Project
Online Customer Service Enablement (OCSE)

Industry
Utility Services

Client Overview
The client is the nation’s largest irrigation district and serves one of the fastest-growing regions in the western United States. The district’s electrical division has become the sixth largest consumer-owned utility in California and is widely regarded as an economic catalyst in the Imperial and Coachella valleys, where it serves more than 138,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers.  The accelerated growth development has created a demand for more efficient services from the client. The demand for online customer services and e-Enablement of business processes were growing.

Business Challenge
The client uses SAP as a major source of information to meet business needs. Before this project, the client did not have a tool to present the information online. Opting to use SAP in conjunction with the other software for the e-Enablement of a large volume of business processes leads to integration issues between people, processes, and SAP.

The objective was to have internal and external customers benefit from self-service business functions by leveraging web services enablement whenever possible. Furthermore an integrated environment was demanded, that integrates people, process, and SAP into a customer focused solution; whereby, people can access information online quickly to meet customer needs. The plan was envisioned to allow the job performer who does the work to have the ability to maintain and analyze the data relative to its performance (key performance indicators), which in turn would help optimize business process and reduce overall cost.

Solution
RJT Compuquest was engaged as the strategic implementation partner to work with the client to establish a project management office and implement the Online Customer Service Enablement (OCSE) project.

The aim of the OCSE project was to streamline and automate the business processes to serve as a backbone for e-Enablement. The project fully utilizes and integrates the client’s current enterprise resource planning investment - SAP Utility Solutions.

By integrating the processes and e-Enabling them, the information on activities is readily available for strategic decision making. Operations are tightly linked to increase productivity and reduce cost.  For the client’s customers, this means better service. The OCSE project’s large scope of work was broken down into the following sub-projects:

• Master Data Restructuring Project
• SAP Resource and Portfolio Management (xRPM)
• SAP Enterprise Portals
• SAP Business Warehouse (BW)
• SAP Utility Customer eServices (UCES)
• SAP Resource and Portfolio Management (xRPM)
• SAP Employee Self Service (ESS)

 

During the course of the project, the team was able to exceeded expectations by adhering to project timeline and budget.

Client Benefits
The improvement opportunities identified and implemented was targeted at improve shareholder value by enabling reduced operating cost.  All implemented process improvements were supported by standard functionality in SAP Enterprise, and they included:

• Cost savings through automated bill processing and  web enablement of customer services for energy  customers
• Replaced manual, non-standard, and offline processes for customer interaction with simplified, standard, and visible processes enabled by OCSE components.
• Reduced project implementation cost by providing executives, project managers, and team members relevant, up-to-date project information, so they can recognize and eliminate costly resource bottlenecks.
• Strengthened customer services by enabling inter department collaborative processes and connectivity through user friendly interfaces to the core components in backend system.
• Moved manually intensive, excel based business reporting to automatic, role-based and electronically routed business reporting to allow more time for problem analysis and resolution.
• Cost savings through implementing Employee Self Services Flexible, ad-hoc reporting through Business Information warehouse.