Team Avanade Project Total 17 Consultants. Accenture Business Services for Utilities Project Total 3 Consultants

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1 CUSTOMER CASE STUDY Avanade helps Accenture Business Services for Utilities build a unique application Automating a manual system gives this company a strategic advantage now and for the future. Creating a proprietary application to streamline an enormous back office task is giving Accenture Business Services for Utilities a real edge in their very competitive industry. Avanade s unparalleled skills with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 and innovative application of.net technologies has provided the organization with a powerful tool to help lower costs for clients. It has also become a tool with which to showcase the company s innovation when selling business process outsourcing to future prospects. There s no question about the value of this solution, Oliver Grüter-Andrew, Accenture Business Services for Utilities Vice-President of Business Services Technology. Industry Geography Size Business Process Outsourcing Canada More than 3300 employees across North America, operating multiple call centers 24/7 across five time zones, producing 50 million bills and conducting 30 million meter-readings annually. Team Avanade Project Total 17 Consultants Accenture Business Services for Utilities Project Total 3 Consultants Accenture Project Total 2 Consultants Technology Avanade Assets Microsoft.NET Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Microsoft Active Directory Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Microsoft SQL Reporting Services 2000 Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Microsoft Internet Information Server 6.0 Avanade Connected Architecture.NET (ACA.NET)

2 Situation The expense of manually handling and reporting an enormous back office task triggers a search for an innovative solution. Business process outsourcing is a rapidly growing, very competitive environment, explained John Lowson, Vice President of Revenue Cycle Operations for Accenture Business Services for Utilities. In order to grow in this environment, we must continually find ways to offer significant cost reductions for our clients. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies exist to improve productivity and efficiency for their clients, while greatly reducing their costs. Thanks to strong business leadership, Accenture Business Services for Utilities has a laser-focused vision of where to improve and streamline their processes and the strategic tools they need to help them get where they want to go. Accenture Business Services for Utilities is a one-to-many BPO that handles meter-tocash processing for more than 20 utility companies. They do meter readings, input data into the utilities customer billing systems, handle all customer service in short, their employees service the entire lifecycle of the customer facing part of the utilities. They also handle all of the IT support the application management and development for all of the IT that supports the customer care cycle. The Avanade people were professional, dedicated individuals who always put our interests first. I can t tell you how pleased our team is to have this solution deployed. Luba Tzotzis Accenture Business Services for Utilities Department Manager Each of these utility companies has their own large and complex customer billing system. And the most complicated, labor-intensive tasks within those billing systems are the exceptions. An exception is anything that needs attention outside of the normal flow of customer billing: a wrong meter reading, a bad credit card, service that was not properly canceled, etc. Thousands of exceptions pour out of this BPO s clients billing systems every day. To manage this large task, Accenture Business Services for Utilities employs a team of nearly 300 people to work the exceptions through the process to completion. Since most exception processing was done manually, the process could be slow and arduous. Also, managing, tracking workload and workflow, and analyzing productivity were difficult. The account service representatives themselves had to track the amount of time it took them to resolve their exceptions, an imprecise way of determining productivity. According to John Lowson, It was hard to get a consistent overview of the inflow of work and the backlogs each day, and even harder to understand the team s productivity against different types of exceptions. In seeking ways to lower costs, management knew they had to automate the process for handling exceptions. If the back office could gather the exceptions electronically, they could manage them better; they could more easily track, measure and generate reports on them; and they could move workload around to hundreds of people across thousands of miles to ensure the quickest and most efficient response to every exception. Automating this process was a key to cutting costs and offering clients improved service for less money. To achieve that goal, they would need to implement a solution that would work across any and every customer billing platform of their current and prospective clients. Accenture Business Services for Utilities went out in search of a pre-packaged workflow software product. Everything they found required an enormous investment of money, yet still would have required a large amount of customization to be effective. One key issue was the way workflow was defined. Most workflow software automates the step-by-step distribution of information to various people or departments, who act upon that information and send it on to the next step. However, this company required a workflow application that would handle the routing of their exceptions to the right Account Representatives. What they really needed was a better way to manage the flow of work.

