Case Study

Client Profile

One of the largest state-owned energy corporations in NSW, our client distributes and retails electricity and value added services to more than 2 million people, in households and businesses across a network franchise spanning 24,500 square kilometres.

Solution

Application Development and Support Services.

Industry

Utilities

Business Challenge

Due to a number of changes in the way electricity consumption was being calculated and charged in the Australian electricity market, our client was facing escalating costs as the need for manual calculation, reconciliation and bill adjustments increased. The most significant changes included:

Another network provider introduced new three time-band maximum demand and capacity charges when previously a single time-band charge had applied.
The National Electricity Market Management Company (NEMMCO) introduced multiple Transmission Loss Factors (TLFs) when previously a default TLF rate had been applied.
The use of electricity contracts catering for Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time was becoming increasingly common.

Solution

Trysoft Technologies' energy specialists developed a number of sophisticated billing rules and system enhancements to automate and simplify the increasingly complex calculations associated with billing commercial, industrial and residential customers for electricity usage.

Billing rules were introduced to the existing billing system to allow our client to automatically pass through the new three time-band maximum demand and capacity charges for peak, shoulder and off-peak to their customers, eliminating the need for manual adjustments to ensure accurate billing.

Enhancements were made to enable the system to accept and pass through multiple TLFs per network provider. Until now the legacy system had no provision for more than one TLF for each network and any alterations to the default value had to be made manually.

With network providers billing on Eastern Standard Time, Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time or a combination of the two, depending on the tariff, our team introduced the functionality for the system to correctly bill customers when Daylight Saving Time applied.

Other enhancements to the system included:

Changes to increase the accuracy of pass through ancillary and participant charges to customers.
Changes to ensure correct calculations of loss factors (Distribution Loss Factors and Transmission Loss Factors) at all times. Previously the system only supported calculations where the value was greater than 1. Manual calculations and adjustments had to be made where the value was less.
The introduction of billing rules to enable the system to automatically bill customers correctly as per the published rate for each network. Previously all our client's tariffs were calculated on a monthly basis whilst other network providers published their tariffs as daily, monthly or annual rates. This resulted in our client's staff manually calculating the monthly equivalent rate for other network providers' tariffs.

Results

The enhancements to our client's existing billing system resulted in the increased accuracy of billing data, improved customer satisfaction and a reduction in costly and time-consuming manual reconciliations and bill adjustments.

These modifications increased the flexibility and scalability of the system and through leveraging our client's investment in this legacy system we were able to support them in optimising their profit margins without the need for costly system replacement.

About Trysoft Technologies

Trysoft Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Raw Capital Partners Limited, a company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX:RCA). Trysoft Technologies provides specialist billing solutions and outsourced information technology services to Telecommunications companies, Energy providers and Government agencies.

Trysoft is fully committed to providing the highest quality products and services and is ISO 9001:2000 accredited.

The company services some of Australia’s largest telecommunications and utility providers as well as maintaining and servicing mission-critical government software installations.

For further information on our products and services please call us on +61 (7) 3870 7070 or email us at trysoft@trysoft.com.

Trysoft Technologies
Suite 2, Level 4,
88 Jephson Street
Toowong QLD 4066
Australia
www.trysoft.com