Snohomish County Public Utility District teams up with Ecodocx to redesign and rationalize bills and customer correspondence using OpenText Document Presentment for SAP (Exstream, Empower, and Content Author)
Established in 1936, Snohomish County Public Utility District (SnoPUD) is the second-largest publicly owned utility in the Pacific Northwest, and the largest of 28 PUDs in the state of Washington. SnoPUD serves more than 350,000 electricity customers and 21,000 water customers.
Snohomish County PUD is committed to delivering power and water to its customers in a safe, sustainable, and reliable manner.
As a not-for-profit organization, Snohomish County PUD is focused on providing quality service to its customers, prudently managing costs, and continually looking for opportunities to improve the safety, efficiency and effectiveness of its business.
“We are staffed for break/fix only. We are not staffed for a massive lift and shift, like this. Therefore, we used Ecodocx extensively [within this project]. And we’ve been very very happy with the work they’ve done. The batch processing time for bill generation was reduced from up to 5 hours to less than 1 hour per server, resulting in an 80% reduction in the end-to-end billing process.”
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Andrew Coughlan,
Application Architect at Snohomish County PUD
In this video, Marc Rosson, Enterprise Architect at Snohomish County PUD and Andrew Coughlan, Application Architect at Snohomish County PUD talk about the OpenText Document Presentment project.
SnoPUD teamed up with Ecodocx, a long-term OpenText implementation partner, in order to deliver this project in a timely manner by following industry best practices.
Snohomish County PUD strives to work with the latest, fully supported software versions to ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations. When the company realized that the product support lifecycle for its billing and letter generation solution, StreamServe, was coming to an end, the District decided to move to a more modern, supported solution.
In addition to the impending lifecycle expiration, SnoPUD encountered challenges with StreamServe. They needed to implement interval billing, which required a redesign of their current bill. However, their version of StreamServe lacked the required on-demand letter generation features the team wanted to leverage.
Additionally, customer-facing business users struggled with the lack of flexibility of billing and non-bill documents, hindering the ability to send personalized and compliant communications. The complexity of the templates required extensive IT involvement, making the maintenance process time-consuming and inefficient.
“Ecodocx has been a great implementor for us. They converted and rationalized our legacy letters. They helped us clean out our OpenText environment.
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Marc Rosson,
Enterprise Architect at Snohomish County PUD
To address these challenges, SnoPUD partnered with Ecodocx to conduct a thorough assessment of their solution landscape and system use cases. An in-depth analysis was performed on every bill version and letter type to identify improvement opportunities.
After careful consideration, SnoPUD decided to leverage OpenText’s Exstream Designer, Content Author, and Empower Editor to redesign bills and implement on-demand customer correspondence. These solutions offered a more user-friendly interface, advanced features, and improved security, enabling business users to create and manage customer correspondence on the fly seamlessly within the SAP application user interface with minimal IT involvement.
The implementation of OpenText’s customer experience (CX) solution and the redesign efforts yielded significant improvements for SnoPUD.
As part of the new bill redesign, SnoPUD was able to reduce the end-to-end billing process by 80%. Bill batch generation is now taking just 1 hour instead of 5
The customer letter redesign project reduced the number of templates and maintenance efforts by 30%, and, at the same time, improved the look and feel of communications.
By utilizing OpenText’s Document Presentment (Exstream) solution, business users gained the ability to create customer correspondence through a user-friendly interface seamlessly integrated into SAP.
Authorized users can modify document templates, minimizing IT involvement and empowering the business to maintain interactive documents within the same environment, while supporting multiple devices, browsers, and environments.
Overall, SnoPUD’s adoption of the latest OpenText Document Presentment (Exstream) solution led to improved system usability, performance, and future-proofing of their solution landscape. It enhanced the customer and business user experience while enabling the IT team to focus on more critical tasks.
Through their partnership with Ecodocx, Snohomish County PUD achieved true digital transformation, driving customer loyalty while relieving IT headaches.
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