The South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority has completed a full-stack transformation of its customer information and contact-center systems, ripping out a heavily customized SAP-based billing stack and replacing it with UMAX on Microsoft Dynamics 365 plus a first-party contact-center and Copilot-enabled automation layer — a move that replaced multiple siloed systems in a single “big bang” rollout and delivered measurable reductions in manual work, billing errors, and time-to-action across collections, meter reads and field operations.
The Regional Water Authority (RWA) serves roughly 430,000+ customers across 15 municipalities in south-central Connecticut, operating multiple treatment plants and a large distribution network. Public-facing programs such as PipeSafe and WellSafe extend its offerings beyond commodity water delivery into protection programs and ancillary services. The utility’s legacy billing and customer information system dated back to 2009 and had been heavily customized, creating high maintenance costs, slow product onboarding, fragmented data, and extensive manual work for customer service and collections.
RWA chose full replacement over incremental patching, partnering with Itineris and deploying UMAX, a utility-focused CIS implemented on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. The rollout consolidated the CIS, billing engine, IVR, self-service portal and agent desktop into a single platform that also includes Dynamics 365 Customer Service / Contact Center, Customer Insights – Journeys, Power Virtual Agents, Power BI and Microsoft Copilot Studio for agent assistance and conversational automation. Itineris positions UMAX as a Dynamics-native, meter-to-cash focused solution purpose-built for utilities.
However, the decision carries long-term governance and cost responsibilities. Utilities are high-trust, regulated services; any automation that touches billing, payments or account balances must be governed, auditable, and conservative in scope. The pragmatic path is incremental AI adoption, strong contractual guardrails (portability, predictable AI costs and SLAs), and rigorous post-deployment validation of vendor-reported claims.
For utilities weighing the trade-offs, RWA’s case provides a useful blueprint: design a single data plane, focus automation on repeatable high-volume tasks first, require explicit AI governance, and plan for an ongoing observability-led operations model that ties telemetry to continuous improvements. The Microsoft + Itineris UMAX pattern is a credible technical option for utilities ready to modernize meter-to-cash and customer service while keeping a path for future innovation — but success depends on the strength of governance, procurement rigor, and the discipline to validate claimed gains over time.
RWA’s modernization demonstrates that utilities can combine domain-specific CIS capabilities with a modern contact center and Copilot-driven automation to reduce manual workload and enable product and service innovation — provided the deployment is accompanied by strong governance, realistic cost modeling, and a commitment to measure outcomes objectively over the long term.
Source: Microsoft Regional Water Authority taps into transformation and automation with Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Customer Stories
Background / Overview
The Regional Water Authority (RWA) serves roughly 430,000+ customers across 15 municipalities in south-central Connecticut, operating multiple treatment plants and a large distribution network. Public-facing programs such as PipeSafe and WellSafe extend its offerings beyond commodity water delivery into protection programs and ancillary services. The utility’s legacy billing and customer information system dated back to 2009 and had been heavily customized, creating high maintenance costs, slow product onboarding, fragmented data, and extensive manual work for customer service and collections. RWA chose full replacement over incremental patching, partnering with Itineris and deploying UMAX, a utility-focused CIS implemented on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. The rollout consolidated the CIS, billing engine, IVR, self-service portal and agent desktop into a single platform that also includes Dynamics 365 Customer Service / Contact Center, Customer Insights – Journeys, Power Virtual Agents, Power BI and Microsoft Copilot Studio for agent assistance and conversational automation. Itineris positions UMAX as a Dynamics-native, meter-to-cash focused solution purpose-built for utilities.
What changed — the technical anatomy
A single data plane and a unified agent surface
- RWA consolidated multiple systems into a single database and UI using Dynamics 365 and UMAX as the canonical meter-to-cash and customer engagement plane.
- Agents now work in a single console that surfaces near-real-time reads, billing and payment histories, case state, and service orders without jumping between systems.
Meter-to-cash and AMI integration
- RWA already had Advance Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in the field, but the legacy CIS prevented full integration into meter-to-cash workflows. With UMAX and Dynamics, near-real-time reads are available in the contact center, and field technicians use one solution for meter reads and service updates — reducing processing time and system friction. The Itineris UMAX offering explicitly supports meter-to-bill conversion and field & customer workflows.
Contact center modernization and Copilot
- Dynamics 365 Contact Center (Copilot-first) provides transcription, summarization, intelligent routing and agent assist. RWA deployed Copilot Studio and a Copilot chatbot to handle simple customer queries (billing amount, last payment), plus agent-facing summarization and transcription to speed interactions and reduce after-call work. Microsoft’s product guidance highlights these exact capabilities for contact centers.
