PSPCL billing software faulty, CLaIM engineers
DP correspondent

Patiala

The Punjab State Electricity Board (PSEB) Engineers’ Association has cautioned Punjab government regarding extending the faulty SAP software of the Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) to 47 other towns of the state. The new system introduced at Patiala and Mohali besides causing huge revenue loss to the PSPCL is causing immense hardships to the consumers. The erstwhile Punjab State Electricity Board had awarded Rs 350 crore ERP project to SPANCO, Mumbai during June, 2010 for providing on line services to the consumers having population more than 30,000 covering the ERP solution for the business processes related to the distribution works.

An association spokesman here on Thursday said the most important module under this project is the metering, billing and collection module and customer care module. At the time of tendering, SPANCO has teaming arrangement with Accenture, which has sufficient experience of rolling out SAP project in other distribution utilities for customising SAP software to business needs.

The project was started in July 2010 and Patiala was the first town made go live w.e.f. December 30, 2011 after repeated overshooting of original target date of April, 2011. It was subsequently started in six other towns out of which Mohali is the biggest town. Although SPANCO is the system integrator but the company on its own does not have any experience of handling billing related software, especially in the distribution business. The project has been experiencing problems from the very beginning mainly due to impractical and over ambitious project and inadequacy of trained manpower with SPANCO for the successful implementation of the project. The the project involves the total shift from the earlier billing software to the new one in 47 towns in the state .