A home-grown and soon to be patented information management system is being used by Eskom to combat electricity payment fraud.
The Advanced Replication Technology (ART) management system, based on the Oracle platform, was conceived five years ago and developed by Grassie Coetzee and Johann Matthews of Infotrans - now part of PN Energy Services.
PN Energy Services was formed jointly by electricity utilities Eskom and France`s EDF.
In its fight against fraudulent activities, PN Energy uses the ART system to identify or "flag" pay-points at which irregular activities take place. It can highlight areas where prepaid electricity purchases and deposits into PN Energy`s accounts do not correlate, or where there are unnecessary delays in this process.
"In a recent case in the Cape, PN Energy was realising only about 40% of its collections and widespread fraud was suspected," says Coetzee. "We were collecting around R900 000 per month, but now, since the introduction of the ART system, more than R2.3 million is being banked in the same period."
Coetzee says the system is designed to ensure that money collected for a financial service is in the bank within a 24-hour cycle.
In excess of 14 million transactions have been processed to date, and financial data loss is less than 500 rows.
ART is a generic system, customisable to accommodate different payment processes. It was initially based on the Oracle 7 database environment and developed using Oracle`s CASE tools, but is now being ported to Oracle`s latest database platform - Oracle 9i.
SQL reports provide information such as amounts collected against what is banked, so problem areas can be highlighted and action taken and accounts adjusted accordingly.
Data from remote rural areas with poor telecommunication infrastructures can also be replicated as long as radio links can be implemented.
"When we first motivated the idea of replicating such data, the big players in the energy systems management arena were not convinced. But we were sure it would work. In fact, we`re now patenting the system which has proven 100% successful," says Coetzee.
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