reaching new levels of customer service and billing accuracies with advanced exception management

A collaboration of:

Reaching New Levels of Customer

Service and Billing Accuracies with

Advanced Exception Management

Brooke Warren Atmos Energy

• Headquartered in Dallas,

TX

• 3 million natural gas

distribution customers

• 1,400 communities in 8

states

• 4,800 employees

• Unregulated and pipeline

businesses

www.atmosenergy.com

Company Overview

Drivers for Change

Legacy systems not well designed for our Contact Center agents

Back office work is manually intensive

Dispatch operations demanding more than current version supports

Disjointed reporting and analytic tools

Changes to current systems take long and are expensive

Legacy systems no longer supported by the vendor

Project Objectives

Configurable system screen flows, data layouts and reference

information that facilitate quick and accurate calls.

Robust customer self service tools for simple transactions.

Intelligent revenue transaction processing that limits manual

exceptions.

Service dispatch tools that allow optimized service order

scheduling and routing.

Reporting and analytics to proactively manage productivity.

Standardized processes where possible to simplify and potentially

automate work activities.

A flexible systems architecture that allows enhancements to be

made more quickly and efficiently.

Guiding Principles for the Project Guiding Principles

Standardization

Simplicity

Scalable

Maximize the System

Scope

Schedule

Budget

Communication

Live AtmoSpirit

High Level Project Scope

SAP CR&B

Customer Information System

- Call Center

- Billing & Rates

- Credit & Collections

- Sales & Marketing

SAP

Business Intelligence

- Executive Dashboards

- Operational Reports

- Transactional Reports

Customer Self Service

- Aligned with CIS functions

- Standard, Integrated

- Flexible, Scalable

ClickSchedule/SAP Mobility

- Scheduling - Dispatch - Device Management

Project Timeline

28 Month Implementation

Single Go-Live, May 1, 2013

8 Mock Data Conversions (including 3 full dress rehearsals)

Long, Iterative Test Cycle

Very Tight Scope Control

Q1 2011 Q2 2011 Q3 2011 Q4 2011 Q1 2012 Q2 2012 Q3 2012 Q4 2012 Q1 2013 Q2 2013

2011 2012 2013

Analyze

Design

Build

Test

Operational Readiness

Test & Deploy

Lessons Learned

BPEM governance

Right size what you are validating on from the beginning

Train your employees on how they will perform their job.

Don’t just train on system screens.

Focus on your supervisors – make sure they understand

the new system and processes and know how to manage

in the new environment

Have a team solely focused on exception processing and

management!

Exception Management – Main

Challenges

After go live of a new SAP system, there are 3 primary issues that

manifest and must be efficiently managed and resolved:

Usability

Issue Identification / Reporting

Exceptions

These issues lead to:

Delays in realizing the benefits of implementing a new customer

relationship and billing system and maximizing your investment

Lesson Learned 1 – Don’t forget

Exception Management Back office personnel at Atmos are extremely pleased with BDEx's

solution which provides:

Unique customer centric view

Significant reduction of average handling time (AHT) for exception resolution

Immediate effectiveness and efficiency gains by users who are new to the system

Ability to close all issues associated with a particular Business Partner from a

central location

BDEx's automatic closure conditions

“I find BDEx to be a wonderful tool. It’s like having a mini-assistant to help you get

to where you need to go faster without having to remember all of the t-codes. When

I’m working on any type of research, we always go to BDEx first so that we can see

everything and have the ability to take whatever action is needed straight from

there.”

Lesson Learned 2 – You’re going to

need a way to quickly dig out! OOPS! That change created how many BPEM cases?!?!?

The combination of BDEx and MDR-TOR (Tolerance Optimization

Reporting) provides post configuration change benefits to:

Quickly deal with and reduce large numbers of exceptions

(implausible and outsorts)

Close the associated BPEM cases

The standard exception reporting provided by BDEx has made

management reporting a lot better and easier

“Great tool in being able to see all objects related to each other in one

location (i.e. you can pull up a contract and see all the BMD and TMD that

goes with it such as contract account, installation, premise,). Being able to

see previous work history is nice so that you can quickly see past issues on

the account, along with who was working it.”

Lesson Learned 3 – What If, What

Now? Continuous Improvement

MDR-TOR provides pre-configuration analysis to determine how a

configuration change would increase or decrease case creation

Greater intelligence to help us analyze our exceptions to reduce

exception counts via configuration refinement

Helps to avoid unnecessary exception back-logs

“Basis Technologies has been one of the best companies to work

with. They have been very responsive, easy to work with and

accommodating with client specific requests. They are truly a partner

in every sense of the word."

Questions

Thank You!!!

Contact Information

Brooke Warren – [email protected]

Basis Technologies

Booth #30

Karl Pringle – [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

A collaboration of:

Brooke Warren

Atmos Energy

[email protected]