Customer Management System

There are tons of systems out there trying to improve business processes of utility companies in general or electric companies in specific.

The key is still doing the re-engineering process well and the application system will just a tool to follow the processes. I put some of my thoughts about Electric Management System in this blog. Feel free to read and comment.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Daily or Monthly Charges?

Many utility companies are still applying monthly charges for customers. Let us say: monthly meter rent, or monthly fixed charged. Why? Mainly because the companies implemented monthly billing and the system is not able to compute daily.

Monthly charges seem to be simple and easily understand by customers, but it is NOT fair to both company and customers. Imagine that the electricity is contracted on the middle of the month, since the billing system produces monthly billing with monthly charges, the customers will be charged the whole month for the affected billing concepts/details. The same case will happen when the customer terminate the contract.

Thus, utility company with these kinds of billing concepts charges should redesigned their monthly changer into daily charges. Even if the bill will be computed monthly, but the computation will take into considerations how many days is used from the last reading date until current reading date. By using number of days, billing becomes more fair!

This daily billing computation charges will benefit as well when the customers want to change the load power or tariff that will affect the cost of electricity. For example: customer A wants to increase the load from 1300VA into 5000VA in the middle of the month. Since mostly the computation of charges are different from 1300VA to 5000VA, the billing system from be able to compute by using number of days:
- billing computation using 1300VA from last reading until middle of the month
- billing computation using 5000VA from middle of the month until current reading

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