Support to Papua New Guinea Power Limited (PPL) on Data Management, Metering, and Customer Engagement

The SRUC Task Order aims to promote utility commercialization and equitable, effective reforms that will enhance the financial viability and long-term sustainability of developing countries' electricity systems. The program is focused on supporting the Government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in its efforts to increase electricity access to 70 percent of households by 2030 through its National Electrification Roll Out Plan. As part of the U.S. Government's efforts under the PNG Electrification Partnership, USAID has tasked SRUC with providing technical assistance to PNG Power Limited (PPL), PNG's fully integrated, state-owned electric utility. The SRUC Work Assignment 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. The Scope of Work for the "Support to PNG Power Limited (PPL) on Data Management, Metering, and Customer Engagement" Work Assignment has four components: customer database cleansing/realignment/improvement, interim activities on meter management, billing, and collections, loss analysis and customer segmentation of large commercial and industrial customers, and a tailored customer engagement strategy for PPL's large commercial and industrial customers. The Component 3 outputs are intended to analyze the information collected and produced in the other Work Assignment Components, in particular Component 1, and to address loss reduction and revenue protection goals. This report is a consolidation of Deliverables 3.1 and 3.2, which focus on conducting associated analytics to identify major sources of non-technical commercial losses and reviewing target customer accounts where losses are highest. The report identifies how PPL can best utilize the data collected through the large power user customer information survey to identify major sources of non-technical commercial losses and develop targeted approaches to ameliorate issues with specific LPU customer accounts and PPL installations. The report includes recommendations on how to track and mitigate non-technical commercial losses for PPL's retail business operations, how to adopt those recommendations into PPL's future revenue improvement program, and it provides input on PPL's customer engagement and segmentation plan to promote a coordinated effort to reduce non-technical commercial losses. The report highlights several potential drivers of non-technical commercial losses, including duplicate customer entry in Gentrack, customer data reliability, abnormal billing parameter configuration, unusual cases identified from the customer information survey, insufficiently protected meters and out of compliance seals, meter calibration and age, and abnormal account, payment, and billing history. To reduce non-technical commercial losses, PPL will need to improve data integrity along with its billing procedures and collections procedures. PPL should focus on specific high-loss or high-revenue areas with the goal of expanding efforts to cover its entire customer base. To do that, PPL should define its priorities, analyze survey and system data, and start working on the specific areas that will enable PPL to observe improvements in revenue faster.