Measured operational outcomes reported by RWA
RWA’s internal reporting and the published case narrative highlight several concrete operational improvements following the rollout:- Automation and process optimization eliminated the majority of previously erroneous bills — RWA reported historically around 14,000 erroneous bills per year and says billing errors have been largely eliminated after automation. (This is an RWA-reported figure; independent third‑party validation is not publicly provided in the materials reviewed, so treat the exact numeric claim as internal reporting rather than an audited metric.)
- Customer Service efficiency: automation saved customer support employees approximately 10 hours per week, enabling them to automate reporting and tackle higher-value tasks. One analyst reported increased capacity and elimination of repetitive manual tasks.
- Collections & disconnection processing: the time to identify accounts for disconnection dropped from roughly 30 hours per week to seven hours per week — driven by automated collections notices and service-order automation.
- Field & meter reading efficiency: technicians now use a single solution to capture meter reads and update statuses; near-real-time reads appear in the Contact Center, negating agent system-hopping.
- Reduced truck rolls: automation of payment and service order flows allowed technicians to receive real-time notifications (for example, when a scheduled shutoff is paid online), reducing unnecessary site visits and associated costs.
Why RWA chose Dynamics 365 + UMAX
RWA’s selection rationale is classic Microsoft-stack logic combined with domain-focused CIS requirements:- Utility-specific functionality: UMAX is designed for utilities and supports meter-to-cash, field workflows and rate complexity that a generic CRM/ERP wouldn’t provide out of the box. Itineris markets UMAX as a utilities specialist solution built on Dynamics 365.
- Unified Microsoft ecosystem: choosing Dynamics 365 delivered native connectivity to Copilot, Power Platform, Power BI and other Microsoft services — reducing integration scope and supporting regular platform updates without disruptive upgrades. This first-party alignment simplifies identity, security and governance when integrated with Azure and Microsoft Entra.
- Low-code/no-code flexibility: the Power Platform and Copilot Studio provide business users with adaptable automation levers and conversational behaviour authoring without heavy code changes, lowering future change costs and accelerating feature delivery.
- Single release strategy: RWA performed a “big bang” replacement to remove technical debt quickly and align all customer-facing functions onto one platform, accepting the execution risk in exchange for consolidated benefits.
Strengths: what worked well and why
1) Data unification and operational visibility
Consolidating CIS, billing, contact center and field updates into a single data model removed silos and enabled operational dashboards, real-time telemetry and single‑pane agent experiences. That immediate context is one of the largest levers for first-contact resolution improvements. Evidence from Microsoft and partner deployments shows observability and telemetry are decisive for continuous improvement programs.2) Automation that touches high-value processes
Automating collections, service-order updates and parts of meter-to-cash reduces both human error and repetitive work. RWA’s reported elimination of most erroneous bills and reduced disconnection processing time are concrete ROI levers, and other Dynamics + Copilot deployments have shown similar efficiency gains when automation is applied conservatively and with visibility.3) Modern contact center features at scale
By adopting Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Microsoft Copilot Studio, RWA took advantage of built-in transcription, summarization and intelligent routing—features that materially reduce wrap-up work and speed agent onboarding. Microsoft’s Copilot-first contact center documentation and case briefs show consistent operational improvements when these capabilities are used to augment agents.4) Faster feature delivery through low-code
Power Platform and Copilot Studio allow business users to iterate workflows and conversational scripts without long development cycles. For utilities that must adapt rate structures, add programs (like PipeSafe or WellSafe), or change outage-level communications, this agility is strategically valuable.Risks, caveats and governance concerns
No transformation is without trade-offs. The RWA case demonstrates strong upside but also surfaces structural risks that any utility should consider carefully.Vendor lock-in and long-term cost profile
Moving a full meter-to-cash stack onto a Dynamics-native CIS like UMAX increases dependency on the Microsoft ecosystem and on the implementation partner (Itineris in this case). That concentration reduces integration friction but raises switching costs, licensing exposure and architectural coupling. Procurement and contract teams must explicitly negotiate data portability, SLAs for upgrades and AI‑specific performance commitments. Industry guidance emphasises three‑year TCO modeling (including AI inference costs and Azure consumption) for Copilot-enabled contact centers to surface potential cost spikes.Generative AI safety and hallucination risk
Copilot agents and chatbots significantly improve agent productivity but carry the risk of hallucination — confidently generated but incorrect responses. For water utilities, wrong billing advice or inaccurate account balances can have regulatory and reputational consequences. Best practice is to:- Restrict Copilot to grounded, curated knowledge sources for user-facing answers,
- Enforce provenance and “source-of-truth” display in agent UI,
- Keep sensitive actions (rate changes, debt forgiveness) behind human approvals. Microsoft guidance and technical patterns encourage clear hand-offs and curated knowledge sources to reduce these risks.
