Case Study: Washington Gas
OpenText advisory services | End-to-end implementation of Document Presentment, Document Presentment Live, Archiving and Document Access for SAP Solutions | ABAP development for SAP Billing/CS/WM/WD
OpenText advisory services | End-to-end implementation of Document Presentment, Document Presentment Live, Archiving and Document Access for SAP Solutions | ABAP development for SAP Billing/CS/WM/WD
Washington Gas has a 165-year history of leadership, innovation, and dedicated service to its residential, commercial, and industrial customers. The company provides natural gas service to more than 1.1 million customers throughout Washington, D.C., and in parts of Maryland and Virginia.
Washington Gas is part of WGL Holdings. The Washington-based holding company is a leading source of clean, efficient, and diverse energy solutions, including natural gas, electricity, green power, and energy services, with operations in 30 states. Besides Washington Gas, WGL consists of the following operating units: WGL Energy, WGL Midstream, and Hampshire Gas.
The company’s goal is to make energy surprisingly easy for its customers, community, and employees.
As a regional natural gas authority, Washington Gas continually works to improve its business processes. The company understood that its regular gas bill is the strongest and often the only channel for customer communications.
Therefore, the utility wanted to redesign its bills to allow its customers to stay connected the way they want. The company also wanted to centralize and speed up the process of storing and retrieving transaction documents.
However, meeting these new and future demands proved challenging with their existing systems and solutions. As a result, Washington Gas invested in SAP-integrated information management solutions, such as OpenText Document Presentment for SAP Solutions, SAP Document Presentment Live for SAP Solutions, and OpenText Archiving and Document Access for SAP Solution.
However, purchasing software products is only half the battle. Washington Gas understood that they had only a high-level understanding of the purchased products and their features and benefits. Also, they didn’t have the necessary in-house expertise to perform the required installation, customization, and additional development work on the purchased OpenText products to align them with existing business processes and daily requirements.
But before even starting the product implementation, the technical department at Washington Gas needed to understand the full potential of the purchased products and how to use them to make the most of their strategic investments.
Therefore, Washington Gas started looking for an external OpenText service provider who could provide advisory and consulting sessions and deliver the necessary technical services afterward.
The company was looking for a service provider with extensive experience delivering customized solutions based on OpenText products and ABAP development for SAP customers in the utility sector.
The service provider had to be able to do product advisory and technical implementation, as they didn’t want any information to be lost between these two steps. Also, they were looking for a provider who could, based on their requirements, take the lead on the overall project and ensure its success.
After conducting extensive market research, Washington Gas selected Ecodocx as its OpenText service provider. The team of Ecodocx provided the following services:
The OpenText Document Presentment allowed the energy provider to address their outdated document design, moving from a simple black-and-white page to a two-page, color statement, complete with extensive graphs and other visual elements, making their bills easier for customers to read and understand. With Document Presentment Live, the company can also generate, deploy, and deliver individualized, multichannel customer communications and make ad-hoc changes within hours, whereas in the past, simple changes would take days.
Data Archiving for SAP from OpenText changed the way the company retrieves and archives its data. The new archiving solution replaced several different solutions Washington Gas was using and significantly reduced data retrieval time from minutes to a few seconds.
Lastly, with the modernized ecosystem, the company uses a single repository to manage all documents. With the tight integration with existing SAP systems, the company no longer needs multiple departmental platforms. During the migration, over 24 million legacy documents were migrated, and all document storage platforms were replaced with a single platform across the enterprise.
