Quality Innovative JD Edwards™ Solutions
Software Development ● EnterpriseOne Enhancements ● Developer Tools ● Consulting Tools
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Who is QI Systems, Inc.?
A: Quality Innovative Systems, Inc. is a software development company dedicated to providing utility customer service and utility billing and enhanced real estate property management systems that are built to run inside Qracle’s® JD Edwards® EnterpriseOne®.
Q: Does QI Systems provide other services for EnterpriseOne?
A: Yes. We are veterans of JD Edwards. Our staff has over 60 years of combined experience providing consulting services, sales, implementations, custom development, and migrations. See JDE Services tab for more information.
Q: I hear QI Systems’ President worked on the original utility billing modules back in the late 90’s for JD Edwards. Is this really true?
A: Yes. Donnie Law has over 12 years experience in the utilities industry specializing in JDE utility billing systems. He was an independent consultant who not only helped develop parts of the system, but also helped implement many of JDE’s original utility customers.
Q: Is QI Systems associated in anyway with the AMX International’s Utiligy 360™ Utility Billing software product?
A: No. While it is true that Donnie worked for AMX International for almost 10 years helping them design their product, QI UBSReady™ is in no way shape or form associated with Utiligy 360. QI UBSReady™ is a completely different product built independently of AMX. AMX is considered one of a few utility customer service and billing competitors.
Q: What makes QI UBSReady different from other customer service and utility billing solutions for JDE EnterpriseOne.
A: There is a huge competitive advantage to using QI UBSReady. For one, QI USBReady has our patent pending and trademarked technology called the Flexible Calculation Module™ (QI FCM™). Basically, QI FCM is built inside the EnterpriseOne toolset and takes advantage of all the existing modules that reside within the EnterpriseOne system. This allows our customers to leverage their existing investment in JDE and for little cost and a fast implementation – usually within 90 days or less.
Q: What’s the QI UBSReady acronym stand for?
A: Good question. It really shows how different we are from our competitors. UBSReady stands for QI Systems immediately makes your existing EnterpriseOne solution “Utility Billing System Ready”. So with little effort and time your commitment to JDE E1, which likely cost you lots of pretty pennies, is transformed to do all the customer service and billing functions needed to take great care of your utility customers and ensure a short ROI on your total cost of ownership. To be blunt, we’re the common sense solution because we are basically EnterpriseOne.
Q: What’s QI PM+™ do for real estate property management companies? A: QI PM+ is a software productivity enhancement to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne's Real Estate Module. It allows customers to better manage tenant/resident accounts through Power Forms and provides comprehensive billing capabilities for all CAM charges, real time utilities, specials charges, service fees, late & finance fees, and more. If you need to bill it to tenants/residents, QI PM+ can make it happen.
Q: Can you do work outside of the United States? A: Yes. We have done work for customers in Canada, Mexico, Africa, Newfoundland, Guam, and the Middle East.
Q: How can QI Systems make my CSR Managers and representative happy by being able to manage our utility customer’s needs on-the-fly – like looking up accounts, setting up new customers, disconnecting customers, scheduling work orders etc…?
A: QI UBSReady™ makes a CSR’s life wonderful. Our user interface screen, that’s right you heard me correctly, one grid formatted screen has all the information a CSR need on it to take care of 99% of all needs or requests a customer has. In fact, we have on-line help tutorials and even instant active training videos loaded ready to run at anytime a new CSR needs help taking care of a customer.
Q: Training videos? What’s this do for me as the CSR Manager or VP of Customer Service?
A: Basically our instant active training videos built inside the Customer Control Center screen saves you training time, money, resources, and makes your new or veteran CSR’s look totally professional. Training new CSR usually takes a couple of weeks. Our solution allows a new CSR to be up and running taking care of your customers within 2 to 3 days. You know your cost structure to train one new CSR. What’s this feature going to do for you over the next 3 years in overall savings?
Q: The billing process has always been a major challenge for most utility billing systems. What can you do with your solution to make this process more accurate and faster?
A: That’s an easy one. We utilize the power of several of the existing JDE’s E1 billing modules to produce fast and accurate billing. You can send a single bill, rebill, run bills in batch, or bill in time intervals. Whatever the choice, we’re fast and accurate.
