A South African designed information management software system, developed in a Cape Town garage, is today helping to advance the cause of the government`s reconstruction and development programme (RDP) as well as combat rampant electricity fraud that is costing taxpayers many millions of rand each month.
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 two of the world`s largest electricity utilities - SA`s Eskom and France`s EDF - to tackle the substantial task of collecting revenue for electricity usage.
The ART solution is now one of the main weapons in the anti-fraud arsenal being used by PN Energy as well as many local authorities in SA, and Eskom on a nationwide basis.
It is also being used to support the RDP through the management of electrification projects. The programme at Khayelitsha, a previously disadvantaged urban community of Cape Town, is an example.
After the initial electrification of 40 000 homes, no further major electrification was undertaken in the period 1996 to 1999 in this area because of the high level of fraud.
Now, with the support of ART a further 40 000 homes are in the process of being electrified and the programme is once again on track.
In its fight against fraudulent activities, PN Energy uses the ART system to identify or `flag` pay-points at which irregular activities take place. For example, it can highlight areas where pre-paid 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 area, 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.
According to Matthews, the Oracle platform was chosen because of its reliability and the local expertise available to optimise it. On the issue of reliability, in excess of 14 million transactions have been processed to date. Financial data loss is less than 500 rows and even this is attributed to a vendor tampering with the power supply during activity causing data block corruption.
ART was designed as a generic system, easily customisable to accommodate different payment processes. It was initially based on the Oracle 7 database environment and developed using Oracle`s CASE tools, but it is now being ported to Oracle`s latest database platform - Oracle 9i.
ART operates by replicating master and transaction data - from the creation of a new PN Energy account to the payment of pre-paid electricity, the subsequent deposit of the collection into PN Energy`s account and the consumer entering the amount into a prepaid meter.
Oracle saw the benefits of the concept in its early stages of development and threw its weight behind Infotrans by providing the tools necessary to develop the system and prove its viability in the Oracle database environment - particularly in terms of issues such as security, replication, scalability and portability.
The replication module is an Infotrans-developed product that operates on master/journal replication rules. The operation was developed for a specific radio network, but can operate using manual files or a TCP/IP network.
Francois Marias, product manager, development tools, at Oracle SA says being able to log and replicate every event gives PN Energy complete financial and management control.
"It does not matter whether the event is transmitted from a low-level radio-based point-of-sale terminal or at a pay-point across high speed TCP/IP, Diginet or 9600 Baud data lines to large distributed databases - the result is the same," he says.
SQL reports provide information such as amounts collected against what is banked so that problem areas can be highlighted and action taken and accounts adjusted accordingly.
Even data from remote rural areas with poor telecommunication infrastructures can now 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, who funded early development privately by selling PCs.
Having proven ART in the PN Energy payment environment, Infotrans, which is now a multimillion-rand company based in Bellville, is now looking to expand its database replication service beyond its current PN Energy and municipality base to other companies - both nationally and internationally - that are looking to better manage their payment processes.
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