Meter-to-Cash Solutions and Tools for Utility Organizations
Utility organizations lose 2 to 5% of their revenue from preventable operational losses, especially in a smart meter/smart grid environment. The cost of these billing errors causes businesses and customers to overpay or underpay for utilities services, leading to embarrassing headlines, regulatory fines and public utility commission scrutiny, and stakeholder mistrust. Reducing revenue leakage is critical for regulatory compliance such as SOX and Public Utility Commission Codes.
Operational leakage issues stem from three main domains:
- Customer account creation and provisioning (e.g. error in rate classification, duplicate or missing customer records, etc.)
- Meter reading, billing and servicing (inaccurate transfer of meter data to billing system)
- Payment collection (reconciliation to GL and the billing system).
These losses are due to a lack of/poor design of internal controls. Manual inspections to detect and resolve errors and inconsistencies are ineffective and overly burdensome. Utility organizations must face these challenges by implementing a set of controls and processes across multiple internal organizations and systems that are automated, independent, and continuous, to eliminate and mitigate the risk of revenue leakage due to these operational losses.
Synaptitude, along with its partners, has assembled a powerful set of tools and guidelines to assist Utility Organizations with Revenue Leakage. Our Revenue Assurance for Utility Organizations package includes:
Utility Organization Revenue Assurance Maturity Model
A CMMI-like model based on TMForum GB941 standards utilizing a set of criteria around Organization, People, Influence, Tools, and Process.
Utility Organization Revenue Assurance Key Performance Indicators
Based on TMForum GB941 standards, these baseline KPIs reflect the best practices of over 700 organizations world-wide.
Meter-to-Cash Data Analytics featuring Martin-Dawes Lavastorm Platform
Designing Analytics and Controls That Are Impactful Today and Into SmartGrid
Meter-to-cash analytics and controls – sometime lumped into a composite category called revenue assurance – are intended to maximize cash from operations, de-risk important changes needed to optimize your business, and enable you to gain rapid and atomic-level visibility to the levers and the results. Given the expected step-function increase in data volumes and process complexity, utilities may discover that current reactive, sampled or manual efforts simply do not provide the appropriate controls.
This same observation was made in other industries - and as a result, change was accelerated in high- performance companies across the analytic maturity curve. Automating controls enables the CFO, Controllers, CCO and CIO to:
- Acquire, correlate and analyze any data important to understand performance, control meter-to-cash, and make decisions
- Capture and analyze the actual business logic so that analytics and controls reflect on-the-ground reality
- Enable drill-down to the atomic level to enable understanding and resolution per charge and per customer
- Provide systematic, automated detection to identify errors as they happen, to maximize the ability to resolve discrepancies within billing cycles.
Learn more about Synaptitude's Meter-to-Cash Data Analytics solutions >>
Utility Organization Revenue Assurance Dashboard
In order to drive executive insight into critical operational measures, Synaptitude packages the Meter-to-Cash KPIs, and utilizes the data analytics platform to gather information from multiple internal and external systems, in order to create a full Meter-to-Cash revenue assurance data warehouse that drives near-real-time RA KPI dashboard metrics with extended drill-down features.
The solution enables all areas of the utility organization to manage revenue leakage in a truly automated fashion.