3 As Richard von Hagen, General Manager for Avanade Canada, recalled, Accenture Business Services for Utilities realized that by building their own application that would allow rapid integration of billing systems to their environment, they could reduce their costs, reduce required resources, and streamline their exception processes. This application would give them a strategic advantage in the market. Solution With the client showing strong business leadership, Avanade creates an innovative way to automate, lower costs, and improve service. Accenture Business Services for Utilities believed that Microsoft had the technology to help them improve their service and lower the cost of providing their operations. From there, it was an easy decision to choose Avanade. Through their existing partnership and in previous engagements together, Avanade had proven that they are the premier technology integrator for Microsoft enterprise solutions, and experts in.net application development. Avanade was presented with a series of challenges. The first was integration how could all of the exceptions from the various customer billing systems be integrated into one system? The next was the management of the workflow, automating the routing of exceptions for processing. The solution Avanade created was named the Workflow Management Application (WMA). The WMA utilizes Microsoft s BizTalk Server 2004 as well as.net technologies. BizTalk 2004, which debuted in market just one month before the project got underway, is the integration hub of the architecture. It provides enormous flexibility, as it can interface with a multitude of different systems. In the Workflow Management Application, BizTalk first interfaces with various legacy systems to pull exceptions from those systems. Then it feeds the exceptions into the Business Rules Engine (see sidebar for a more complete explanation). Avanade chose the BizTalk Server Business Rules Engine to accomplish many of the decision-making factors within the application. The Business Rules Engine (BRE), supplied with BizTalk Server 2004, enables you to build, test, and deploy flexible rules that support your business processes. It is made up of a number of.net components, tools, and wizards that provide design-time support for building business rules, as well as a runtime environment for executing the rules. At runtime, a sophisticated forward-chaining inference engine processes the rules and takes the actions specified. Avanade s implementation of the BRE prioritizes the work in queues based on defined business rules about the utility company, each exception, and each of the account service representatives who may end up processing the exception. In short, the BRE routes the work items to the appropriate account service representative according to their availability and skill set. BizTalk Server For the Workflow Management Application, BizTalk Server 2004 can call a web service which will then query a system and provide a data-set back in the form of an XML file; it can do straight file transfer via FTP; it can go out on a scheduled basis to an Avanade-built custom Microsoft Exchange Server connector to extract s from an box and convert them to XML files for processing; and it can do a straight database query to get exception information from an antiquated DOS 3.3 based db III application. And that s just the tip of the iceberg of BizTalk s integration capabilities, according to Wayne Kack, Avanade s project manager for the Workflow Management Application. After pulling the exceptions from the various systems, BizTalk transforms and translates the different exception types into a single, unified view of an exception message to be fed into the Business Rules Engine. The unified view represents a subset of the data from all the different systems, and includes information about the source system and the transformations and calculations that were made along the way. While BizTalk is a key tool to integrate Accenture Business Services for Utilities current clients systems, its real value may well be seen in the future, interfacing with whatever systems prospective clients may be running.

4 Avanade used both BizTalk and.net to build the BRE implementation, relying on existing BizTalk functionality augmented with customdeveloped code. While many of the business rules were created using BizTalk, some were simply too complex and had to be written in C# for.net. To allow even more business logic to be implemented, Avanade designed pipeline components in.net to inject business processes and code inside of the messaging pipeline. Both the BizTalk and.net parts of the BRE are configurable I m looking forward to working and allow for rules to be changed with minimal expense. with Avanade on similar projects In building the web application, Avanade leveraged their Avanade Connected in other functional areas of our Architecture for.net asset (see sidebar) which allowed them to use principles of a Service Oriented Architecture. That means the plumbing can not only handle the companies. business needs today, but will also be able to handle whatever requirements John Lowson Accenture Business Services for Utilities might have in the future. They can Accenture Business Services for concentrate on creating business logic without worrying about major overhauls to the Utilities Vice President of Revenue Cycle Operations underlying technical platform. Avanade Connected Architectures for.net (ACA.NET), a framework to accelerate application development, also decreased the need for custom development, cutting hundreds of hours of development time, and providing Accenture Business Services for Utilities with best practices for secure development of new reliable, scalable application functions. During the development and testing phases, Avanade took full advantage of another innovative technology. To simulate multiple environments with multiple servers as part of each environment, yet keep costs under control, they tapped Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 to setup virtual hosted environments. Virtual Server allowed Avanade to host 24 virtual servers on just three physical servers, saving tens of thousands of dollars on additional physical servers, as well as outsourced technology service providers monthly fees for maintaining and supporting those physical devices. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 proved a flexible, much lower cost alternative for development and testing. However, in production, the Workflow Management Application utilizes two physical BizTalk servers, two physical Web servers, and two physical SQL servers. Avanade Value Unmatched expertise on the Microsoft platform and a complete understanding of the end user makes the difference for this solution. To build the Workflow Management Application for Accenture Business Services for Utilities, Avanade brought its unmatched application development and integration expertise to get as much out of the technologies as possible. BizTalk Server 2004 was released to market a month prior to the project launch, which meant that there was very little practical experience to draw upon. That s where Avanade s relationship with Microsoft was critical. By getting early and unfettered access to the technology, Avanade s consultants had developed an expertise with BizTalk 2004 before it was released. In fact, the director of Avanade Canada s Enterprise Integration Center of Excellence had become a BizTalk Server 2004 guru, speaking about it at seminars all over the world. At a time when many in the industry hadn t yet seen BizTalk Server 2004, Avanade was able to provide their customer with all of the knowledge and experience necessary to get the most from this new technology.

