LODESTAR
LODESTAR Offers Component-Based Software Solutions LODESTAR® Corporation has been a leading provider of software applications for the utilities industry since 1978. LODESTAR’s complete suite of applications is powerful enough to meet the processing demands of today, yet maintains the flexibility necessary to adjust to the business changes of tomorrow.
LODESTAR Customer Choice Suite The world’s most flexible, scalable, and proven software to facilitate Customer Choice in the new energy marketplace: • Out-of-the-box completely integrated solution • Seamless front- and back-office integration • Flexible architecture to meet the needs of today and the future • Designed to exceed the performance, reliability, availability, and scalability requirements of our most discerning customers • Fully backed by LODESTAR’s premier Customer Service Group LODESTAR Customer Choice Suite™ was developed to help energy service providers, distribution companies, and energy customers meet the dynamic challenges posed by a volatile deregulated energy market.
BillingExpert LODESTAR’s flagship billing engine is second to none in the utility industry. BillingExpert® provides utilities with the ability to meet the challenging demands of complex billing. Due to growing complexity and continuous changes affecting the commodity market, utilities are struggling to meet these demands. Customers demand more complex and accurate pricing plans as well as the underlying data. Technological advances increase the availability of more detailed consumption data, allowing the creation of more complex pricing plans. Commodity markets have become more volatile, creating a need for innovative products, and maximizing profits for providers while passing cost savings on to consumers.
Financial Management Extension A fully functional integrated accounting solution to enhance the LODESTAR CCS .
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Financial Management Extension™ is a solution for an integrated accounting solution for our flagship billing product, BillingExpert. Financial Management Extension delivers a fully functional, completely integrated, accounting package to the LODESTAR CCS™. Financial Management Extension provides your financial organization the ability to track accounts receivable, revenue, and general ledger information for all transactions that take place within the LODESTAR CCS. As an extension to BillingExpert, Financial Management Extension stores both the billing and financial data within the same database. This reduces redundancy and data integrity issues between billing and financial packages. For those customers requiring integration with external accounting packages, it can be seamlessly integrated with virtually any accounting package.
Collections Management Extension Collection management that accelerates the revenue cycle. Collections Management Extension™ offers unified and coherent management of all your collection operations. Collection management is not an isolated activity. Collections are an integral part of your finances and your customer relationships. Collections Management Extension is tightly integrated with LODESTAR’s Financial Management Extension and other CCS applications. As a complete solution Collections Management Extension brings together the processes, events, and activities that automate the tracking and management of receivables and account aging. When accounts show signs of aging, you need to respond in a way that expedites positive cash flow yet is sensitive to the dynamics of each account.
PricingExpert On-the-spot pricing analysis and proposals for today’s competitive sales force. PricingExpert® provides utilities with the ability to quickly identify and qualify customers while minimizing their exposure to the inherent risks of the rapidly deregulated marketplace. In today’s market, utilities are challenged with integrating a system that
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can provide key pricing, risk management, and billing all in one application. The situation is further complicated by the complex products and services that customers demand from their suppliers. A highly configurable pricing engine and a dynamic quoting mechanism are required to support this infrastructure. PricingExpert helps meet these challenges with price-personalized load profiles using multiple pricing mechanisms and indices. Data can be imported from various systems such as risk management, forecasting, or energy trading desks.
RateExpert Rate and pricing design for today’s marketplace. RateExpert® provides utilities with the ability to meet the challenging demands of complex rate and pricing design. Rate and pricing design have become critical utility functions based on complex related variables, vast quantities of data and documentation, and the coordinated efforts of people from numerous departments. Before RateExpert, most utilities had to manually develop the tools required for rate design and analysis. Unfortunately, these legacy applications were difficult to modify and required time-consuming manual intervention to modify. RateExpert improves accuracy and productivity with a set of integrated tools in an easy-to-use package. Energy providers can quickly respond to rate and price changes that affect the fair allocation of resources as well as competitive pricing required to retain customers and earnings stability.
LODESTAR Profile and Settlement System The solution for cost-effective load estimation, reconciliation, and settlement. LODESTAR Profile and Settlement System™ provides utilities with the solution to the settlement challenges of the increasingly competitive deregulated energy market. “Open access” and “Customer Choice” are making it possible for all entities in the market to choose with whom they will do business. Customers can decide which Energy Service Provider (ESP) to purchase their energy, while ESPs can select which
transmission and distribution (T&D) or generation company will schedule their energy. Companies need the capability and flexibility to perform accurate and efficient load forecasting, as well as load and financial settlement. LPSS provides the tools to validate, edit, and estimate load data, aggregate it to a very large scale, and perform load settlements accurately and quickly.
C/S LodeStar The Load Research standard for more than 20 years. Client/Server (C/S) LodeStar® is the most robust and well-known load research system available today. It provides a cost effective load research solution that helps companies meet
deregulated energy marketplace is fast and reliable transaction interchange between organizations and enterprise systems. LODESTAR Transaction Management Hub™ is specifically built to enable transactions between energy market par ticipants. LTMH employs JMS (Java Message Ser vice) to facilitate easy integration with any JMS-compliant messaging environment such as SeeBeyond, Tibco, or MQSeries without locking you into a proprietar y environment messaging or Enterprise Application Integration. Unlike many EDI-based solutions, LTMH employs XML that enables easy linkage of individual transactions into complete processes. LTMH will enable your company to conduct
Solution Provider
www.lodestarcorp.com
CONTACT INFORMATION Chris Hamilos Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Patricia Mansfield Senior VP, Global Sales and Marketing Steve Doroff Senior VP, Strategic Product Initiative Dean Vassilou Senior VP, Product Management CK Yau Senior VP, Software Development Trevor Martin Senior VP, Professional Services and U.K. Operations
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LODESTAR Corporation Headquarters Two Corporation Way Peabody, MA 01960-7918 Toll-free 888.225.1293 Phone 978.532.4555
LODESTAR Customer-Choice Suite
their changing business needs as they restructure and compete in an open, deregulated marketplace. The software contains three subsystems for Sampling, Data Management, and Data Analysis. The flexible architecture and friendly graphical user inter face provide users with a system that is easy to learn and use. Robust processing power with the flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions packaged into a cost-effective solution makes C/S LodeStar the first choice for Load Research.
LODESTAR Transaction Management Hub Fast and reliable transaction interchange between organizations and enterprise systems. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing today’s
millions of transactions everyday in a dozen different categories from enrollments to billing to account changes to supplier payments.
LODESTAR Customer Portal Providing customers and the energy industry with secure Web access to their data. LODESTAR has developed the LODESTAR Customer Por tal™ to automate Web access to customer data through a secure Web por tal. It allows a reduction in costs by providing Web access to account information and inter val usage data without tying up customer ser vice or IT staff. You will be able to provide better customer ser vice by allowing customers to per form account management of their accounts at their own schedule, based on their own needs. ■
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LODESTAR Corporation JPMorgan Case Tower 600 Travis Street Suite 6850 Houston, TX 77002-3007 Phone 713.292.2500 LODESTAR Solutions Limited Abbey House 25 Clarendon Road Redhill, Surrey RH1 1QZ United Kingdom Phone +44.1737.852266 BUSINESS CONTACT
Patricia Mansfield
[email protected]
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