Abjayon’s team achieved a milestone by successfully implementing a fully optimized meter-to-cash business process for a prominent cooling company in Qatar within a record time.
Overview
Increasing competition and cost pressures have driven energy suppliers to streamline their operations. The focal point of the energy industry’s operations lies in the Meter-to-Cash process, encompassing tasks from meter reading to billing and receivables management. However, comprehensively analyzing this end-to-end, cross-departmental process chain for transparency and pinpointing optimization opportunities proves to be a challenging task.
The Meter-to-Cash process involves intricate procedures that demand the seamless integration of various distinct systems, leaving room for potential data transfer failures between them. Such failures can lead to instances of overcharging or undercharging customers for services. Overcharging results in disgruntled customers and unfavorable publicity, while undercharging leads to lower-than-expected revenue, potentially influencing future operations. To ensure the precision and punctuality of revenue collections, each utility must establish a method for regularly validating billed usage.
While upholding quality and reliability as primary concerns, no utility supplier can fortify its business resilience without a steady cash flow. Our client stands as Qatar’s largest commercial provider of district cooling services, currently managing four cooling facilities across the West Bay and The Pearl-Qatar districts with a total refrigeration capacity of 237,000 tons. Over the course of its existence, the company has accumulated invaluable technical and operational expertise, refining strategies for both B2B and B2C engagements. Nevertheless, the company has encountered notable challenges, particularly in addressing high-bill complaints and customer dissatisfaction.
Objectives
The client aimed to optimize its meter-to-cash process by leveraging Abjayon’s services, focusing on:
- Implementation of Oracle Utilities Customer-to-Meter (C2M) service
- Data migration from the legacy system to the C2M service
- Implementation and integration of Abjayon’s Digital Self-Service (ADSS) portal with C2M
- Implementation and integration of Oracle BI Publisher with C2M
- Integrations with third-party systems, including Oracle ERP, banks, and various payment channels
Challenges and Solutions
Abjayon, as the lead system integrator, addressed challenges by optimizing existing processes and services. This involved upgrading technology with a unified corporate solution, streamlining customer information systems, billing/collection, and customer support applications.
Strategy
The team outlined distinctive procedures related to meter-to-cash, focusing on implementing new customer support and billing/collection systems for residential and commercial customers, including integrations with AMR meters.
Procedure
The Abjayon team meticulously developed a roadmap to guide the project’s rollout and execution. The comprehensive streamlining of the project was carried out by a team of 20 experts over a period of nine months.
Our strategic objective was to optimize a meter-to-cash process, intending to yield multiple benefits. However, the team encountered challenges when incorporating existing meter measurement and billing process scenarios into the new customer-to-meter business process.
The client’s pre-existing systems proved to be inflexible and intricate, prompting regulatory bodies to intervene and halt the previous bill collection process. To address this, Team Abjayon replaced the existing billing and collection system with Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter (C2M).
“Oracle Utilities Customer to Meter is a billing and customer service system designed for conventional numeric meters and billing procedures. It caters to utilities of all sizes, supports various utility service types, and adeptly handles the intricacies of a utility’s business processes.”
Additionally, we performed data cleansing and transformation to achieve the necessary data normalization in the newly implemented Customer to Meter (C2M) service. A Digital Self Service Portal was established to address customer demands and queries.
The refined solution successfully achieved all goals, earning high praise from the client for its end results.
Results
The project was launched in September 2022, enabling the company to leverage cutting-edge technologies for enhanced consumer intelligence and streamlined corporate procedures, leading to reduced operational expenses. Furthermore, it improved the meter-to-cash process by introducing a customer care and engagement platform atop existing meter management, invoicing, and payment technologies. This integration allows our client’s team to access accurate and timely information more readily, consolidating data, analytics, and client billing and payment interfaces within a single system.
Our team is currently providing one-year post-go-live support for the implemented solution. Additionally, the client intends to incorporate Abjayon’s newly implemented Customer-to-Meter service in its upcoming business expansions.
Your Digital Transformation Partner
Abjayon stands among the forefront technology solution providers in the healthcare sector. For further inquiries, please reach out to us at info@abjayon.com.