5 According to John Lowson, The opportunities to take advantage of our scale are with tools like the WMA, automation that we can layer on top of our clients underlying systems. The success of those types of initiatives comes from knowing how to build effective interfaces with those underlying systems. That was the value of Avanade. Key to the success of this application was the acceptance by the end users. To increase that acceptance, Avanade gave the tool a familiar look and made it easy for users to log on. Much of the WMA was custom-built in.net by Avanade, including the most visible component of the solution, the end user interface. However, since the goal was to make the representatives and their managers comfortable with the way the work was presented to them, they didn t want the interface to have the look of a web-based browser. Avanade, with their deep.net skills, was able to create the interface to look and behave more like a Microsoft Windows application, giving the users features and functions that they were more accustomed to. ACA.NET Proven solutions are born of discipline, insight, and a passion for building things right. Avanade delivers this advantage to its clients through a tool-set called the Avanade Connected Architecture for.net or ACA.NET. Built by the industry s leading technologists, these components trim hundreds of hours from standard project timelines. ACA.NET and the Avanade Connected Methodologies also reduce risk, create faster time-to-market, and provide greater functionality. In addition, Avanade made the application authenticate via Active Directory, which allows Windows Integrated Authentication for the end user. The user can sit at his or her desktop, click on the icon and quickly be authenticated without being challenged by logon screens and passwords. Oliver Grüter-Andrew, Vice-President of Business Services Technology remarked, Avanade is driven to be the best.net consultants in the market. We hired them because we were convinced of that. Results A system, unique in the industry, replaces a labor-intensive and time-consuming process to reduce costs, upgrade reporting and help demonstrate continued innovation to customers. The technology delivers exactly what we wanted, was John Lowson s assessment. Indeed, deployment of Phase 1, Release 1 is successfully integrating Accenture Business Services for Utilities back office with their many disparate customer systems, automating volumes of work which previously had been done manually. Today, reporting is more accurate and offers much more data. Internally, managers have more insight into increasing efficiency. As Luba Tzotzis, Department Manager, noted, Not many businesses out there can measure their back-office work like we do now. As a result of that type of consistency and accuracy in reporting, they are now better able to match supply and demand from a staffing perspective. It s all about staffing correctly, John Lowson explained. It s about seeing the productivity so we get a more accurate picture of how long it takes to get through the work in each of the different queues. Then we ll be able to staff more efficiently and find ways to continue to improve processes, training, and coaching. In the first three and a half months after the deployment, the Workflow Management Application successfully processed 70,643 exceptions, a number the company can confidently use to accurately determine their staffing needs. This was a business-driven project from the start, with cost reduction being the ultimate goal. However, there are additional benefits that Accenture Business Services for Utilities is already realizing from the WMA. This project is the latest of several they have designed to reduce costs of future operations, allowing them to propose more attractive deals. Plus, the application itself is a great marketing tool and is already being showcased to prospects. With the investment they ve made to easily integrate new clients into their

6 environment and deliver more value more quickly, this company believes they now have one more unique capability that will help increase their growth. About Avanade Avanade is the leading technology integrator specializing in the Microsoft enterprise platform. Our people help customers around the world maximize their IT investment and create comprehensive solutions that drive business results. For more information about our services, please visit