Revitalizing an old, inflexible remittance system without spending a lot of money.
Done.
Unisys updated Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) remittance system—lowering its costs and accelerating payback.
At Florida Power and Light (FPL), processing remittance transactions was inflexible, labor intensive and no longer cost effective. FPL had to decide whether to upgrade or replace its existing remittance system, which processed few exceptions—not including payment investigation—checks only and certain types of multiples. Payment investigations, particularly, change of address (COA) was the most time consuming task. Unique to Florida, COA was ongoing due to the growing number of “snowbirds” who migrate to Florida for six months out of the year. This high volume of COA added to the payment investigation, using valu-able time and resources.
The new payment processing system needed to:
- Process routine and exception bill payments
- Encode and deposit checks without a companion remittance document
- Integrate cash management concepts to economically deposit checks and support financial decision making
- Recognize and process customer correspondence written on remittance documents\
Automate Labor Intensive Processes
George Mass
Manager of Customer Accounting, Billing and Payment Processing, Florida Power and Light
Unisys was awarded a $2 million contract to implement the Unisys Remittance Processing Solution (RPS). With our solution, FPL can now process every type of payment during a daily business cycle, without carryover. Using an image-based remittance system and a powerful integrated back-office system, all the labor-intensive details such as returned checks, checks without invoice stubs, payment inquiries, changes of address, and other exception items are now automated. Our remittance system includes three NDP500 image/power encoder transports, two imaging mail sorters, an archive module and a cash management feature.
The Unisys Cash Management feature allows FPL to choose what banks will give them the lowest cost per item. This feature turned out to be the main selling point for FPL. “The inclusion of the cash management feature in our base system allowed us to pay back this system within a year and was a deciding factor in choosing Unisys,” says George Mass, Florida Power and Light Manager of Customer Accounting, Billing and Payment Processing.
Improved Cash Position and Processing Quality
FPL found valuable benefits in a streamlined bill-to-collection cycle and improved overall operating performance in its payment system operations. Mass comments that a key benefit to us is “accelerating posting of cash to our customers’ accounts, with this new system we’ve been able to accelerate by one complete day the actual physical posting of payments to our customer’s records.” Before our system was implemented, payment investigations required two or three employees to handle, daily. Now it involves only one person. And, since FPL decreased the number of personnel needed for research, it can now redistribute employees to prepare bank deposits. With this realignment, same-day deposits have increased from 92 percent to 100 percent. This includes the labor required for all departmental tasks such as mail opening and extracting as well as the labor required for all known remittance back-office functions.
Sophisticated balancing logic, along with system-wide batch integrity checking, helps to ensure that customer payments are posted on a timely basis. The automated exception processing system is integrated into the system so that transactions are followed through to completion. By providing online inquiry of MICR/OCR image data, reducing payment credit errors, and providing disaster recovery techniques, FPL has substantially enhanced its service commitments to customers.
Client at a glance
Florida Power and Light Company (FPL), the principal subsidiary of FPL Group, Inc.,
Primary Business
One of the largest providers of electricity-relatedservices in the United States
Size of Company
Serves 4.1 million customer accounts in the state of Florida
Annual Revenue
Annual revenues of more than $6 billion
Markets Served
State of Florida
Countries of Operations
Florida, United States
Key Components of Solution
Remittance Processing Solution (RPS), (2) NDP 500, Cash Management System (CMS); Change of Address (COA).