Q: Ok, bottom-line. What’s QI UBSReady™ going to cost me?
A: Ah, the magic question. The answer is not what you’re accustomed to when looking at utility customer service and billing systems. You see you already own EnterpriseOne so your already 80% there. Add our 20% and we’ll make your E1 investment utility billing ready in less than 90 days. No new hardward, no additional IT staff, no selection consultants, and save thousands on the procurement process since you already bought EnterpriseOne. Add our Project in E1 and the ROI speaks for itself. Plus, we’re willing to work with you on your budget and timeframe. Heck, we’ll even allow you to pay us a monthly license fee for the life of the software (like leasing software – I smell some tax advantages here), or use QI UBSReady for a period of time and then convert to a full purchase and get some credit toward the total purchase price. Bottom-line: We’re here to work with you, not against you. Every deal has different variables in play and we’ll work with those variables to make a deal work for you.
Q: What relationship do you have with Oracle development? A: Our relationship with Oracle development is very good. We are in regular communications with them regarding our EnterpriseOne software enhancement process. In fact, we now have our own system code Q60 to develop enhancements under which ensures our development standards are meeting their strict requirements.
Q: Are you looking for resell partners to sell you software enhancements? A: Absolutely. We are always looking for good partners to spread the word to EnterpriseOne customers. Currently we have two partners reselling our enhancements in Canada. One focused on real estate customers and one targeting JDE utilties. Q: What's your real estate experience? A: We've done software development work for retail customers like Walmart, commercial customers like Boston Properties, and residential customers like Glenwood Property Management. In fact, one of our vice presidents spent several years working for commercial development companies in development, leasing and property management.
A: First, we don’t offer an integration product like most people think of when looking for a Utility CS and Billing solution. Our product has four patent pending and trademarked modules that were developed using the JDE toolset and is supported by 9.0 and toolset 8.98. Because of this technology we basically activate existing business functions already within E1 to perform all the CS and billing functions you need. So from the technical IT folks all the way down to your customer interfacing CSR, we look and feel just like E1. Q: So what’s this mean to the IT Department? A: It means an easy, simple and fast implementation that requires little support from IT once QI UBSReady is running. The implementation is basically managed like a Project within E1, the environment is supported by the E1’s existing security standards, requires no additional hardware, and requires no additional staff. So, for IT there is basically no additional costs to deploy QI UBSReady. Q: What about having to make rate changes? This is usually a huge drain on IT’s time and resources. A: Not so with QI Systems because we’re an almost an “out-of-the-box” solution and using one of our four patent pending trademarked technologies, we’re able to push rate management and changes out to CSR power users to make modifications and changes in a matter of minutes, not like the traditional means which take weeks, sometimes months. Q: What version of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne does QI Systems support? A: Q: You keep talking about your patent pending and trade marked technologies that pull all the existing EnterpriseOne modules together in order to provide a full blown utility customer service and billing solution. What are these technologies? A: QI UBSReady™ Patent Pending Plug-In Technology are built in the EnterpriseOne Toolset. So if you’re an EnterpriseOne developer and are familiar with how a Project is deployed in JDE you’ll be able to use our technologies immediately. The four technologies developed by us are called:
Q: What other cool stuff can QI UBSReady™ do?
A: Well, lots of things and way too many to list here, but here’s a sample. We have built interfaces so that a CSR can utilize free or share ware, or software that is available for a nominal fee. These include linking QI Systems® to Google™ Earth, maps and now their new PowerMeter software. We’re also capable of linking to Smart Grids and also utilize green friendly KPI reporting.
Q: What’s the buzz all about regarding the QI FCM™? A: Great question. We'll let Donnie answer that question. “Our Flexible Calculation Module is designed to help JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
customers simplify calculations
that are difficult to do with
standard JD Edwards’ functionality and also enables calculations that are done
by third party software to be done easily within the core functionality of
Edwards. It’s the core calculation engine we have
used in our real estate and utility billing software enhancements, but it also opens
up all of EnterpriseOne to use Excel like Formula based calculations.
With our FCM you don’t have to hard code calculations in programs.”
