The City of Johannesburg says its upgrade to a SAP environment is proceeding on track, despite several complaints by the city's residents to the contrary.
A look at the Hello Peter Web site shows several complaints from citizens, ranging from double billing issues and wrong billing to inadequate assistance, if any, from the call centre.
Despite these complaints, City of Johannesburg spokesman Virgil James says: “As far as the SAP rollout is concerned, it has been highly successful.”
The city started rolling out SAP under the project name Phakama, in November and December last year, with the pilot phase happening in the west of the city. James says further rollouts have been scheduled to run between February and May. The project is expected to wrap up in June.
Better services
Phakama is the city's plan to move from disparate legacy systems onto an integrated SAP platform that will ensure greater functionality in metered services, billing, collections, customer service and payment processes.
In the west, the implementation means that 160 000 customers can receive customer information and improved billing services.
Director of special programmes Abraham Mahlangu was quoted by joburg.org.za earlier this year as saying the old system presented a number of challenges, because the disparate set-up meant many different billing systems that did not interface with each other.
However, there have been some glitches during the rollout process. James says there were some initial delays in issuing rate clearance certificates, because these processes were started on the old system and not completed in time for migration to SAP.
However, the issue was resolved in January and the city is not aware of any significant delays related to rates clearances on SAP.
James does admit to technical issues with the city's electronic services on its Web site, which stopped people from accessing online accounts and related services, but says these were resolved on 17 March.
Citizens calling into the call centre are greeted with the message: “Please note there may be delays in processing calls due to the implementation of a new software system.” This will result in longer call handling times, but will improve once SAP is implemented. James says this is related to the impending implementation of SAP.
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