Snohomish County Public Utility District teams up with Ecodocx to upgrade OpenText Document Presentment, redesign and rationalize customer letters and bills in redesign letters and bills in Empower and Content Author.*
Established in 1936, Snohomish County Public Utility District (SnoPUD) is the second-largest publicly owned utility in the Pacific Northwest, and the largest of 28 PUDs in the state of Washington. SnoPUD serves more than 350,000 electricity customers and 21,000 water customers.
Snohomish County PUD is committed to delivering power and water to its customers in a safe, sustainable, and reliable manner.
As a not-for-profit organization, Snohomish County PUD is focused on providing quality service to its customers, prudently managing costs, and continually looking for opportunities to improve the safety, efficiency and effectiveness of its business.
In this video, Marc Rosson, Enterprise Architect at Snohomish County PUD and Andrew Coughlan, Application Architect at Snohomish County PUD talk about the OpenText Document Presentment Upgrade, Letter, and Bill Redesign project.
SnoPUD teamed up with Ecodocx, a long-term OpenText implementation partner, in order to deliver this project in a timely manner by following industry best practices.
Snohomish County PUD desires to always run on the latest, supported versions of all software solutions in order to stay compliant with industry standards and regulations.
The company realized that the product support lifecycle for their OpenText Document Presentment (StreamServe) 5.6.2 solution was ending and it was time to upgrade to a newer supported version. By the time SnoPUD decided to start the project the latest by SAP-approved version was Document Presentment 16.6.x.
As a first step, Snohomish PUD initiated a template clean-up. Once started, the internal team quickly encountered some functionality gaps, as well as a significantly different implementation logic between the previous version and the new version (e.g. StreamStudio Composition Center vs. StoryBoard & WorkShop). SnoPUD realized the need to create logic for certain parts of the application from scratch.
In addition, the customer service representatives (CSR) at Snohomish County PUD increasingly struggled with the old customer letters developed in Composition Center. The old templates and the logic behind them didn’t make any sense and using them for addressing incoming and outgoing customer requests, became quite time-consuming and labor-intensive.
And, last but not least, SnoPUD wanted to redesign and modernize its bills and batch correspondence. The goal was to get rid of all legacy templates in StoryTeller and PageOut and redesign all bills and letters using Exstream Designer.
“Ecodocx has been a great implementor for us. They converted and rationalized our legacy letters. They helped us clean out our OpenText environment.”
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Marc Rosson,
Enterprise Architect at Snohomish County PUD
In order to save time and make the most of their strategic investment, SnoPUD requested Ecodocx to do an extensive audit of their OpenText environment.
SnoPUD has chosen Ecodocx for this and the next OpenText-related tasks because Ecodocx had extensive experience in supporting and designing OpenText solutions and has supported many similar utility implementations and upgrades using the new OpenText Exstream tools.
In addition, Ecodocx had experience providing support and services for the SnoPUD’s Streamserve environment which uniquely qualified the team to assist with this upgrade and meet the schedule requirements for related projects.
After executing the audit, Ecodocx recommended to:
SnoPUD hired Ecodocx to do the upgrade, as well as the letter, bill, and batch correspondence redesign. By working hand in hand, Ecodocx and SnoPUD were able to significantly reduce the number of templates and enormously optimize the usability of customer letters. Ecodocx implemented Empower and Content Author (Document Presentment Live) and integrated the Document Presentment Live bundle into SAP CRM for a seamless letter creation and distribution experience.
“We are staffed for break/fix only. We are not staffed for a massive lift and shift, like this. Therefore, we used Ecodocx extensively [within this project]. And we’ve been very very happy with the work they’ve done.
Andrew Coughlan,
Application Architect at Snohomish County PUD
The optimized look and feel of all written customer communications (letters, correspondence) will improve call center efficiency and reduce customer call times.
The automation of mundane, error-prone manual steps will minimize the daily process of modifying, approving, and maintaining customer letters to a minimum.
Implementing a newer version of Document Presentment Live will improve integration into SAP CRM business processes.
Reduced IT involvement by allowing business users to maintain old and create new interactive documents in the same environment while reusing existing interactive application designs ( based on user role or responsibility area).
Allowed flexibility across the user community to support multiple devices, browsers, and environments.
*Disclaimer: At the moment of writing this case study the project is still in progress.
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