KESCo improves billing efficiency with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Kanpur Electricity Supply Company (KESCo) is an electrical power company based in Kanpur, India. The company provides online billing and payment options for more than 600,000 residential and business customers. As the company grew, its on-premises infrastructure struggled to handle the volume of requests from KESCo customers and staff, hampering operational efficiency.

Some customer bills were generated incorrectly, such as applying the wrong tariff or payment deadline. This was due to business rules being mapped incorrectly to the billing system’s software, compounded by mistakes arising from manual processes and lack of data validation controls.

Ensuring accurate, timely customer billing and payment was a core challenge for KESCo, since it could severely impact revenue realization.

KESCo also did not have a business continuity or disaster recovery (DR) plan in place, and its only backup system was on-premises.

To achieve better performance, high availability, and improved return on investment, the organization decided to deploy a modern, agile, and robust infrastructure to host its custom billing application and establish a disaster recovery solution.

KESCo chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because of its robust process automation, on-demand scalability, and seamless integration with multiple third-party applications hosted on AWS, Azure, and other cloud services providers.

By combining different Oracle products, KESCo could achieve all its goals—disaster recovery, data security, maximum availability, and operational efficiency—in an integrated, cost-effective solution.

Oracle Enterprise Database Service on OCI offered the performance, flexibility, and scalability required to store and manage KESCo’s customer data with built-in automation and analytics, while OCI could securely host KESCo’s back-up and disaster recovery. Additional Oracle services would enable KESCo to overcome specific disaster recovery challenges, such as Oracle Real Applications Clusters that would allow uninterrupted service delivery during local power outages.

Since migrating its online billing application and disaster recovery to OCI, KESCo has reduced its total cost of ownership. Operational efficiency has improved significantly since the electricity supplier leverages OCI’s high performance, availability, and scalability.

KESCo’s customers can now access billing information 24/7, get their queries answered, and make payments via a secure payment gateway or internet banking. The customer portal also lets users customize their notifications for bill reminders or usage alerts to help them stay within their budget.

KESCo’s data quality has improved significantly by switching to Oracle Enterprise Database Service, which offers a secure, flexible way to manage data with built-in controls and analytics. Automation of many of the organization’s routine tasks, including data upload and verification, has replaced manual processes, and eliminated errors.

By reducing billing errors, the company has improved customer satisfaction while increasing revenue realization. Customer complaints have decreased considerably as KESCo’s service delivery has improved by maximizing availability and performance of its billing app and customer portal hosted on OCI. KESCo’s mobile billing application is fully integrated with its main Oracle Database in OCI, enabling a seamless customer experience.

Migrating backup and disaster recovery infrastructure to OCI has given KESCo peace of mind that all data and applications are safeguarded around the clock. Oracle Cloud Guard detects misconfigured resources and insecure activities, flagging security issues to enable swift action.

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) protect KESCo’s database from disruptions caused by local power outages—which is common in Kanpur. Oracle RAC allows the organization to run its database across multiple servers dispersed geographically within India to maximize availability and enable horizontal scalability. When power outages and other disruptions hit one server, KESCo’s database automatically connects to another server, without affecting customers’ user experience.

KESCo worked with the Oracle Center of Excellence to ensure a smooth, rapid migration to the cloud. Oracle Cloud engineers provided expert guidance on planning and managing the move.

Navyal Softeck Solutions provided the DBA support and Fluentgrid SI helped in FG-app migration. Working with Oracle Cloud Lift Service (OCLS) and cloud architects from Oracle, it took approximately 25 days to complete the project. KESCo has gone through all stages of migration and has successfully moved its development, pre-production, and production environments to OCI.