Lesedi Municipality`s credit control division is achieving significant savings and delivering increased customer service after enhancing its local government solution.
Lesedi Municipality division head: Income and Expenditure Gerty Herholdt says the municipality was facing the same challenges as many other municipalities. "We did not have an integrated solution, which meant that the reconciliation of debt was being carried out manually. This had the effect of pushing overtime payments to an all time high and was open to human error," she says.
Fujitsu account manager Louisa Brand says: "We have been working in partnership with Lesedi since 1994 and will continue to develop Fujitsu`s local government solution keeping up with all new local government requirements."
With the enhancements to Fujitsu`s local government solution, Lesedi now has an end-to-end billing and debt recovery solution.
Previously, residents who were in arrears but had made payment arrangements with the municipality stood the risk of still having their power cut due to the inadequacies of a non-integrated system.
"The integrated solution means that there are no delays between capturing the information and updating it on the debtors profile, giving real-time on-time information," Herholdt says.
"Residents in arrears who now make payment arrangements are registered in real-time, ensuring that when a cut off report is run, their power is not cut off."
In terms of enhanced reporting, when the first age analysis report was run, Lesedi was able to breakdown debtors into residential, business and central government sectors, enabling the credit control division to communicate to management the percentage of debt in arrears by the individual sectors.
"We are continuing to develop Fujitsu`s solution to support new legislation such as the Property Rates Bill. The system will take data provided by our property valuers and automatically generate the new rates bills which come into effect on 1 July 2006," says Herhold.
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