Npower has been forced to bring in service provider partners to help resolve disruption to customer-facing systems after encountering problems with its large-scale SAP rollout.
Many of the energy provider’s 5.4 million customers began to experience problems as account details were transferred from legacy in-house systems onto an SAP platform in 2011. Issues included billing delays, problems with the creation of accounts and direct debit payment schemes not being set up properly. A backlog of complaints also created longer call waiting times, with regulator Ofgem highlighting a “serious deterioration in service levels” in the past year, prompting an apology from npower CEO Paul Massara.
The project was originally aimed at improving administration of millions of customer accounts, with the IT system covering billing, customer service and financial systems. IBM was contracted as the systems integrator for the project, with account migration reaching completion in August 2012.
However, Forrester analyst Duncan Jones said that the stakeholders should have expected to encounter some technical problems with such a large, transformative SAP project. As a result, customers, vendors and service partners need to ensure that project contracts give the flexibility needed to react to unplanned changes during and after the implementation process, he said.
“These are complex projects involving a lot of changes to the way that people are doing things, and there is risk involved that you have to mitigate,” he said.
“They [npower] should have foreseen this, SAP should have foreseen this and IBM should have foreseen this.”
An npower spokesperson said that the billing and account problems were the result of a number of “complex and varied issues” due to the size of the project, and the company is currently working to resolve the IT issues.
via Npower calls in service partners after troubled SAP rollout disrupts billing systems ( – Software ).
Npower calls in service partners after troubled SAP rollout disrupts billing systems
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