Data protection, residency and auditability
Contact centers produce voice, transcription and PII-laden records. Integrating Copilot agents with CRM data increases attack surface and raises retention and residency questions when the service spans jurisdictions. Utilities must maintain auditable trails for both data accessed during inference and for changes Copilot suggests or executes. This is especially true for public/quasi‑public utilities operating under regulatory oversight.Change management and hidden process debt
A “big bang” rollout removes legacy constraints quickly but concentrates change risk: user adoption, training, and incomplete migration of edge-case billing rules can cause initial disruption. RWA’s rollout appears successful, but other organizations have seen vendor-reported early gains that require longitudinal validation to be trusted fully. Vendor-reported metrics should be validated against independent baselines and operational telemetry for at least 6–12 months post-launch.Practical guidance for utilities considering a similar path
- Map the meter-to-cash data model first.
- Build canonical schemas for accounts, meters, reads, tariffs and service orders so that integrations (AMI, field apps, payment gateways) layer cleanly into Dataverse or the chosen data plane.
- Stage Copilot adoption conservatively.
- Start with agent-assist (summaries, suggested replies), then add constrained chatbots for simple queries. Keep financial or legally-sensitive operations behind human confirmation.
- Demand audit-grade AI SLAs.
- Negotiate model performance windows, rollback procedures, retraining cadence, and cost caps for heavy inference loads.
- Require portability and exit plans.
- Contracts should include exportable, documented data schemas, and a migration playbook for unbundling from proprietary connectors.
- Run an extended pilots-and-measure phase.
- Validate vendor-reported KPIs with independent telemetry for at least 6 months; focus on error rates (billing, meter reads), first-contact resolution, agent handle time and field cost metrics (truck rolls, time-to-service).
- Secure governance for low-code assets.
- Treat Power Apps, Power Automate and Copilot Studio assets like code: version control, test automation, and an admin approval workflow are essential to avoid sprawl and fragile processes.
What to watch next: practical signals of success
- Sustained error reduction: confirm that lower billing error counts persist beyond the initial stabilization window and aren’t simply a short-term effect of migration cleanup.
- Informatics maturity: look for consistent, automated telemetry that ties agent behaviour, contact volumes and billing anomalies into actionable dashboards.
- Cost stability for AI features: monitor Copilot usage and Azure inference costs, especially for voice and high-volume chat scenarios.
- Governance artifacts: watch for published playbooks or audit trails for how Copilot agents are authored, approved and monitored — a strong sign of production-grade AI governance. Evidence from other Microsoft deployments highlights the centrality of observability and governance to durable success.
Final analysis — the balance sheet
RWA’s approach — replacing a brittle, heavily customized SAP-based CIS with a purpose-built utility CIS on the Microsoft stack — is emblematic of the modern choice for regulated utilities: trade some vendor concentration for measurable agility, observation, and AI-enabled productivity gains. The reported outcomes (reduced billing errors, significant agent-time savings, faster collections processing and fewer unnecessary truck rolls) are exactly the types of operational levers that fund digital transformation.However, the decision carries long-term governance and cost responsibilities. Utilities are high-trust, regulated services; any automation that touches billing, payments or account balances must be governed, auditable, and conservative in scope. The pragmatic path is incremental AI adoption, strong contractual guardrails (portability, predictable AI costs and SLAs), and rigorous post-deployment validation of vendor-reported claims.
For utilities weighing the trade-offs, RWA’s case provides a useful blueprint: design a single data plane, focus automation on repeatable high-volume tasks first, require explicit AI governance, and plan for an ongoing observability-led operations model that ties telemetry to continuous improvements. The Microsoft + Itineris UMAX pattern is a credible technical option for utilities ready to modernize meter-to-cash and customer service while keeping a path for future innovation — but success depends on the strength of governance, procurement rigor, and the discipline to validate claimed gains over time.
RWA’s modernization demonstrates that utilities can combine domain-specific CIS capabilities with a modern contact center and Copilot-driven automation to reduce manual workload and enable product and service innovation — provided the deployment is accompanied by strong governance, realistic cost modeling, and a commitment to measure outcomes objectively over the long term.
Source: Microsoft Regional Water Authority taps into transformation and automation with Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Customer Stories
