Waco to replace legacy utility and work-order systems with SpryPoint and CloudGen; SpryPoint scheduled to go live July 14

City leaders described two concurrent technology projects intended to modernize customer billing, self-service tools and field operations during the April 15 work session.

Lisa Tyre, director of community engagement, described SpryPoint as a modern customer information system that will replace the city’s more than 30-year-old legacy billing system. The new system will provide an updated customer portal, live chat, text and email options, more frequent meter-data updates and built-in reporting and dashboards. Tyre said customers will be required to re-enroll for the new portal and, if they use bank- or card-draft payments, to reestablish those payment arrangements in the new system. The city plans to take the water office offline for a single day of cutover on July 11 and to bring the new portal online July 14.

"This system will allow us to mimic exactly what the customer's looking at, allowing us to be able to assist them a little bit more efficiently," Tyre said, describing call-center improvements and real-time insights. She told council the five-year SpryPoint contract totals about $2.5 million; the city has spent just over $1 million to date on implementation and expects recurring maintenance costs to rise modestly each year.

Tyre showed a sample portal and bill layout intended to give customers clearer consumption trends, alerts for continuous-flow events and a cleaner bill design. The city plans an outreach campaign that includes a newsletter article, a June bill insert, a web page with tutorial videos and targeted emails to customers with valid addresses; staff said they will try to contact customers who appear to have active autopay arrangements to help them reestablish payments. Tyre said the city intends to avoid disconnecting customers during the transition and plans a grace period into mid-August to accommodate re-enrollments.

Mike Seawright, chief information officer, described CloudGen, an enterprise asset-management and work-order platform meant to consolidate asset records and field work orders across departments. CloudGen already went live for several utility-related divisions earlier in the year and entered a 90-day "hyper care" support period following that launch; further waves for water distribution, facilities and public works are planned. Seawright said the system enables mobile field updates, reduces paper handoffs and provides a single digital record for assets and maintenance activities.

"One of the most exciting things about this system is it empowers our work, our staff in the field for real time updates around work orders, real time updates on assets," Seawright said. He added that the city plans to integrate CloudGen with the MyWaco app and other systems so that service requests flow into a single work-order environment.

Council members emphasized the need for broad communications and strong change management. Tyre and Seawright said staff have staged demos, pulled in departmental stakeholders during the RFP and implementation processes, and planned 90-day post-launch support to ensure adoption.

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