Ellensburg, WA, February 08, 2024 — Origin Utility (Origin), a leading provider of innovative smart city solutions, recently announced the successful go-live of its SmartCity platform at the City of Ellensburg, WA.
The City of Ellensburg provides its customers with water, wastewater, sewer, electric, gas and telecom services. The City selected Origin after a detailed procurement evaluation, electing to implement Origin’s SmartCity platform with perfect-fit applications for utility billing, payment processing, customer self-service portal and mobile work management modules.
“We’re excited to partner with the City of Ellensburg to bring this cutting-edge technology to its community, which will not only make the utility billing process more convenient for residents but also help the city manage its utility more cost-effectively for the long term,” said Justin Saye, CEO, Origin Utility. “It was a pleasure to work with the City team and we feel fortunate to have earned their trust and an opportunity to serve their community.”
Origin SmartCity provides a future-proof technical enterprise service framework that allows municipalities to choose best-in-class applications in a single user interface with a single support team. Through a platform approach with utility- and municipality-tailored middleware, SmartCity provides complete optionality for cities to innovate and modernize at a pace that fits their circumstances, aspirations and budget.
“We are constantly looking for opportunities to improve the customer experience,” said Ellensburg City Manager Heidi Behrends Cerniwey. “Working with Origin to deploy our new utility billing system will give customers what they’ve been asking for: paperless billing, autopay options, detailed utility bills with comparisons to prior months, and an easy-to-use customer portal. Ellensburg is the only city in Washington that owns and operates non-profit natural gas and electric utility distribution systems. Origin was able to work with our internal team to address our unique utility challenges and develop a system that will streamline the whole process and make it more customer-friendly.”
For modernizing municipalities, Origin SmartCity presents a paradigm-breaking opportunity to take control over their long-term operational and IT roadmaps with complete flexibility for continuous improvement, experimentation and operational excellence. SmartCity’s enterprise service framework means real-time data integration and actionable insights across a utility’s application landscape—in an easy-to-use and fully supported service.
For the City of Ellensburg, SmartCity provided three unique benefits:
High-volume Start/Stop service event processing for Ellensburg’s significant university student population.
A multi-service, single-account management approach to support the City of Ellensburg’s full-service offering of water, wastewater, stormwater, natural gas, electric, and telecom.
A high degree of flexibility and customization of the service approach and instance to accommodate the City team’s unique operating model and team.
“The value delivered by Origin SmartCity is crystal clear,” said Saye. “By integrating technologies and best practices not available to other legacy solution providers, we’ve created a new category of solution in the market that will deliver generational benefits to our customers. We’re very excited to begin this journey with forward-looking clients like the City of Ellensburg.”