Introduction

Maintaining a quality database for effective energy management and recovery.

Our energy Bureau leads the way in utility management innovation and service. As your dedicated energy estate partner, our Bureau service offers efficient and reliable data quality, bill validation and portfolio management.

We will relieve you of the administration time of configuring and maintaining estate and meter data, processing and validating utility bills, enabling you to use that valuable resource elsewhere.

The key features of our bill validation and cost recovery service include:

• The maintenance of a high quality estate database
• Receiving your utility bills directly from the supplier as EDI files or paper invoices
• Checking and processing each individual invoice for any utility
• Processing meter readings direct from the site and verifying against the utility bills
• Gathering half hourly data direct from data collectors to check against the invoices
• Reviewing and verifying historic billing data
• Comparing charges on each bill with your agreed tariffs and agreed contract rates
• Tracking for duplicate bills, overdue bills and identify missing bills
• Investigation of inconsistencies directly with your utility supplier
• Negotiation with utility suppliers to ensure recoveries are refunded or credited efficiently and correctly
• Proactive energy management support
• Management and estate reporting.

As part of TEAM’s bureau service, each customer receives a regular service report providing a comprehensive overview of the service, database quality and recovery performance.

The Bureau Service Delivery Report (SDR) is generated monthly and contains charts and statistics relevant to the 12 completed months prior to the current date. Information includes rolling annual performance, potential and realised savings and an overview of the recovery queries. The SDR aims to provide ultimate service transparency.

Click here to view an example of our SDR report.

Some Bureau Service Facts & Figures

• On average across our customer portfolios we recover 5 times our fees charged to customers for the service
• Our highest individual customer bill recovery rate for the last 12 months is 8% of total bill value
• We process 100% of all white mail bills within our SLA of 3 days
• We process 99.9% of all EDI bills against our SLA of 24 hours
• We would like to take the claim to fame that we invented the concept of a Bureau service in 1995 (practice makes perfects)
• The highest number of bills processed on Sigma for a single customer is 156,000 per month and 86,000,000 meter readings per annum.

Outsourcing Benefits

Bureau Operational Approach

We use the Six Sigma methodology to deliver our bureau service – a data driven approach for eliminating defects in processes. Our methodology focuses on improving the Bureau Service performance by managing business processes. We see processes as important assets of TEAM that must be understood, managed, and developed

The six sigma framework fulfils the ISO9001 Quality Management System requirements for our certification.

We have invested in and implemented iServer a Business and IT Transformation Suite from Orbus Software and therefore our business processes are available to all employees via the iServer portal giving them access to a single source for our processes, policies, working instructions, email, letter and report templates. This visibility ensures consistency in deliver across all team members.

From iServer we can automatically output our end-to-end business process documentation which we are more than happy to share with customers and prospects to give complete transparency into how TEAM does Bureau.

The Bureau Service process models use the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) industry standard which is a graphical approach for defining our business process.

The BPMN notation advantage is that it provides an intuitive and easy way for non-expert users in BPM to understand the notation. It reduces noise communication between the process design stage and implementation, execution and management whilst providing the definition our software development design team need to deliver software change to support our process.

We have modelled all our processes from new customer on boarding to bill recovery and have supporting policies and work instructions.

Bureau Database Management

Data quality is king. 

We have development more than 80 individual data quality checks that are performed each evening on each bureau customer's database. Our data management team are provided with the output of these checks and work proactively to resolve all exceptions reported. Our data quality checks include:

• Missing HH data 
• Missing bills
• Consecutive estimated bills
• Overdue bills
• Missing first bill
• Duplicate bills
• Valid MPAN.

Bureau Operational Structure 

Our Bureau operational structure has been designed to optimise:

• Data processing throughput and quality
• Bill cost recover and
• Customer service delivery quality.

Customers are provided with a named single point of contact Bureau Service Delivery Manager who is responsible for the delivery of the Bureau Service and customer relationship from account set up.

Our Bureau Service Delivery Managers act as the main day-to-day service contact, supported by a Service Delivery Analysts. The responsibilities of the Bureau Service Delivery Manager include:

• On boarding - new customer set up
• Sigma customer configuration and optimisation
• KPI reporting and delivery
• Service issue management and service recovery
• Review Meeting/Conference Calls
• Advice and guidance in optimising customers portfolios
• Customer communications
• Your database quality and bill recovery rates.

 ^{Diagram: Bureau Operational Structure}

Bureau Customer Communication

All Bureau Service customer communications are managed using our customer relationship management (CRM) application and it's Case Management function. This enables our Bureau team to manage, measure and report on our performance in dealing with all customer interactions. All Cases are assigned a priority and each priority has a defined service level agreement for the management of the Case. We report our performance live via the Bureau Support Portal and via our monthly Service Delivery Report.

The Bureau Support Portal enables our customers to have online access to our Case Management in real time and self-serve. The Bureau Support Portal provides our customers with fast and efficient access to their Bureau service.

Using the Bureau Support Portal customers can interact with their Bureau Services Delivery team. The Bureau Support Portal provides customers with the ability to create and raise new requests or questions as well as review historic ones. The site also provides the ability to retrieve prior documents that have been shared with our customer.

The Bureau Support Portal is our customers window through which they can view and update interactions, past and present, with their Bureau Services Delivery team.

For further details on the Bureau Support Portal click here.

^{Smarter Bill Processing}

We offer a complete solution for utility bill processing and data management. As well as our extensive capability for processing bills presented in an electronic format we have development extensive capability, through the use of industry-leading technologies, that enables our Bureau service to automate the accurate processing of large volumes of: 

Paper Bills:

• bulk scanning of paper bills (including Customer & Supplier automated recognition) and optical character recognition (OCR) conversion
• workflow routing and task flow management
• Management Information.

PDF Bills:

• PDF automatic collection from inbound emails, PDF splitting and de-skewing
• workflow routing and task flow management and
• conversion to EDI file formats for automated billing upload and validation
• Management Information.

Our process removes the burden of manual entry, enhances data processing quality and gets your billing data into Sigma quickly.

^{Note: Optical character recognition is the electronic conversion of images of printed text into machine-encoded text.}