The first annual Canada Day at CS Week invites all Canadian utility personnel and vendors to an afternoon packed with Canadian-specific utility topics and speakers. Canadian utilities will inaugurate the new venue earlier with an invitation-only luncheon.

With a smart grid world bearing down on utilities from multiple angles, the first session, “Customer Care, Billing and Bench Marking in Canada” will be highly interactive, assessing the efforts of Canadian utilities to benchmark the services and operations of their customer service departments. Whether the driver is smart grid, regulatory, or internal, benchmarking can be an effective tool for improving operations and measuring/delivering on cost/benefit analyses. What new services might a smart grid world bring to the utility?  How to measure the new service levels?  Several Canadian utilities will present with Jon Brock, President, Desert Sky Group LLC, as facilitator. A second, more generalized, round table discussion of Canadian utility issues will follow.

Meter data management wraps up the day as Waterloo North Hydro (WNH) discusses its implementation of an operational data store (ODS). The emergence of smart metering has many utilities in Ontario moving to implement ODS. WNH will review their ODS implementation and elaborate on its positive impact on management of the distribution system including real-time integration with existing in-house systems, efficient business processes with external systems, improved outage management and the value of configurable business rules to monitor specific meter behavior and the health of the network.