Times Of Swaziland: EEC TO REVAMP POST PAID BILLING SYSTEM

EEC TO REVAMP POST PAID BILLING SYSTEM
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Kwanele Dhladhla on 24/10/2018 10:18:00


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. 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 of billing customers based on their
electricity consumption. 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 generates 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 system 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. Therefore, the need for the replacement of this billing system is
apparent,” EEC clarified. The Eswatini Electricity Company (EEC) is a power
utility, which was formed in 1963 to provide electricity to the Eswatini by
sourcing or generating power using the least cost sources of energy.