Energy Utility Corporation Limited (EUCL) has unveiled plans to overhaul the prepayment system commonly known as Cash Power to help enhance service delivery. During a news conference in Kigali, yesterday, Maj. Eng. Jean Claude Kalisa, the managing director of EUCL, said the upgrade aims to reinforce the existing system to improve customer service delivery and enhance system performance. “Upgrading the system will allow old data to be archived so as to decrease the number of transactions in the database thus, increase the speed of access into the system,” he said. “It will also create database that can be used in case of system failure as well as allow electricity purchase during recovery,” he added. With the new system, customers’ contacts will be linked to their prepayment meters (cash power) to facilitate communication and service delivery. It will also ease the categorisation of customers (industries, institutions and ordinary customers) and locate them through the geographic information system (GIS). The first phase of this upgrade was conducted in November last year. The second is slated to last two weeks and there will be no electricity purchase from 9pm and 8am during upgrade period. EUCL is partnering with Connect Africa, a South African company, in this project. The upgrade of the system had been scheduled to start from May 4 to 18 between 9pm and 8am but was postponed until further notice for EUCL to provide details about the upgrade and how it will affect electricity purchasing. The prepayment system was introduced in 1995 by former ELECTROGAZ to improve revenue collection and customer service. EUCL gets 60 per cent of its revenues from the prepayment system and 40 per cent from the post payment. EUCL has 570,000 customers, with 2000 of them using post payment system while the rest use the prepaid system. editorial@newtimes.co.rw
