“With a successful implementation within two weeks, the results were quite impressive. Through an automated process, we lowered processing time to verify daily bills from five hours to less than five minutes. This allows us to significantly improve our billing accuracy.”
Rob Marr, Billing Manager
Challenges
An energy company for the city of Mississauga in Ontario, Canada, Enersource distributes electricity safely and reliably to more than 200,000 residential and commercial customers.
As part of its commitment to service delivery excellence, the company must provide accurate and timely billings to their customers. To comply with new regulations for billing, Enersource had recently implemented a smart metering billing system that was, however, incompatible with its existing bill verification system (BVS).
Built in-house, the legacy BVS required enormous amounts of computing power—plus hours to process and verify the accuracy of bills on a daily basis. Any anomalies were distributed via email with no efficient or established process to track resolution. It was clear: Enersource needed a new bill verification system.
Solution
Enersource knew that their new bill verification system would have to provide the following functionality:
An easy way to determine the accuracy of customer bills in a timely manner
A comprehensive view of billing controls by concurrently accessing data from varying sources
Efficient distribution of anomalies to customer care for review before bills were sent to a third-party for print and delivery to customers
The team met with Enersource to discuss how CaseWare Monitor (now Alessa) could meet their needs. Within just two weeks of the initial implementation, the company had a new bill verification system that offered the following:
Accurate billing: Verifies the accuracy of print bills using independent calculations to derive billing dollar amounts that are then compared to those on actual bills.
Monitoring multiple data sources: Connects to multiple data sources, such as bill print files, the core billing system, and MS® Excel spreadsheets to create a consolidated data repository from which anomalies are generated based on user-defined tolerances.
Workflow for managing issues/anomalies: Automatically distributes billing anomalies to the customer care and billing departments for final review, ensuring that bills are accurate and sent to the printing company in a timely manner. Also maintains a repository of results and provides evidence of the work done, which can then be reviewed by auditors.
Results
With a bill verification system based on Alessa, Enersource now enjoys the following benefits:
Management can view billing error rates on a daily basis
Accuracy of billing has improved significantly
The process to verify daily bills was reduced from five hours to less than five minutes
Labor-intensive manual reviews were eliminated
Entire billing process was automated