Eastern energy

Company: AnacompCustomer: Eastern EnergySubmitted by: Byline GroupEastern Energy (a TXU company) is now giving its customers a faster, more efficient and cost effective response to their telephone enquiries, 24 hours a day, following Anacomp’s completion of the first phase of a project to modernise its customer records and billing information system. This has replaced the original microfiche-based record and backup system for historic documents with a fully on-line electronic document management system. The new system is configured to accept in excess of 200, 000 document pages per day and after six months in operation stores over 28 million pages of information, which Eastern’s customer service representatives can access within seconds. Anacomp’s Document Management Solutions (DMS) division is providing a complete solution as an outsource service, collecting data from Eastern, processing and transforming it, and loading the document pages onto an DocLine document server at its 24-hour secure London Data Centre. Customers’ records and billing information are held on Eastern Energy’s mainframe computer system for six months and this gives its call centres agents on-screen access to current customer information within two tenths of a second.

Under the microfiche system, data was backed up daily and was the source of information older than six months, which had been purged from the mainframe. If agents needed to consult these records, they had to refer to the relevant microfiche. This meant that they could not deal with such enquiries immediately, but had to call the customer back after consulting the microfiche. Brian Holland, Eastern’s business consultant in customer services business development says:’The microfiche system was supported by open reel tapes, which had become obsolete, so we decided to leap from the oldest to the newest technology. Under the old system, it took time to retrieve information, so we always had to call customers back.

Our objective was to be in a position to deal with enquiries the first time customers called and not incur the costs of ringing them back.’The company was looking for a solution which not only addressed that problem, but would also satisfy the company in terms of response time and in allowing access to customer information to be protected by appropriate ‘ Chinese Walls’. These are needed in order to meet regulations regarding the separation of business activities and allows access to be restricted according to need. The solution also had to comply with the requirements of taxation law.’Anacomp has produced a very good solution that satisfies all our objectives,’ says Mr.

Holland. ‘ We are also pleased at the way disaster recovery is handled; everything is backed up.’ Anacomp has a back up server at its Salford Data Centre, which ensures 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year access to users in the event of a communications or system failure. Anacomp was the original provider of the microfiche system and has maintained the equipment for the last 15 years. The new system began to come on-line in June last year, with Eastern transferring microfiche files to Anacomp in batches.

These were burned to CD and were available to the system within a couple of weeks. Now files are updated overnight and available to agents the next day.