GPU Energy - Utility Bill Processing

Company Info

GPU Inc., is an international provider of energy-related infrastructure and services. Domestically, its three electric utility subsidiaries - doing business as GPU Energy - annually provide approximately 44 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity serving two million customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. GPU Advanced Resources, Inc. sells competitive retail energy and services in the Mid-Atlantic region. Altogether, GPU serves more than 4.3 million customers around the world.

The Requirements

In conjunction with Y2K preparations, GPU Energy started a project to migrate business applications from mainframe processing to SAP R3 on the HP-UX operating system platform. Packaged SAP reports did not provide the flexibility, quality and print processing required for GPU to conduct business. Print software requirements included:

• Flexible print formatting including IPDS and PCL
• Dynamic Formatting including multiple languages and charts (pie, bar)
• Handling of SAP RDI (raw data interface)
• Integration with postal software processing and barcode support
• WYSIWYG design of applications including spell check
• AFP resource compatibility
• Highlight Color and Full Color support

Decision Criteria for Papyrus

GPU selected Papyrus Document Solution based on ISIS' response to the requirements and rapid development capabilities. In a very short time, ISIS was able to quickly produce a sample Papyrus billing application using the sample SAP data and layout that GPU provided.

The Solution

GPU's Bill Print solution uses Papyrus Designer and Papyrus DocEXEC. With Papyrus, GPU nightly processes regular bills for its three subsidiaries with volumes of 50,000 to 200,000 accounts and collective/ master/voucher processing of 10 to 100 bills, varying from 5 to 200 pages. Additional applications include letters with volumes of 100 to 30,000 per cycle and check generation with volumes of 25,000 monthly.

Papyrus Designer?s WYSIWYG design capabilities enables rapid development and updating of new or changed bill formats. Features used include conditional processing to produce consolidated billing for multiple services and for the different subsidiaries, data-driven power usage comparison charts, and conditional notices and marketing messages.

To start batch processing, SAP application servers generate RDI or plain text and print the data to remote queues. Each data type is printed to a unique queue. Then a series of UNIX scripts automate formatting and printing.

• The first script, checks for the number of concurrent spool runs and launches the formatting procedure.

• The second script invokes Papyrus DocEXEC formatting for each spool request, creating an index file and log file that is passed to postal processing which adds the carrier route information.

• The third script checks that all post-processing is completed, merges the updated log information and runs the postal optimization to generate the final print order for maximum postal discounts. Then this print order is input to the Papyrus DocEXEC post-processing application which imports the earlier pre-composed, indexed AFPDS documents in the correct order, adds the additional document information including carrier routing and barcodes, and produces the final AFPDS. This final AFPDS is then processed by the OCE print server and printed on the Pagestream 1000.

Benefits

• How quickly GPU staff learned to use Papyrus Designer to develop applications
• How Papyrus handles the SAP RDI data file
• How easily and quickly GPU developers can make changes to applications
• Ease of integration with postal processing and archive software