Business Impacts of Implementing New Customer Information Billing System

Customer Information System implementation will bring about some changes in commercial processes operation. Some of the changes were already identified in Gap Analysis done by Project Implementor and should be approved by Upper Management of the company.

The impacts of changes in work organization are presented as one part of general organizational analysis.

Providing service to the clientshould be one of the top priorities of the Company. The commercial offices, especially the personnel working in offices, shall have the online access to Customer Information System and will be able to resolve all clients request and provide the effective quality services to clients. The availability of online access will radically change the way some processes are carried out and reduce the time required to complete some activities. The time that is used currently for manually checking of information in different applications or in the documents will be minimized or completely eliminated.

The reorganization of the meter reading activity to carry out meter reading everyday of the month will have an impact on the number of readers that the company will need. The reorganization of routes must also take into consideration the scheduled distribution of invoices to all payment points for each of the defined collection cycles. This is to ensure that all payment points will have approximately the same volume of invoices ready for pick up by the customer for each cycle.

The carrying out of only one billing program and carried out over a centralized database during the daily billing process will have an impact on the scheduling of tasks related to the monitoring of batch processes and its results. The billing process will start after the uploading of meter reading information during batch process in the night. It means that the cycle meter reading-billing will have duration one day, billing will be consistent and all manual validation will be eliminated. Handling of the results of the daily batch billing will also be distributed across the days and this will allow COMPANY to manage exception cases over a longer period of days so more attention and actions can be done for them prior to the distribution of the invoice.

Debt Management and Bad Debt Management will be implemented and integrated into the collection processes. This means that Customer Information System will validate the information about invoices and payments and automatically, based on parameters, will generate the work orders for disconnection or other necessary actions. Manual monitoring and control of payments and debt will be eliminated. Only some parts which is related with bad debt management (which is handling of debt after permanent disconnection) will be done manually but using the functions which the Customer Information System provides.

The definition and classification ofwork order types will enable the planning of works to be carried out in a more efficient and informed manner. Each of the types will be assigned specific priorities to enable better decision-making as to when the work order must be scheduled. The users will have the information about status of each work order, about the person responsible for execution and when the work order was carried out. These information are very important for flexible work orders scheduling for next days. These information will be accessible for technical center and for commercial unit too which permit to clarify the delays if there are.

Some commercial activities can also be eliminated because of Customer Information System implementation. With the daily generation and processing of reading itineraries, it will be possible to provide portable data terminals for all readers and the printing of the reading lists on meter reading sheets may be eliminated. The elimination of this process has the impact on processing time of readings and on costs of the paper that was used. Another impact would be that it will not be necessary to introduce the meter reading data to the system manually and thus eliminating of the possible errors related to manual data entry.

The process for customer assistance which consists of providing user information, handling complaints and requests for rebilling or all other customer requests may be carried out in a quicker and easier manner because of the availability of information.

With the Customer Information System implementation, it will not be necessary to use a lot of time with reports and statistic information preparation. This means that will be possible to eliminate some human resource which now are responsible for preparing this information manually or to allow these personnel to focus on more important matters. Later on, the generation of some reports may be discontinued when the managers of the COMPANY are comfortable with using the Customer Information System. System will provide the up-to-date information daily in Management Information System (one of function of CIS) and this makes available with cumulative information in relation to operational indicators for each month. In addition to this, defined users like managers may obtain more information from various reports which will be provided by the system.