3 Utility Companies Seeing Success with RunMyJobs
Billing, meter-to-cash, regulatory requirements — these are a few examples of the day-to-day business processes that utility companies must carefully managed. Then there’s the bigger objectives that require more time and focus — like driving business outcomes and ensuring a positive customer experience. It can be hard to find the time, especially when it’s imperative that all daily financial matters run smoothly.
Handling billing and compliance operations as efficiently and accurately as possible has led many utility companies around the world to implement RunMyJobs by Redwood Software. The workload automation (WLA) platform enables connection and coordination across every process and enterprise application, resulting in faster response time and mitigating risks in invoicing, billing, payment and debt management. Offering an end-to-end solution, RunMyJobs handles industry-specific processes like meter-to-cash, automating from meter reading to invoice delivery, making it the go-to automation solution for utilities.
Read how three utility companies improved efficiencies and saw results using Redwood.
3 Utility Companies Succeeding with RunMyJobs
Anglian Water
Background
Anglian Water is a U.K.-based utility with 5,000 employees and more than 6 million customers. With a daily billing workload of 16,000 invoices, Anglian Water faced billing operational issues resulting in customer complaints and an overloaded support hotline. The company needed to normalize its billing to address these issues, as well as improve cash flow.
Why Redwood?
Anglian Water initially attempted to solve its billing process problems with additional manual intervention and employee hours. They realized they needed help and found cloud-based RunMyJobs workload automation to automate and streamline billing operations. RunMyJobs offered Anglian Water the ability to monitor, visualize and orchestrate processes across hybrid environments.
Results
With RunMyJobs, Anglian Water improved customer service by automating billing processes, eliminated billing errors and significantly reduced customer support calls. The company earned a number one ranking in Ofwat’s water regulator service incentive mechanism (SIM) program, with an overall score of 90 out of 100, beating the industry average of 84.4. SIM recognizes companies for efficiently managing their accounts, making bill payments easy and resolving operational problems quickly. RunMyJobs also enabled Anglian Water to streamline cash flow. Read more.
FortisBC
Background
FortisBC is Canada’s largest public utility company with more than 2,400 employees and 1.2 million customers. FortisBC wanted to improve billing accuracy and the customer experience. With more than 50,000 bills sent out each day, Fortis needed to provide accurate, consistent billing, coordinated data collection and integrated data sources. The company also wanted to bring customer service and billing back in-house, which would require a robust automation solution.
Why Redwood?
FortisBC selected RunMyJobs by Redwood because of its powerful SaaS-based solution that could connect across systems and applications to secure all the data integrations involved in the billing process. The company implemented RunMyJobs in a successful, on-time migration involving innumerable applications and interfaces.
Results
Since launching RunMyJobs, FortisBC has not missed a single billing deadline and has produced 100% accuracy in its 50,000 bills. The company’s phenomenal record has furthered its goal of exponentially improving customer experience through faster, better and more cost-effective billing operations. Read more.
SWM
Background
Stadtwerke München (SWM), one of Germany’s largest municipal utilities with more than 10,000 employees, provides electricity, natural gas, district heating and cooling and drinking water to Munich residents, as well as supplying urban mobility solutions, telecommunications services and swimming pool oversight. SWM faced massive amounts of customer data and activities that had become a resource drain, as well as a growing range of services and a desire to increase sustainability. Because their existing platform did not support SAP IS-U, the service team has to manually start 60-70 billing processes daily, leading to delays as well as erroneous invoices being sent to customers. The company recognized the need for a better automation solution to streamline its business processes, especially meter-to-cash, which involves everything from reading meters and maintaining data to preparing and sending out invoices — each process requiring more than an hour of manual work. SWM sought an improved customer service experience through automation.
Why Redwood?
With its sophisticated SAP environment, SWM wanted an automation platform that had deep SAP expertise. The company needed a solution with a proven ability to handle its diverse enterprise applications and data sources and process huge amounts of data from energy plants, wind parks, consumer meters and other systems for meter-to-cash reporting and billing. SWM chose RunMyJobs by Redwood because of its SAP experience and track record.
RunMyJobs would interface between ERP systems and financial data sources to make all required data readily and reliably available on a daily basis. RunMyJobs could provide the control and access SWM required, and a view into the detail of which meter-to-cash processes are executed, when and how. SWM could more easily adhere to the proper meter-to-cash sequence, decreasing process errors and instituting automated recovery routines should any error occur — enabling immediate intervention by SWM IT teams. And Redwood made it easy to migrate with not only an efficient 3-step migration process but also specialized tooling for migrating from Control-M, SWM’s existing platform.
Results
After a smooth and successful migration to RunMyJobs, SWM now has all of its customer data available at once, speeding up its customer response time and ability to provide customers with expert advice. The platform enables end-to-end automation of SWM’s meter-to-cash process across SAP IS-U and Business Warehouse to ensure 100% accurate invoicing on a daily basis. RunMyJobs’ self-recovery functionality and flexible scheduling of run times reduced meter-to-cash processing time from 14 hours to 8 hours.
With the messy, multi-step activities simplified into a predictable, manageable automated process, SWM focused on its “Next Best Activity” project, a continued effort to optimize customer service even further. Orchestrating end-to-end daily data flows from more than 25 different sources into a central database to then run recommendation algorithms prepares the next best activity for all call center team members. SWM has now implemented RunMyJobs across its organization, including mobility solutions, mobile ticketing and parking. Read more.
Why Utility Companies Should Use RunMyJobs
With Redwood Software, your IT team can automate utility business processes like meter-to-cash, streamlining business operations and orchestrating processes across business applications and environments. Redwood can elevate your efficiency, accuracy and productivity — resulting in cost-savings, time-savings and a better customer experience. Try a demo today.
