing meaningful results for years to come,” said Michael Murphy, our Energy & Utilities Industry Lead.
According to Abed Darwish, Director of IT Business Solutions at Citizens Energy Group, “With their energy and utilities industry expertise, wide range of capabilities and local delivery support, Centric has become a trusted partner that consistently delivers value to Citizens Energy Group.”
