Thames Water has gone out to tender with a contract for a Customer Relationship Management and Billing system for their non-household retail business functions and for their wholesale water and waste business functions in the run-up to competition in 2017.

From 1^st April 2017 all non-household customers in England will have the ability to choose their water supplier and sewerage services provider. Thames Water’s non-household retail and wholesale business functions will be participants in the new competitive non-household water market - each with their own set of market obligations and commercial requirements.

The water company is now seeking to implement new system solutions, including Customer Relationship Management and Billing (CRB) capabilities for their non-household retail business functions and for their wholesale water and waste business functions.

Thames has not yet decided whether to procure system capabilities jointly for retail and wholesale or separately for each business function - the current tender process will help to inform the decision. The scope of the contract is to select the provider of the systems - the system integration provider will be selected via a separate process.

Thames Water are looking to appoint a maximum of five suppliers to the framework agreement, which will run for an initial period of one year, Any agreement awarded would be for an initial duration of 1 year, with options to extend annually up to a maximum overall term of 5 years.

Thames Water anticipates that the Retail system will be required to calculate and bill charges for at least 250,000 customers across at least 340,000 sites and their associated measurement/usage data, for a number of products and services. The system will also need to be both flexible and scalable to meet the changing requirements of the market and to support potential increases in customer volumes, in line with business retail market in the UK.

The contract is being tendered in three Lots as follows:

Lot No 1: Non-household CRB system covers a system to enable the billing and relationship management for Thames Water Retail business customers receiving water and wastewater services.

The system will be used to deliver the following core capabilities for the Retail business:

• Prospect to sale, contract capture and account management;
• Pricing and development of products and services;
• Bill issue, order to cash, collections (accounts receivable) and payment management;
• Debt and Credit management incorporated into a billing system;
• Core customer interactions - inbound / outbound contact (queries, complaints, issue resolution) and customer data management;
• E-functionalities (e.g e-orders, e-billing, webapps capabilities, etc.) - Managing initiation of non-primary offerings: trade effluent and other value add products and services;
• Reporting, analytics and consumption/benchmarking analysis;
• Interfacing with internal corporate systems - Interfacing and reconciling with market operator;
• Purchasing of wholesale services and reconciliation of wholesale and retail charges;
• Interfacing with external market registration systems and other third parties.
• Pre sales, contract and customer (retailer) management;
• Service point management, service management, service measurement (metering) and tariff management;
• Financial settlement encompassing collection of usage data (meter reads), invoicing, payments and subsequent collection (accounts receivables);
• Managing new network connections requested by developers as well as provisioning event and network based services (asset work and field services);
• Core customer interactions: handling queries, complaints, work requests and communications with customers - E-functionalities (e.g e-orders, e-billing, webapps capabilities, etc.) - Interfacing with external market registration systems and internal corporate systems - Interfacing and reconciling with market operator.

Lot No 2: Wholesale CRB is for a system to recover wholesale revenues from retailers in relation to the provision of commodity, network and event based services which will be required to calculate and bill charges on the basis of no less than 500,000 service points and their associated meterand usage and data read, together with a range of other associated network and event based services to up to 100 retail customers. Thames Water Wholesale is looking for a system to deliver the following capabilities:

Lot No 3: Non-household retail and wholesale CRB is for the combined provision of Lots 1 and 2.

No indication has been given by Thames Water at this stage with regard to the potential value of the contract. Deadline for requests to tender is 3^rd June. Click here to access the tender documentation.