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.
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
In Customer Management System, especially in utility companies, the process of cashier closing is important. At the end of the day, all cashier (whether online of offline) should be closed and do not receive any payment anymore. A good customer management system could detect any unbalance money movement when the cashier is closed. How?
Let say that there are 3 cashiers: cashier A, B, and C. At the end of the day, all money received should be transferred to one cashier (say cashier A) to deposit it to the bank.
Cashier B when declaring that the money is moved to cashier A, a printed money out movement receipt/report should be printed by the system on terminal of cashier B. Cashier A when declaring that he/she received money from cashier B will let the system in his/her terminal to print money in movement receipt/report. This will create balance. The printed receipt/report is only for documentation signed by both cashiers involved. If the declaring of money out and in are not done, system will refuse to be closed because there are money “hanging” somewhere. The same case when cashier C will move the money to cashier A.
By having this money in/out reports, the manager of finance or commercial office will be easy to monitor the movement of money. It would be great if the system is centralized so that the manager can always check the amount of money collected and movements between cashiers.
Then, how about implementing 24/7 payment system through online website or ATM. Well, this will be a different procedure to handle that will be discussed in next blogposts. Watch out for it.
