Maintenance and Technical Support for Customer Information and Water Billing System for City Water Department
Project Description
The Billings and Customer Service Department at a major midwest city water department converted from a Mainframe-Based Billing System to the BANNER Customer Information/Billing System (BANNER CIS) in September of 2000. BANNER CIS (also known as Advantage CIS or Indus Customer Suite), provides comprehensive customer accounting facilities for the city’s water and sewer services. BANNER CIS maintains records of customers (approx: 600,000), premises, services, accounts, meter readings, inventory, and more; and provides the means to record and bill for services in a cost-effective, efficient, and manageable way. SDI has teamed with Indus Corporation and assumed major IT production support functions for the billing application and associated interfaces. SDI assists in the development of new product enhancements in BANNER test environments and provides maintenance and support in the BANNER production environment.
Project Goals
SDI originally assisted in the implementation of the BANNER CIS System. This complex project has had a significant impact on the manner in which the city department conducts its business. The new billing system continues to provide city employees with improved access to integrated information allowing staff to serve customers in the most efficient manner possible. SDI and Indus are tasked with providing day-to-day maintenance of the customer information/billing system, and supporting new CDWM IT initiatives.
SDI Services
- Managing citywide IT initiatives/projects
- Facilitating requirement gathering sessions with city representatives and outside vendors
- Developing functional design documents
- Developing interfaces from BANNER to other city and third party applications
- Performing quality assurance testing for modifications and enhancements to BANNER 3.2/BANNER 3.2 Web
- Providing resolution on application defects reported by the helpdesk
- Providing production support of several interfaces to the BANNER CIS System including; meter reading, payment processing, billing, collections, and service order.
Project Results
SDI continues to update/modify on-site systems that help the city water department improve customer service and attain maximum profitability by:
- Reducing overhead costs
- Achieving a return on certain IT investments as benefits overcame transition costs
- Reaping business value on time and on budget within months from the launch of new and/or modified application functionality