A District of Columbia workgroup has filed a report with the District of Columbia PSC regarding the feasibility of implementing seamless moves at Pepco
The workgroup report said that while seamless move capability could be programmed into Pepco's new billing system, some of the challenges remaining to implementing seamless moves are as follows:
1. Seamless moves would entail changing a customer's account number at the move. Pepco would need to develop a trigger for sending a changed account number, new service location, and phone number change transaction to the Supplier. The Supplier would need to be able to accept this change and update the customer's account number while retaining the old number in case cancel/rebills occur.
2. Suppliers will receive final bills and thus a drop transaction even though the customer is moving to a new premise. A Supplier will need to process the final bill and process the new bill for the customer with a new service account number. A Supplier may get a customer's old contract account number if a cancel/rebill occurs and will need to process it.
3. Customer Move-In process would need to be developed to have additional validation if maintaining the Supplier relationship.
4. Move-Ins not done on the customer's meter read date would require considerable development effort to the billing and Customer Relationship Management systems.
Pepco estimates that in order to implement Seamless Move functionality in the new system, it would take 5 full time programmers and approximately 12 months after the rules have been defined
Pepco previously provided a high level estimate of $525,000 for seamless move functionality alone. Such estimates are preliminary and would need to be confirmed after a finalized design is complete and would likely include changes to the customer billing system as well as to the EDI rules, Pepco said