E-Billing Project
On monday, September 8th 2008 ESB Customer Supply launched your account online, new online technology designed to allow customers access to manage their accounts via the Internet. This launch marks a new venture for ESB in allowing customers direct access to data held in the SAP back end customer billing system for the first time, via integration with the web based SAP Biller Direct system.
The system was delivered by a joint business and IT E-Billing project team, which was managed by a joint business and IT Project Board. The business team in ESB Customer Supply was firstly managed by Brian Conway during last year and then, more recently, by Aileen O'Connor, who worked closely with Caithriona Dalton in the role of Technical Delivery Manager.
The Business Blueprint was signed off in June 2007 and apart from a brief three-month suspension for the SAP billing system upgrade at the end of 2007, the project team have worked hard to deliver a product which represents new ground for ESB in terms of system availability, security and complexity. Internet products must provide 'always on' capability, so the business requirement for E-Billing was for a high-availability design with minimum downtime.
Each of three active Web and Biller Direct servers have a passive server counterpart, which is designed to take over system operations from the active server in the event of a failure or planned maintenance, without a loss of service to the customer. The technical architecture was designed by Gerard Holmes and Daragh Noctor in SAP Basis and Padraig McCaffrey in ISC Supply, with additional expertise supplied by David Dillon and others in IT Operations, whose input to the project was managed throughout by Paul Fannin. Biller Direct provides the customer with a web link to their ESB account data to view readings, account history and copies of historical invoices, all of which are managed via the SAP customer billing system, which was implemented as part of the MOIP project in January 2005.
Security specialists Tom Flanagan and Andy Whelan played a key role in designing and testing the security of the system. Noel O'Mahony in the Test & Quality Team helped to stress test the system by simulating high volumes of concurrent users.
The SAP functional team, led by Caithriona, mapped the E-business blueprint to the SAP product features to arrive at the functional design. The project team workload also included the configuration of the existing SAP billing system and SAP Biller Direct system, integration with the invoice archives, integration with the Exchange server for e-mail notification to customers, completion of functional specifications for the Web and SAP development teams, system testing the developments and arranging and liaising with the business teams engaged in User Acceptance Test programs.
The SAP functional team included Elaine Sexton, Theresa Marnane, Gerard Whyte, Mark Bissett and Ger Gleeson with consultant support when required from Torsten Birn from SAP. The Web development work was completed, in the main, by Charlie McAdams, who worked closely on webpage wording with Edel McCarthy of ESB Customer Supply.
The main SAP development contributors were Aidan Brennan, Shauna Brady, Dave Brown and Mick O'Brien. In common with all successful IT system implementations, the key element was the collaboration, teamwork and the strong work ethic shown by the various technical teams across the ICT Group and the business team in ESB Customer Supply. Apologies and thanks to all others who made contributions to the E-Billing project, but who have not received an individual mention here and a special thanks to the major Project contributors.
