Electricity Supply Board of Ireland

Electricity Supply Board (ESB) is the primary supplier and distributor of electricity to 1.7 million customers in Ireland. They have used the DOS version of System Innovators´ CASHIER for Windows product since 1991 to collect payments for bimonthly electricity bills. In 2002, ESB selected System Innovators to upgrade their collection operations. Through the efforts of a dedicated team, ESB rolled out new software and hardware to 141 cashiering workstations in 82 cash offices over a 6-week period. By the end of the year, ESB had deployed RevenueCollector and CASHIER for Windows throughout Ireland.

Andrew Giles, ESB Payments Manager, said, "The decision to go with RevenueCollector was an easy choice really. We had a very good relationship with System Innovators for 11 years, and our people were singing their praises. Our cashiers were so impressed with the new products that we handled this as an upgrade."

A Host of Benefits

RevenueCollector provided ESB with a number of benefits, including an electronic audit trail accessible from all locations. Andrew stated, "The offices were generating a paper mountain. We´re trying to reengineer the processes within the back-office activities, and RevenueCollector arrived at the right time. To get the benefits out of it, we didn´t want 82 shops sending paper back and forth, so we eliminated the physical paper tally rolls. It´s a lot quicker and cheaper."

ESB installed bar code readers at each of the 141 cashiering workstations for faster and more reliable input of account information from the giro portion of the bill. They had previously used OCR readers that had become problematic over the years and decided to switch to bar code readers. "We are very pleased with their performance, and our cashiers point to a much improved bill payment process," said Andrew.

The speed of clearance of payment and lodgement (deposit) queries was also improved. "In our Customer Charter we guarantee to turn payment queries around in 5 days, or we pay the customer 35 Euros. We used to do this research in our legacy customer system, but now we use RevenueCollector. The clearance of payment queries has dramatically improved. We have a much quicker turn-around time and are staying within that target a lot more. Lodgement queries are much quicker, too. Our ability to re-debit bad cheques to accounts is faster with RevenueCollector," reported Andrew.

Reconciliation Online and Across Currencies

The reconciliation processes were also improved. "Daily cash journal reconciliation is now online and speeded up considerably. Our Cash Control Unit has reported that lodgement reconciliation is also much faster since RevenueCollector has come in."

ESB accepts both Euros and foreign currencies for payment. All currencies other than the Euro are entered as "foreign currency" with a unique exchange rate for each transaction. While the Euro is the currency for Ireland, they will occasionally receive check payments in sterling or dollars. When this happens, the cashier calls their Treasury Department for an up-to-the-minute exchange rate quote and that rate is entered for the transaction.

Andrew summarized his opinion of the work done by System Innovators by stating, "They are first class. If I were looking for the best model of a service provider, I would choose the model that System Innovators uses. Backup service is superb. I know they have a lot of clients, but we always feel that we´re the only client they have."

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