Sector Reform and Utility Commercialization (SRUC) Task Order: Support to Papua New Guinea Power Limited (PPL) on Data Management, Metering, and Customer Engagement

based program funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by Deloitte Consulting LLP and its subcontractors. The SRUC team is assisting Papua New Guinea Power (PNG) Limited's (PPL's) reform efforts to improve its operational and financial performance. The goal is to assist in the transformation of PPL into a financially viable institution capable of investing for future growth and effectively partnering with the private sector. PPL's reform is a key component of PNG's National Electrification Roll Out Plan. The goal of this assistance is focused on helping PPL improve its engagement and relationships with its 7,000 largest customers, which represent over 70 percent of its current revenue. The activities will help expand and improve PPL's capacity to effectively manage customer information, strengthen business processes related to the collection and management of customer data, and utilize PPL customer information for billing and collections. A major revenue source for PPL is its large power users (LPUs), who are registered in Gentrack. PPL manages and bills these customers using Gentrack, but the Gentrack billing system has not been upgraded for a long period of time, resulting in inadequate support and functional limitations. This has weakened the operational processes and the system's auditing/reporting capability over time, making the customer data stored in Gentrack database unreliable. The SRUC team developed a report that identifies areas that require action from the survey team, with recommended actions for PPL, to strengthen the current survey process and to optimize the overall data cleansing initiative. This guide will help the PPL team as it expands the survey in other operation centers throughout the country and will be critical in advance of the utility's transition to implement Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for its LPUs and if it transitions Gentrack to any other system for billing and customer information management. The report continues to address the key operational challenge areas from the previous report. It is in a format of questions and answers with recommended solutions to the identified operational issues, based on questions, challenges, and successes from the survey effort to date. The objective is to have an operational manual for the PPL survey team covering the following: to assist PPL in improving the staff's understanding of the significance of having a clean and reliable customer database, to act as an informal guide to refer to as questions come up throughout the implementation of the survey process, and to strongly position the PPL working group with a tool to reinforce the ongoing POM data cleansing process, as well as progressing with the exercise in other operation centers. The customer survey and data cleansing initiative aims to improve the accuracy and reliability of customer data stored in Gentrack. The primary targets of the data cleansing initiative are the 7,000 largest customers, who represent over 70 percent of PPL's current revenue. The initiative will help PPL to strengthen its business processes related to the collection and management of customer data and to utilize PPL customer information for billing and collections. The internal survey working group will play a crucial role in the survey and data cleansing exercise. The group will be responsible for developing and implementing the survey process, collecting and analyzing data, and providing recommendations to PPL management. The group will consist of representatives from various departments within PPL, including customer service, billing, and IT. The survey and data cleansing exercise will involve several steps, including developing an internal survey working group, conducting a customer survey, collecting and analyzing data, and providing recommendations to PPL management. The exercise will be critical in helping PPL to improve its engagement and relationships with its largest customers and to strengthen its business processes related to the collection and management of customer data. The report provides answers to frequently asked questions related to the customer survey and data cleansing initiative, including the need for the survey, the purpose of the data cleansing initiative, and the roles and responsibilities of the internal survey working group. The report also provides guidance on how to optimize the ongoing process and prepare to start the survey in other centers, including the target datasets of the data cleansing initiative and the equipment needed for the survey. The customer interactions section of the report provides guidance on how to contact customers prior to sending the teams out, how to send customers a written notification informing them about the survey and requesting them to prepare the supporting documents, and what to do if access to the metering site is not granted. The back office support section provides guidance on how to group customers and assign groups to each of the survey teams to collect information, how to update the Gentrack customer database with the information collected from the field, and what to do with information that leads to believe a customer is in the incorrect tariff class or has other data improperly listed in the Gentrack database.