Advanced Control Systems Partners with Envox 6

WESTBOROUGH, Mass. - Advanced Control Systems (ACS) partnered with Envox Worldwide's Envox 6 to create interactive voice response (IVR) and call center management solutions for its electric, gas and water utility customers.  ACS, a privately-owned provider of utility information systems, will provide the Envox-based voice solutions to its customers as additional modules for PRISM, the company's outage management system that is currently being used by more than 200 utilities worldwide. 

Envox 6 is a standards-based communications development platform with integrated application development and management components for creating voice solutions. Envox 6 provides a bridge between legacy systems and new voice solutions, allowing customers to leverage prior investments in hardware, software, and solution development. Using Envox 6, developers can create a range of voice solutions with support for new standards and emerging technologies, including VoiceXML, speech recognition, VoIP and Web services.

ACS has leveraged Envox 6's architecture and development capabilities to create the new IVR solutions, and integrate them with PRISM's administrative interfaces, databases, and agent management systems.  These Envox-based IVR solutions will help utility companies manage customer calls and crew dispatches when service disruptions occur.  

According to Cynthia Moore, vice president of research, Gartner, "Utilities are investing in industry-specific applications that improve business processes in their quest to meet rising customer expectations, excel in increasingly volatile markets and create an expected shareholder return in an uncertain regulatory environment." 

ACS's crew call-out solution creates field crews by contacting workers with the appropriate job skills to respond to after-hours outages.  They also offer an outage reporting solution that enables the utilities to log service disruption calls from customers and then keep them informed about known problems.  This solution can also be configured to notify customers once service has been restored.  

The first Outage Management System solution featuring the Envox-based IVR module is currently being tested in the City of Anaheim and is expected to go live in late 2005.