The City of Johannesburg's migration of assorted databases onto the SAP platform has left thousands of Johannesburg residents in the dark as to how much they owe the city, amid ongoing complaints of ridiculous bills.
In addition, as the e-service site has been “under construction”; residents have not always been able to access their bills through the online portal. The service was completely down last week, returning error codes.
The city's billing system has been under fire since the council started migrating its assorted billing platforms to a SAP platform. News reports stated that residents had received hugely inflated bills and could not resolve issues through the call centre, Joburg Connect.
Last August, Johannesburg executive mayor Amos Masondo promised improved service to residents. He said the city was busy capturing account details and consolidating these onto the unified SAP system. However, five months down the line, the city is still sorting out its data.
The city started rolling out SAP under the project name Phakama, at the end of 2009, and implementation of the project was completed in June last year. Despite the problems reported in the press during implementation, SAP awarded the city's project the System Application Products Quality Award, for its successful implementation.
Phakama is the city's plan to move from disparate legacy systems onto an integrated platform that aims to provide better functionality in metered services, billing, collections, customer service and payment processes.
However, despite the completion of the implementation phase, city residents are still frustrated. When ITWeb called Joburg Connect, we were told statements had not been sent out for about three months, due to a billing issue, and the e-services facility was under construction.
Consumer complaint Web site Hello Peter also lists several complaints about the city's billing system. These include one person who complained of a R600 000 electricity bill for a small household, and another who had not received a statement in the post and could not resolve the matter through the call centre.
Limited problem
Stan Maphologela, deputy director of customer communications in the city's revenue and customer relations department, says the city is “aware that some accounts have been impacted by not receiving monthly billing statements regularly in the last months”.
Maphologela says, however, that the issue is limited to less than 5% of billable customers. The city has 1.3 million account holders, which means about 65 000 accounts have been affected.
The issue, Maphologela explains, is due to the issues created around moving data off the different systems onto the SAP platform. Data had to be migrated from various software platforms within different business units, such as City Power, Johannesburg Water, Pikitup, Metrobus, Johannesburg Roads Agency, Joburg Connect, Rates and Taxes, as well as the planning unit.
“SAP is designed as a system which forces the city and its customers to correctly provide the data needed for billing to take place accurately,” he notes.
When the information does not meet the “required standards” the system forces a correction, which requires intervention by staff members and delays posting of bills.
“However, there are internal processes put in place to handle and deal with this problem, and the numbers have reduced,” says Maphologela.
Offline
In addition, the online system is being reconstructed “to improve customer experience”, says Maphologela. As a result, some of the service offerings were temporarily suspended while enhancements were completed on the online portal.
The city's e-services portal project is called “going green” and seeks to “make the lives of residents easier by providing online access to a number of municipal services”, explains Maphologela.
He says the project will reduce the amount of paper statements sent out and will allow customers to receive statements “almost immediately”. Residents will also have access to accounts dating back two years.
Although certain sections of the Web site are still under construction, customers can still receive the following services: statements via e-mail, progress on building plans, online valuation form, and free interactive map, says Maphologela.
This morning, e-services seemed to be functional and an account could be downloaded, which was not the case last week.
SAP did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.
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