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A transition from a legacy billing platform with limited integrations to a robust bill statement generation platform with a distribution component to email and support for printed bills.
An electricity and utility company in the Caribbean wanted to upgrade their E-Billing platform as the client’s needs had outgrown the capabilities of their current bill statement system. The client wanted to increase the number of customers on E-Billing and replace the existing platform with a robust and fault-tolerant system for printing and emailing customer statements.
The client is an electricity and utility company in the Caribbean with an installed generating capacity of 161 megawatts (“MW”), servicing around 32,000 customers and an annual total operating revenue of approximately $200 million.
They produce approximately 35,000+ statements per month, which their customers receive over email or post.
While there had been some progress in moving to paperless billing, the developed system was converting printed bills into PDFs, which were then printed and sent in the post or PDFs emailed to customers. There was no ability to determine whether billing statements were emailed, printed or both. There was limited ability to track whether bills were successfully printed or emailed.
Finding old bills involved traversing file shares and being familiar with folder and file naming conventions.
The legacy platform was not robust or fault-tolerant. Issues had to be resolved within a short window of time; otherwise, the company risked losing the ability to generate statements for that day. PDF bill statements were generated by one platform and distributed by another, with no integration between the two systems.
BMT replaced the legacy platform with a bill statement generation and distribution engine that produces and archives 500,000 customer billing statements per annum. The replacement system supports sending billing statements to customers via email or post.
BMT developed a robust bill generation and distribution component to generate and archive customer billing statements. The system is fault-tolerant. If there are issues producing or sending a particular billing statement, the system will simply retry generating or sending the billing statement in the next scheduled run, which would recontinue until each statement was successfully sent.
Customer Service can query the system to see if a billing statement was emailed or printed, to whom the billing statement was sent, and if the recipient has opened the billing statement.
Finding current and past billing statements is now easy. Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) can find billing statements searching by account, date, name, address (or any combination thereof). A free-text search option is also included to allow CSRs to search for billing statements using keywords that appear on the bill.
Integrations are also developed to pull information from the company’s customer portal, Prepay system(s) and several other third-party platforms and then display that data on the billing statements.
Changes can easily be made to the billing statement templates by Customer Service without needing to involve IT or BMT Solutions.
To increase efficiency, barcodes are placed on the billing statements, meant to be used for a variety of purposes including, tracking if billing statements are physically printed/folded and delivered to the post office, and an easy way to scan and stop the system from printing further statements when statements are returned by the Post Office.
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