Challenge
Since the inception of the competitive market in energy, our client, a competitive energy retailer had not fully tracked transaction records and had attempted to reconcile only three types of records (out of a set of 38 transaction types) used for billing and invoice processing. Revenue delays, partly due to transaction posting failures, accounted for over $120 million dollars of billing backlog. Thousands of accounts and meters had gone untracked for more than six months. The client’s current transaction management tools could not adequately track, report, and reconcile transactions as they moved (and sometimes become lost) through internal validation environments and applications. Multiple error queues contained tens of thousands of transaction errors. TMNG Global was engaged to complete an assessment of the transaction management systems and provide recommendations for improvement.
TMNG Global Solution
Using the Deming workbench™ and our proprietary TMNG QBC™ methodology, the TMNG Global future-state team interviewed transaction management personnel and other internal transaction users. From these interviews, the team gathered over 500 business and functional requirements upon which the future state architecture could be developed. These interviews also yielded significant information about current state processes and provided an opportunity for immediate improvements in operations.
Our recommendations for the current state focused on process ownership, process improvement, reporting, training and documentation. We introduced the concept of transaction velocity, measuring how fast transactions moved from the market to the client’s internal software applications for account creation and billing. TMNG also recommended the prioritization and grouping of transactions into families, which allowed the client to begin tracking mission critical transactions used in billing. Other recommendations focused on the tracking and reconciliation of order management transactions. We proposed an alternative, future state environment that would eliminate the “chasing” of transactions as they moved through multiple, internal applications.
Benefits to the ClientInitial findings demonstrated that moving billing windows would result in an immediate increase in transactions available for use during the billing cycle. The client realized a more than 5% increase in transaction availability and resultant revenue increase within two weeks of bill window alteration–at no extra expense. Order management transactions were now being tracked and reconciled for the first time. Customer enrollment failures have gone from not being handled to now being recognized within three days and available for re-work. Safety net transactions, once necessary to ensure customer enrollment for all customers, have been reduced up to 25% due to our process recommendations. Additional recommendations, once implemented, will reduce more unnecessary transactions sent to market.
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