PWN’s long-term goal is to become such a high-performing business that it can offer customer contact and billing services to other utilities as well. Having initiated a broad-based program to progress to this goal, the company realized that the costs of running its call centre were rapidly mounting and that the system then in place for processing invoices could be made more efficient.

PWN decided to move its customers toward a self-service, Internet-based communication and billing system in order to:

• Lower call centre running costs;
• Improve customer service and higher customer satisfaction;
• Move PWN toward its long-term goal of providing similar services to other utilities.

• The core PWN billing system is based on SAP.
• Avanade worked with PWN to develop an innovative, customized enhancement for SAP R/3 and SAP CRM using key middleware – an SAP .NET connector, Webservices and Biztalk. This provided a secure, synchronous environment for customer communication.
• Avanade also integrated the back-end SAP systems with a Microsoft Content Management Server at the front end, using CTI (Genysis) to connect the telephony to the SAP systems.
• The system as a whole was exceptionally complex, involving an unusual number of new interfaces, conversions, enhancements and modifications. The SAP team worked very closely with the Microsoft team to develop and install this innovative system landscape.

• More efficient customer communication
  • By using the SAP .NET connector to connect to SAP at the back end, the project team gave customers the means to immediately identify errors in their Internet communications with PWN. This was a very new application at the time.
• Secure and synchronous customer communication
  • Used in tandem with the SAP .NET connector, Web services and BizTalk middleware provide real-time, up-to-date information on customer situations for every communication channel – telephone, email and Internet.
• High performance delivered
  • The CRM program has delivered benefits in terms of both operational efficiency and business performance.