Powercom Engineers against extending faulty billing system
October 02, 2012 03:35 PM
By Vinod Gupta
PATIALA: PSEB Engineers’ Association has cautioned the Punjab Government against extending the faulty billing system to 47 other towns of Punjab.

The billing system for PSPCL consumers has collapsed completely at Patiala . The bills are not sent in time and even the delayed bills are faulty leading to numerous complaints by consumers. The new system introduced at Patiala and Mohali besides causing huge revenue loss to PSPCL is causing immense hardships to the consumers.

SPANCO was given the work for improving the metering, billing & collection module and customer care module. SPANCO had teaming arrangement with Accenture who have sufficient experience of rolling out customized SAP project in other distribution utilities of countries. Now Accenture is not part of project.

The Association has alleged that SPANCO is the system integrator but the company on its own does not have adequate experienced manpower . The project is experiencing problems from the very beginning mainly due to impractical and over ambitious planning on the part of the team handling the project .

Te new billing software has not been tested properly and thoroughly before the first town was made 'GO LIVE'. This resulted in numerous billing related problems causing untold misery and harassment to the consumers.

SPANCO tried to fix the problems at their own with untrained manpower resulting in more errors. Besides billing related problems, the new billing, system is causing revenue loss worth crore of rupees to PSPCL due to wrong billing, delay in billing and wrong processes due to negligence of the company. The project has totally collapsed on the ground.

Association demands that the project should immediately be handed over to a group of expert engineers from the distribution, billing and IT fields who can steer it successfully on the ground with the help of Accenture .