The client is a leading electricity distribution company in Nigeria that serves four states for electricity distribution for a wide variety of customers like Residential, Commercial, Industrial / Maximum Demand customers, and more. The client is dependent on its traditional billing management system for metering, billing, and payments to various customers.
ClientEnergy & UtilityServicesUnified Billing SystemYear 2022
Key Challenges
- The existing billing management system wasn’t compatible with the ever-changing compliance regulations, billing models in the utility industry and wanted to upgrade their system
- Client faced challenges with the billing system that was based on Progress/4GL and ran on UNIX, which is not futuristic
- Furthermore, they had to deal with two different databases for prepaid and post-paid customers
Solution
- Sparity developed a Unified Billing System that is compatible with all types of spot billing terminals and mobile apps for more than 5 million customers, which includes prepaid and post-paid customers
- Enabled the users to access the UBS system even at remotest locations via internet as it is hosted on cloud infrastructure
- The angular library was chosen on the front end which offers faster loading than the ASPX front end
- Developed the web application framework using ASP.NET Core 2. X
- Designed web application allows easy access to users’ data and helps quickly generate the bills according to Business Units and regions
- Integrated Audit & Risk Management modules into the system to cater the needs of compliance needs
- Proposed an approach to view the billing results before actual bills are generated (trail billing) so that any discrepancies crept are corrected
- Employed MS SQL as relational DBMS for handling large data
- This facilitated the application to handle higher loads of traffic with near zero downtimes and configure out of the box integrations to fully meet requirements
- Performed execution of regression suits for the entire application
- Prioritized regression test cases and implemented automation scripts through Katalon automation studio
Benefits
- 90% reduction in manual test execution efforts
- More than 1.2 million customer data is present in one database, enabling end-to-end reporting with role-based authentication
- Implemented Automation Testing to reduce the time, and cost and improve efficiency
- UBS system implementation enabled easy reporting and helped identify the loss-making feeders’ / business units
- 40% reduction in rework through the better process standardization
- 50% improvement in the automation test coverage
