Anglian Water is to offer its 400 largest corporate customers a
Web-based processing and payment system.
Called Vista, the e-billing system will allow the company's
corporate customers to view their account details and aggregate
their metered accounts via the Internet. Vista, which will allow
customers to compare spend and consumption via graphical
information displays, is expected to go live on 7 July 2001.
Tim Hardcastle, director of information services for Anglian, said,
"Vista provides large organisations with an efficient way of
processing multiple bills. Depending on the size and nature of the
organisation, this can result in savings of up to 20% to 30% in
administrative costs where bills are processed singularly. For our
part, we will be incurring cost savings as well since we don't need
to process as much paper. It's a win-win situation."
According to Business-to-Business E-Billing, a recent report from
Analysys Research, the market for e-billings systems is set to boom
as businesses realise the benefits of automating the
invoice-to-payment process.
Danny Dicks, co-author of the report, said companies that have
already developed successful e-billing systems for use in their own
businesses would soon view them as assets that can be sold on to
other companies. "There are a number of e-billings systems that
have been successfully developed and used in a particular market,
for example travel, whose owners are now looking to attract other
industry sectors," he said.
Anglian's Hardcastle is not yet looking for customers for the
e-billing technology. "Our primary objective in the short term is
to meet our customers' requirements. We don't currently have any
plans to exploit this technology beyond our own customer base but
we are happy to talk to customers about how it might be
used."
He added, "We plan to apply Vista to our important commercial
customers. If it works at that level we will look at whether our
domestic customers will be interested in this kind of service."
Arlene Martin