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posted on 18 June 2008 09:22

n17 June 2008 - npower, one of the UK’s largest electricity suppliers, has been using a document management and archiving system from Macro 4 to support its Core Consolidation Programme, a strategy to rationalise the energy company’s billing and customer service operations onto one centralised platform.

Macro 4’s Columbus document management software has helped npower to archive and maintain availability to key legacy billing data from five million customers, allowing the records to be accessible along with current customer information via the company’s centralised strategic billing and customer service system called CIB (Customer Information and Billing).

The legacy information was originally located on disparate billing systems at a variety of separate geographical sites as a result of previous mergers and acquisitions at npower, which today comprises the former electricity and gas supply businesses of MEB, Calortex, Yorkshire Electricity and Northern Electric and Gas.

“We were operating four core billing systems at different locations, each producing millions of customer documents a year, as well as around twelve smaller systems. Maintaining all of the separate systems demanded significant IT and administrative effort, “ explained Trevor Abbott, Senior Support Analyst at npower.

“We knew that decommissioning these systems and consolidating the billing infrastructure would increase efficiency and help us to deliver a consistently high standard of service to all of our customers. One of the challenges of consolidation was finding a simple way to retain the information held on our original systems and keep it easily accessible,” explained Abbott.

“Billing systems contain a wealth of useful information in addition to billing data - including meter readings, customer histories, correspondence and customer service notes, which is essential for customer relationship management. We are also legally obliged to hold on to much of this data for many years.”

npower wanted to avoid migrating all of the legacy data onto its new central billing system, which would have been complex and time-consuming. Instead, it opted for the Macro 4 archiving solution, which would provide the capacity to store seven years historical data for the five million customers being migrated. Columbus met npower’s requirements in terms of being easy to implement, yet able to cope with the individual data formats produced by the different systems.

Once extracted into Columbus, the data is compressed, enabling billions of records to be stored cost-effectively on a single server. The information can then be accessed quickly over npower’s network, within any number of business applications, including the CIB system and can be converted automatically into a range of compatible viewing formats.

npower now intends to use Columbus as the online archive for historical data from the current CIB billing system, enabling system performance to be maintained as customer numbers and data volumes increase. Abbott was very positive about the benefits:

“Macro 4 has given us an incredibly simple, flexible way of addressing the legacy data challenge. The Columbus system has helped us to rationalise our billing environment, free up manpower from maintaining legacy systems and give customers a more responsive service. Moving forward, Columbus is our strategic choice for all corporate data archiving.”

About Macro 4

Macro 4 is a global software company that helps organisations to improve the performance of their critical business applications by making the complex simple. Macro 4’s solutions for application performance, document management and application availability are easy to use, fast to implement and deliver value quickly in even the most complex IT environments.

US and European subsidiaries and a network of international business partners represent the company in every major market worldwide. Macro 4 is headquartered in the UK and listed on the London Stock Exchange.

Macro 4’s Document Management solutions capture, store, present and deliver business-critical documents electronically and physically in the most appropriate way to increase the efficiency of key processes such as SAP™ ERP, application decommissioning and customer service via the Internet or call centres.

About npower
npower is one of Britain's largest electricity suppliers and supplies gas, electricity and related services to 6.6 million customers across the UK.

^{[Formatted by Majid Soltani.]}