EEC TO REVAMP POST-PAID BILLING SYSTEM

MBABANE – In its quest to be an efficient service provider, Eswatini Electricity Company (EEC) has presented a business opportunity to companies to come up with a billing system.

The parastatal has issued an expression of interest for the custom development of a post-paid billing system. The deadline for submissions had earlier been slated for November 30, 2018 but has since been shifted to January 17, 2019.

EEC is looking to work with a suitable and capable company, with a proven record of accomplishment in project management, business analysis, software development, software testing, system deployment and system documentation.

“The company is needed to develop a new billing system that will meet EEC’s current billing functionalities, address existing challenges and develop new functionality that will align with improvements in billing processes,” reads the Expression of Interest (EOI) in part.

In the EOI, it was explained that the current EEC post-paid billing system has been operating in the company for over 20 years and began as an in-house developed solution to address a local need that of billing customers based on their electricity consumption.

Grown

The company said it has since grown as business demands continue to increase and was currently running on HP-UX, and an Adabas-Natural environment.
EEC disclosed that the post-paid billing system was still a key system at EEC as it generated more than 70 per cent of EEC’s revenue.

Over the years, EEC’s information system portfolio has grown to consist of heterogeneous but related modern systems including the SAGE CRM, Ellipse, Outage Management System (OMS), receipting, 3E and GIS among others to form the backbone of the company’s daily operations and decision-making.
However, it was pointed out that it was becoming more and more difficult to integrate the billing system with these other modern systems as it runs on older, sun-setting technology.

“As technology, regulatory and customer demands change, efforts have been made to stretch the system beyond its functional limits and this has proved impossible.

Apparent

“Therefore, the need for the replacement of this billing system is apparent,” EEC clarified. 
EEC is a power utility, which was formed in 1963 to provide Electricity to the Eswatini nation by sourcing or generating power using the least cost sources of energy.

The company currently operates in a liberalised market through the Electricity Act of 2007 and the Energy Regulatory Act of 2007. EEC imports 80 per cent of the electricity demand from Southern Africa countries through Bilateral Agreements also from the Day Ahead Market (DAM) in the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP).

Locally the company buys five per cent from one local Independent Power Producer (Ubombo Sugar Limited) and generates the other 15 per cent from its internal power stations.

Interested companies are requested to complete their proposals following the outline and requirements indicated in the EOI.
EEC desires a product that will solve all the limitations for the current billing system which are;

l Has no inbuilt bill emailing and SMS functionality

l System is console based and platform dependent which is not user friendly
l Only IT personnel can generate and print system reports
l Is not optimised for bill adjustments
l Bills are only produced after a control run (month end)
l Does not offer free text fields for tracking notes
l Does not allow for user generated reports
l Is not optimised for time of use meters, they were only accommodated later on
l Reading capturing module is not optimised as it allows abnormalities and does not separate automated readings from manual readings
l Does not accommodate other forms of payments like EFTs and Mobile Money

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