Vancouver, B.C.
September 30, 1999

Sierra Systems Consultants Inc. (Sierra) announced today that the City of Kitchener (the City) has "gone live" with SierraCIS, which handles all of the City's billing and customer-related activities for natural gas and water services.

The City of Kitchener is located in south central Ontario approximately 60 miles from Toronto. It is the largest municipality within the boundaries of the Regional Municipality of Waterloo with a population of 185,000. The City operates both natural gas and water distribution systems through the Utilities Division of the Public Works Department. Both commodities are provided to residential, commercial, and industrial customers within the City.

"Sierra's staff have been great and have been very effective in assisting us with our business and technical needs," said Olav den Ouden, Director of Revenue at the City of Kitchener. "SierraCIS will help improve the City's customer service, enabling us to more efficiently respond to our customer inquiries as all of the information is online and centralized."

"SierraCIS was designed and built with the needs of industry deregulation in mind," said Al Ytsma, Vice President in charge of Sierra's CIS Practice. "It is a highly functional and flexible application allowing customers to configure the system for their specific needs very quickly," continued Ytsma. "SierraCIS positions Sierra at the forefront of currently available CIS solutions."

SierraCIS enables utilities to streamline and optimize business processes such as customer inquiries, customer billing, collections, service work, meter reading and equipment inventory. SierraCIS supports any type of metered or unmetered services, including electricity, natural gas, water and sewer. It has full support for rate negotiation, conjunctive billing, flexible pricing and unbundled services.

The City of Kitchener represents Sierra's first in-production client for SierraCIS. Sierra is currently implementing SierraCIS in four other sites with scheduled production dates later this year.

Since its establishment in 1966 Sierra Systems Consultants Inc. has delivered high quality, cost effective information technology based business solutions. Sierra has more than 880 employees in 14 offices throughout North America.

For further information please contact:
Al Ytsma or Paul Elkington
Sierra Systems Group Inc.