Roughly three months ago, Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd) initiated an upgrade to its billing and customer information systems. The upgrade has not gone smoothly.
In addition to negatively affecting ComEd’s own customers, over the last three months and counting, the upgrade has affected key systems and processes used daily by retail energy suppliers to bill their existing customers and to provide new and existing customers with price quotes.
The member companies of the Retail Energy Supply Association share the frustration experienced by our customers caused by ComEd’s failed systems conversion. ComEd’s repeated systems glitches, data integrity issues, and delays have caused undue stress and inconvenience for all involved.
Retail suppliers are unable to bill their customers or find themselves having to issue estimated bills while ComEd works to restore the functionality of its systems. Customers looking to evaluate and compare electric supply offers are unable to fully assess their options because the information suppliers need to build those offers, information that suppliers obtain from ComEd, is unavailable or unreliable.
RESA and its member companies have been working tirelessly both to support ComEd with the provision of information on the issues we are seeing and, within our member companies, to devise workarounds where we can while we await ComEd’s fixes.
RESA remains committed to exploring every avenue available to ensure that our member companies, and the over 800,000 customers on retail electric supply in ComEd’s service territory, receive the quality service they deserve. To that end, we applaud recent efforts by the Illinois Commerce Commission to attend meetings with ComEd and retail electric suppliers. We are hopeful that these meetings will be constructive and help speed the resolution of open issues.
