case studies.

• Cumberland Electric Membership Corp.
  
• NFIB
  
• Priority Logistic
  
• Back Yard Burgers
  
• Coco Bonbons
  
• The Hermitage Hotel
  
• Rob Bironas
  
• Country Music Hall of Fame
  

Industry:     
Utility District

Situation:     
Providing electricity to 47,000 customers. CEMC manages 6 billing cycles per month.

Problem:     
Managing large numbers of inquiries, and customer service issues was very labor intensive.

Solution:     
Provide CEMC with a low cost solution to manage, and reduce, the multitude of daily calls coming into the Customer Service Desk. This would also help control the costs of staffing Customer Support Areas.

Development:     
bytes of knowledge designed, programmed and implemented a system that allows customers to view their bills online, in a secure environment. In order to provide an adequate response time and to allow CEMC flexibility in the future, a Microsoft platform was chosen that interfaces with their legacy IBM AS/400 application. An interface was designed to provide the online MS SQL database with updated information from AS/400. Customers are able to be notified, via email, that their bill is available online. The second phase of the project will provide customers with the ability to pay their electric bills online.

Technologies used included:

• Windows 2000
• IIS 5.0, ASP 3.0
• MS SQL 2000
• Interface to IBM AS/400
  

Results:     
It is estimated that only 30% of CEMC customers will have to adopt the new system, and make payments online, in order for the project to achieve a ROI, which took less than 12 months.