Enteg implements a solution for Payment Collection through a Handheld Device In Noida Power Company

Introduction

Noida Power Company Limited distributes power in Greater Noida, near Delhi in Uttar Pradesh, which is being developed as an industrial hub and urban settlements. The Company reaches out to a population of about 2 lakhs spread across hamlets, villages and a new township spanning an area of 335 sq. km.

The Company is a joint venture between the RPG Group, a leading business house in India and Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority, an autonomous body of U.P. Government responsible for town planning and infrastructure development. The venture marks the strategic entry of the Group into privatized distribution of electricity in North India.

The existing process of Payment Collection

Earlier, the VCP or Village Contact Person of NPCL went to the villages, collected money from the consumers and handed over a hand written receipt to the consumer . After a few days of collections , the VCP submitted the collected cash, cheques and drafts to the collection center . The cashier at the collection collected the cash, cheques and drafts . The data entry operator entered the payments of each consumer manually into the system . The cash and drafts were then sent to the clearing house .

Business Concerns

Noida Power Company faced a lot of difficulties due to the existing proves which included

• Time Consumption in payment collection
  
• Too Many manual Interventions.
  
• Possibility of Human Errors.
  
• Possibility of Frauds and Revenue Loss
  
• Difficulty in tracking collections
  
• Manual Calculation of discount and relaxation percentage on payable amounts
  
• Lack of on the field information causing high dependency on back office
  
• Difficulty in knowing the exact payable of a consumer during multiple payments by consumer.
  
• Lack of immediate collection updates, Data re-entry in SAP system
  

Solution Proposed by Enteg:

Enteg proposed a solution where the billing applications could be mounted on a hand held device and would allow the NPCL field force to collect the payment from the customer. The handheld device would be loaded with the master data for the customers, outstanding items etc from SAP system. The field force could collect the payment from the customer and record the details on the handheld and provide the bill print to the customer. The collected data will be loaded on to the SAP system.

Implementation Highlights

Enteg developed an application on the handheld device which will allow VCPs of Noida Power Corporation to collects payments from consumers, upload payment to server, view reports of various categories and segregation of transactions, print transaction receipts for consumer, connect to FTP Server for data synchronization, and handle mechanical and hardware problems of the device during transactions so as to allow uninterrupted and efficient flow of payment collection process.

The interruption handling in the application include power off during on-going receipt print ,receipt not printed properly ,paper or ink is exhausted ,network problem during data synchronization , upload , download ,power failure during payment collection or synchronization.

The handheld can be programmed only using C. However, to make programming easy and consistent, Enteg developed its own sdk , a set of apis and libraries that can be used to produce efficient , fast , reliable , and manageable and user friendly UI applications on these devices .

Benefits Achieved through Payment Collection Project on Handheld

• Better process control whereby VCP’s will be prompted to deposit collected payment with NPCL after defined intervals, failing which no further payment collection will be possible through the HHI.
  
• Prevention of fraud as program residing in HHI will only allow receipt generation after due authentication.
  
• Elimination of fraud by amount overwriting on manual receipts as program will be generating receipts and the same will be recorded in the system.
  
• Prevention of data tampering and revenue loss as data residing in HHI is encrypted and is not exposed to outside tampering.
  
• Enhanced control and Tracking on Payment Collection process.
  
• Improved process efficiency as entry of Payment data into SAP by Data Entry Operators will be replaced by periodic upload of data to SAP.
  
• Reduction of collection to invoice cycle time and also make the payment collection process for rural areas more efficient.
  
• Availability of on the spot reports on consumer details, payables and payment
  
• Availability of Multiple filtering of reports .
  
• Bifurcation of Collection Reports by Cash, Cheques and Drafts
  
• Easy to locate a consumer and view his details in a convenient manner.
  
• The system gives an interface to see the actual data in the system database through an admin controlled interface.
  

About Enteg SDK

• Using Enteg SDK , one can reliably and efficiently develop a solution in a fraction of the time that would have other wise required. Enteg SDK provides the architecture, layers and tested components, through which, programmers can develop rich and easy-to-use and manageable applications in no time.
  
• Enteg SDK provides abundant and rich UI libraries for creating User Interfaces on HHI. Hence programmers need not write code to design user interfaces.
  
• Enteg SDK provides sophisticated controls like on screen menus , buttons , labels , text fields, password fields , date fields, which programmer can use on a customizable Enteg SDK UI Form .
  
• Enteg SDK supports control layout management and provides automatic scroll options for the form and controls used in the display .
  Enteg SDK network libraries provide an easy way to communicate with the outside world .
  
• Enteg SDK database layers and libraries manage the activities required to reliably fetch large amount of data from the database, store and manage them in memory .
  Using Enteg SDK one can reliably and rapidly store and fetch large amount of data in the database .
  
• Enteg SDK allows programmers to concentrate only on the application’s business logic leaving the rest to the Enteg SDK’s framework.
  Using Enteg SDK , one can write portable applications that can run on a wide range of devices . It follows the scheme that says “Write Once , Run Anywhere”.
  
• Once an application is written, it can be deployed to wide range devices without any problems as the device specific activities are taken care of by a pluggable component of Enteg SDK .