Origin Inc.

#6: Revenue Audit

adam — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:19:36 +0000

The foremost responsibility of your CIS is to bill all of your customers accurately. During the implementation of your CIS, the focus was to ensure that your new CIS would accurately generate customer bills. However, those efforts assumed that the factors required for billing, the billing determinants, would be accurate and available.

Since going live with your new CIS, two high-level questions must be asked:
… Follow this link to read the Revenue Audit Whitepaper

#5: Where is the latest TNSNAMES.ORA file?

jim — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:40:15 +0000

If you are using query tools or other applications that rely on the tnsnames.ora file, it should normally reside in your %ORACLE_HOME%\NETWORK\ADMIN directory. However, as new environments are being created, or moved to different servers, it can be a hassle for your team to keep up with the latest tnsnames.ora file. The TNS_ADMIN environment variable offers a solution to this problem. Place the latest and greatest copy of the tnsnames.ora file on a shared folder, and have the users create a TNS_ADMIN environment variable referencing this location. From this point forward, changes to tnsnames.ora do not have to be distributed to the user community.

#4: How Protected is Your Bill Cycle?

adam — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:03:14 +0000

In PSERM and CC&B, there is a “Protect Bill Cycle” setting on the account. This will only prevent the bill cycle from changing when a new service is started. When the last active service agreement on an account is stopped, “protect bill cycle” setting is ignored and the bill cycle may be changed.

#3: Un-dispatching a Field Activity

admin — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:05:42 +0000

There are situations when you might want to un-dispatch a field activity. This is especially useful when the field activity is linked to a pending SA and the field activity needs to only be rescheduled and not canceled. To do this, remove the field order id from the field activity and save the field activity. Be sure to note the field order id. Make any needed change to the start/stop information or field activity information, such as changing the date. Go to the field order that now does not contain any field activities and cancel the field order.

The field activity is now ready to be dispatched again.

Note: Please be sure that use of these procedures is in line with your company’s business rules.

#2: I Want to See More!

admin — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:04:53 +0000

Press F11 in Internet Explorer to see up to 20% more of your screen. This might seem like a simple tip, but on many pages this can eliminate vertical scrolling and allow you to see more information.
While in full-screen mode, right-click on the toolbar and select “Auto-Hide” to squeeze a little more out of your browser.
Press F11 to toggle out of full-screen mode.

#1: High Bill Amount vs. Meter Reading High/Low

admin — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:02:41 +0000

Too often, excess energies are spent tweaking meter reading high/low tolerances in an effort to prevent a bill that is too high from reaching the customer. High/low meter reading tolerances based on percentages do not work well if the quantities being measured are relatively small, or relatively high. From a customer service perspective, the goal is to prevent an alarming bill from reaching the customer. Worse still would be having an alarming amount debited from the customer’s bank account!
An underutilized tool that can help prevent these embarrassments is high bill amount. This amount may be set when service is started, or the data is converted, and is often never updated. A custom batch process can update the amount based upon a customer’s history, rate, service type, customer class, route, or almost anything else.
High Bill Amount truly is your last line of defense before letting that bill go out the door.