CASE STUDIES
RWE nPower Business
Sector
Utilities – Electricity
Background
The leadership team at npower Business created some ambitious targets to restructure cash collection and customer services management procedures as well as centralise and automate everything within RWE npower’s industrial and commercial arm. They hired CVG to support their goals.
The Challenge
Being a Utility company, npower’s challenge was the volume of ERP and legacy systems they had within their business division. The analysis demonstrated not only the need to adopt new processes and practices, but also the need for an overhaul of systems so that the company could cope with the required process changes, and as a result, be in a good position to improve their customer service, cost levels and cashflows.
“The system went live in October/ November, targeting overdue debt and within six weeks of going live our client managed to collect £4.2m of additional cash flow,” he continues. “Within a four-week period, they had two times payback on their investment.”
Results
The system went live in October/ November, targeting overdue debt and within six weeks of going live our client managed to collect £4.2m of additional cash flow. Within a four-week period, they had two times payback on their investment. Based on positive early results due to the tireless work from the npower leadership team, the global Utility delivered an additional cash flow improvement of £15m within the following 6 months. RWE npower’s early successes with The Customer Value Group has therefore encouraged them to extend its usage within their organisation to also include customer disputes, customer queries, change of address, change of direct debit, etc.
Changing processes to accommodate the global Utility’s need to compete not only resulted in generating quick wins, but also allowed them to identify problem areas within their organisation which required change. “Once we’ve treated the symptoms, we work backwards to identify the root causes, and eliminate them.”
The satisfaction expressed by the global Utility speaks for itself. Says an Internal Project Manager at RWE npower: “Building a collections system in-house was possibly an option, but there was a concern that if we had tried it, there would have been a long implementation, with high costs, problems with integration, and the data would have been generally transactional (without the task management in The Customer Value Group). ”
The Customer Value Group – The Best Option
“The Customer Value Group provided the best option for a ‘black box’ turn-key solution. The Customer Value Group has a high standard of people, and general consulting skills are very well-integrated into the business.”
We went to market with an outline of our requirements and spoke to five companies,” adds the Project Sponsor. “We devised a template for assessing the relevance of each product including previous history, cost, and service offering, short-listed three, and put them forward to the project board.”
“Other products we looked at were London Bridge, Talleyman, Siebel, and Credica. We felt that The Customer Value Group provided an excellent opportunity in terms of deployment time, cost, and business customisation. There was a very strong willingness and eagerness on the part of The Customer Value Group to deliver what we needed, and we thought it a good opportunity to have something developed for our business. There is a great deal of willingness from the development team to support our requests and requirements.”
“…The Customer Value Group staff are superb, consummate professionals, and I am entirely confident about The Customer Value Group team’s understanding of their clients needs.”