       HICRON IMPLEMENTS A BILLING SYSTEM IN KRI23/11/10 - Wroclaw
HICRON has signed an agreement for the development and implementation of a billing solution to support the sales of natural gas, LNG, LPG and heat by KRI SA. The purpose of the project is to implement a flexible solution to manage the sales processes in the energy sector adapted to the business requirements of KRI SA. Due to the specific nature of its business, the company needed an industry solution which would ensure a quick service of thousands of customers at the same time, associated with regular calculation of charges for the consumption and delivery of gas. The design stage will be completed in March 2011. ”The biggest challenge in our industry is the need to bill thousands of customers at the same time. Hence, a utility billing system has to be, first of all, integrated with the meters, so that the charges can be automatically calculated based on the predefined algorithms. Secondly, it must be capable of sending millions of records at one time and, last but not least, it has to ensure a sufficient degree of flexibility to allow us to configure all the sales parameters ourselves. Additionally, there are a number of other processes such as the organization of the network and service lines and management of the gas meters,” says Paweł Szczepaniak, IT Department Manager, KRI SA. The billing solution proposed by HICRON is the company’s proprietary software developed on the basis of HICRON consultants’ knowledge of the business processes in fuel and energy enterprises, tailored to the individual needs of KRI SA. The solution will be integrated with the SAP system in such areas as the sales and distribution, facility management, project management, finance and controlling. The solution will support comprehensive customer services: from setting up an account in the SAP system based on the service line agreement (including an automatic check for duplicated records), through management of the gas meters (receipts and issues of the meters to and from the warehouse, connecting and switching, entry of meter readouts), service of contracts and invoicing (including adjustments), to the agreement termination procedures. On the market of SAP partners, HICRON stands out not only for its expertise in the business processes of energy and fuel sector companies, but also for its knowledge of unique SAP solutions and competence in the development of even the most complex SAP ERP system extensions. At the stage of planning the development of the SAP ERP system we were talking to a number of service providers, however, the knowledge and experience of HICRON consultants has convinced us that the company will be a stable and reliable partner to our SAP expansion project,” says Paweł Szczepaniak. The starting point to the discussions about the implementation of the billing system and its specificity was the analysis of the SAP system conducted by HICRON consultants at the end of 2009. Based on the knowledge of the strategic changes planned by KRI SA, the consultants have thoroughly examined the extent to which SAP supports the business processes of the company. The result of the analysis was a proposal to implement a number of improvements and a recommendation for the development of the system which would ensure a comprehensive support of the new strategy of KRI SA. In addition to the concept for the development of the billing system, the improvements planned by HICRON also include the implementation of functionalities supporting the processing of the excise duty applicable to the sale of gas for use as fuel in vehicles, processing of the fuel fee, recording and settlement of environmental certificates, expansion of the tariff to include the distance factor and implementation of a solution to manage the flow of documents. The design of the billing solution implementation is prepared on the basis of the Accelerated SAP (ASAP) technology and the HICRON Implementation Method. |
