Snohomish County Public Utility District teams up with Ecodocx to upgrade OpenText Document Presentment, redesign and rationalize bills in Exstream, and redesign letters and customer correspondence in 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.
“The technical team at Ecodocx has been excellent – they’ve been responsive in challenging situations, patient as we’re learning and resolve issues very quickly. I’d like to make a special call out for Andriy who went above and beyond more times than I could keep track of to support us. The team is extremely hard working and we’d not have been successful without them. Gabriella has been great to work with on this project. She has been very flexible and yet is still willing to bring up concerns so we can work through them. She is interested in creating a great working relationship between Ecodocx and SNOPUD and does everything she can to support us.”
Steven Eaton,
Mgr. ITS Applications – B2R/SAP Dev/ECM/H2R/P2P/RPD at Snohomish County PUD
Snohomish County PUD desires to always run on the latest, supported versions of all software solutions in order to stay compliant with industry standards and regulations.
The company realized that the product support lifecycle for their OpenText Document Presentment (StreamServe) 5.6.2 solution was ending and it was time to upgrade to a newer supported version. By the time SnoPUD decided to start the project the latest by SAP-approved version was Document Presentment 16.6.x.
In addition to this, SnoPUD faced challenges with their existing document presentment solution, StreamServe. They needed to implement interval billing, which required a redesign of their current bill. However, the version of StreamServe they were using lacked the necessary functionality for ad hoc letter generation the team wanted to take advantage of.
Additionally, customer-facing business users struggled with inflexible invoice and non-invoice documents, hindering personalized and compliant communications. The complexity of the templates demanded extensive IT involvement for maintenance, leading to a time-consuming process.
“Ecodocx has been a great implementor for us. They converted and rationalized our legacy letters. They helped us clean out our OpenText environment.
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 SAP 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.
Business users are now able to create customer correspondence by taking advantage of Document Presentments’ user-friendly interface and seamless integration into SAP CRM UI.
By utilizing OpenText’s Document Presentment 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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