Automated Utility bills payments solution for Oracle Customers
- 2. Utility Bills Payment – Tiring Job Problem Statement A client of ours in Middle East in Real Estate Management sector needed an automated process in Oracle EBS for booking the expenses of electricity and water utility bills corresponding to meters installed at different cost centers (Projects). Business users had to spend more than 5+ days of manual effort for mapping the amount of different meters with correct cost centers and then summarize a report to be sent to finance department for payment. The invoices had to be created manually thereafter for payments 2
- 3. Use Case A monthly redundant task to allocate the Electricity and Water charges from main bill to various apartments and shops based on meter readings and mapping of these meters to corresponding cost centers / locations / projects. Thereafter the manual creation of invoice to facilitate the distribution of expense and payment on time to the Electricity and Water authority. Our client had to spend more than 8 man days per month to complete this task considering the huge volume of apartments and shops they were managing3
- 4. Offered Solution • User interface was designed for capturing the mapping of meter no. with cost centers. • A web interface was designed to facilitate the user for uploading of monthly bill sheet on server. • Once the sheet gets uploaded a concurrent request runs in background that reads the data from uploaded sheet and dumps it into a custom staging table in Oracle database. • BI Publisher report was developed that calculates the monthly bill amount against each meter and shows it according to the business requirement. Report shows the detailed as well as summarized version of bill amount according to the cost centers. • Business takes the required approvals on the printed sheet from system and forwards it to finance department for payment. 4
- 5. Offered Solution - Assumptions • Business has the details of mapping of different meters installed at different locations (apartments / shops) which corresponds to a particular cost center / project / segment in the chart of accounts • Business receives the monthly bill sheet in a machine readable format preferably excel from the utility providing entity. • Business gets the updated format in case authority makes any changes to format. The same is communicated to IT team maintaining the same 5
- 6. Value for Business • The process from uploading the file to generation of report, approval and invoice creation takes not more than 30 mins. Drastic reduction from 8 man days effort to 30 mins and huge cost saving • Correct Expense Booking : It helped finance department to book the expenses properly on correct cost centers at the time of invoicing. • Zero Human Induced Errors : It reduced the human errors to 0 that were introduced due to human intervention earlier while preparing the bill payments from sheet that came from authority. It also gave a correct picture of bill arrears amount which earlier was hard to reconcile 6
- 7. Some Snapshots of current solution 7 User Interface for Uploading the file provided by authorities
- 8. Some Snapshots of current solution 8 BI Report Scheduling and Output Summarized O/P
- 9. Some Snapshots of current solution 9 Detailed Report which provides input to Invoice Creation
- 10. Enhancements in Cloud Solution Manual approval on sheet could be removed by integrating the process with Oracle workflow. Manual invoicing part could be removed by auto generating the payables invoice in system after final approval from finance manager. A notification could be sent to business users for verification after the payables invoice generation. Solution has been extended to include multiple utility bills payment modules like phone bills, broadband, monthly vehicles maintenance, petrol consumption bills etc. 10 1 2 3 4
- 11. How can we partner in your journey • Implementation / Support for Oracle Cloud Solutions (Financials, HCM, Procurement, Projects, Inventory and OM) • Custom Bolt-Ons and Industry Specific Solutions using PAAS • Support / Upgrade / Testing services for e-Business Suite • Health Check, Audit for ongoing or implemented solutions 11
- 12. Connect With Us Chandigarh : Delivery Center of Excellence E-196 Phase 8-B, Industrial Area, Mohali Contact Number :- +91-8725097121, +91-8725078786 Email : radhesh.soni@emiconglobal.com business@emiconglobal.com Facebook : emiconconsulting Linkedin : emicon-advisory-services-llp