Oracle Customer Success—City of Lakeland

City of Lakeland Saves an Estimated US$2.5 Million Data in Infrastructure Costs Over Five Years While Gaining Customer Satisfaction and Staff Productivity

By taking advantage of Oracle Exadata Database Machine’s stability and high performance, we reduced application-response time, cut overnight billing-run time, and improved staff productivity and customer satisfaction.

— Laz Martinez, Systems and Programming Manager, City of Lakeland

The City of Lakeland, incorporated on January 1, 1885, is a government municipality located midway between Tampa and Orlando along Interstate 4 in Polk County, Florida. Its government delivers services, such as public safety (police and fire); parks and recreation; community development; and public works to a more than 97,000 citizens across 74 square miles. The city also operates the Lakeland Linder Regional Airport and provides electric utility services to more than 100,000 residential accounts and 11,000 commercial accounts through Lakeland Electric. It also delivers water utility services to more than 52,000 accounts through its water and waste water department.

Business Challenge

Ensure the city’s utility billing application can reach its full potential to improve transaction response times and accelerate overnight billing runs
Reduce time needed to complete batch processing tasks for utility customers

Optimize IT budgets, staff resources, and assets, including software licenses
Ensure database scalability as well as high availability and reliability to support the city’s utility e-services portal

Deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Enterprise Manager and created a highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective data infrastructure to support many of the city’s most critical applications, including Lakeland Electric’s meter-data management system that supports smart-grid initiatives
Consolidated eight databases—including an enterprise resource planning system, geographic information system, and utility billing system—onto a single machine, avoiding hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual license support costs, and saving more than US$2.5 million for the system’s total cost of ownership over five years

Replaced disparate constituent-facing web portals with unified e-services functionality, including customer self-service for account changes and general information; online payments and prepayments; and consumption history and metrics for more than 100,000 residential customers—saving US$314,418 over five years through consolidation
Completed overnight electric utility billing runs 6x faster—billing 6,917 accounts at 259 accounts per minute—by enabling Lakeland Electric’s customer-billing solution to reach its full potential
Lowered the total window for batch processing, including generating collections information, from between five-to-seven hours to less than one hour (from 275 events per minute to 1,454 per minute)
Enabled City of Lakeland to process allowable earnings with a pension via Oracle’s PeopleSoft applications in 18 minutes versus the 90 minutes it took previously
Accelerated report creation, running most reports in half the time of the legacy environment
Reduced batch run times by more than 80%
Cut central processing unit (CPU) use rates by six CPUs to consuming less than 3 cores of the available 24 processor cores, ensuring applications will continue to perform well as the city grows
Used Oracle Platinum Services to provide continuous system monitoring, ensure optimal performance, benefit from faster upgrades, and maximize return on investment
Worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services to tune Oracle Exadata to ensure optimal performance through standard installation; hardware, network, and operating system validation; storage server, log-in, default database configuration; and postinstallation verification

After evaluating four platforms—including HP and IBM servers—we selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine because it provides us with a single source for hardware, software, and storage, and a single point of accountability—driving faster issue resolution. We can now run eight separate applications, all with unique requirements, seamlessly and efficiently, and we have the scalability needed to support future growth requirements. We view Oracle as a strategic partner.

— Laz Martinez, Systems and Programming Manager, City of Lakeland

Execution

“Our infrastructure teams (networks and database administrators) took delivery of Oracle Exadata Database Machine in May 2012, and they had it completely installed and configured—working with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services—by August 2012,” said Jeff Michel, database administrator, City of Lakeland.

About City of Lakeland

Headquarters

Polk, Florida, United States

Employees

Published: Jul 15, 2014

Oracle Customer Success—City of Lakeland

City of Lakeland Saves an Estimated US$2.5 Million Data in Infrastructure Costs Over Five Years While Gaining Customer Satisfaction and Staff Productivity

Business Challenge

Results

Execution

About City of Lakeland

Headquarters

Polk, Florida, United States

Employees

2,300

Partners

Oracle Solutions Used