SUCCESS STORY
Puget Sound EnergyIndustry• EnergySolutions• OpenText™ Document Presentment
for SAP Solutions• OpenText™ Data Archivingfor SAP Solutions• OpenText™ Extended ECM
for SAP Solutions®

®

Washington State utility energizes
customer experience with OpenText
Puget Sound Energy optimizes enterprise content with®
OpenText Suite for SAP Solutions®

Results
Optimized document
production process for enhanced
customer engagement
Rapid data archiving and retrieval
Integrated content management
on a single platform
Customer correspondences
updated four to five days faster“One of the greatest featuresabout OpenText Document
Presentment Live is that graph.
We did such a successful job that
we have other utility customers
calling us and asking, ‘Hey,
how did you do that?’ And wesay, ‘Well, we used OpenText
Document Presentment Live’.”Anu Iyer

IT adviser
Puget Sound Energy

Washington State utility energizes customer experience with OpenText

Puget Sound Energy is Washington State’s oldest energy company
and the largest utility in the Pacific Northwest, providing electricand natural gas service to roughly 1.5 million customers over
6,000 square miles. As the first utility to own and operate windenergy facilities in the Northwest and the second largest utility
owner of wind power, Puget Sound Energy is a leading producer ofrenewable energy in the Pacific Northwest.

For a lot of customers, this is their sole communication withus. We want to improve their experience by providing mobile,
Internet and other avenues of access to us. We would like toprovide as happy an experience as possible. Our focus is always
on customer engagement, customer experience and doing what
the customer wants,” explained Anu Iyer, IT adviser for Puget
Sound Energy.

A history of dedicated service

However, meeting these new demands proved challenging with
PSE’s existing systems and solutions. “We had a legacy systemthat had served us well when we produced only electricity
and gas for traditional means and we continued to do what
we had always been doing,” noted Iyer. Thus, in 2013, PSE laid
the groundwork for the future by deploying an SAP Customer
Information System. The team then turned its attention to its
document management, document production and archiving
solutions. PSE was using third-parties for these functions, which
resulted in slow and inefficient processes.

Puget Sound Energy (PSE) has a 150-year history of leadership,
innovation and dedicated service to its customers. While the utility has
experienced dramatic change over the years, PSE’s focus on safe,
dependable and efficient energy service has not wavered. Driven by
this commitment, the company recently transformed its customer
communications, accelerated access to data and streamlined its
enterprise content platform with OpenText Suite for SAP Solutions,featuring OpenText™ Document Presentment for SAP Solutions,
OpenText™ Data Archiving for SAP Solutions and OpenText™ Extended
ECM for SAP Solutions.
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®

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Boosting customer experience
The utility industry currently faces a wide range of challenges,including rising consumer demand for renewable energy sources
and new digital technologies. Determined to keep pace with thesedemands, PSE has been investing in renewable energy, such as windand solar, to provide cleaner energy choices for its customers. The
utility is also working to provide consumers with more choice whenit comes to communication with the company. “Most people simply
receive an electricity bill, look at it and then pay it.

A new digital content platform leveraging industry
leading solutions
The company required a new solution that could integrate with its SAPsystem. Similar to its selection of SAP, PSE sought an industry-leadingsolution. After considering various options, the company decided on
OpenText Suite for SAP Solutions, including Document Presentment
for SAP Solutions, Data Archiving for SAP Solutions and Extended
ECM for SAP Solutions.

“The businesscan easily
make ad-hoc
changes tocorrespondences.
What used to takefour to five days
can now be donein less than a day.”Anu Iyer

IT adviser
Puget Sound Energy

Washington State utility energizes customer experience with OpenText“We chose OpenText because it had a tight integration with SAP—and SAP and OpenText were the industry leaders. We recognizedthat OpenText was a company that really knew how to manage
large amounts of documents and data. Although we looked atothers, we never seriously considered any document management
solution other than OpenText. It was a no-brainer,” explained Iyer.

Optimizing customer communication processes
speeds change requests
Today, Document Presentment for SAP Solutions provides PSE
with a platform for design, deployment and multichannel deliveryof documents and correspondence. The solution enables PSE togenerate individualized customer communications and to makead-hoc changes on the fly. In the past, a simple change on customer
correspondence, such as a fax number on a bill, might take days as
data from SAP was sent to a third-party vendor who created thedocument, stored it, printed it and mailed it out. Now, PSE can makethe change and produce it the same day. And with the Document
Presentment Live add-on, last-minute changes can be made quickly.
“The beauty of it is that it goes out in that night’s billing run. If
you make the change at say 8:00 in the morning, it can reachthe customer’s hand by noon or 1:00 p.m. the next day. That is
how fast the turnaround time is. We are extremely happy,” said
Iyer. “The business can also easily make ad-hoc changes tocorrespondences. What used to take four to five days can be donein less than a day. That is an incredible improvement.”

Innovating for millennials with omnichannel delivery
and modernized bills
The new solution has also allowed PSE to expand its range of billformats and delivery methods. “We can provide our customers withchoices they didn’t have before. We can provide them separate
bills for renewable energy and for traditional energy. They can see
their bills in new ways—mobile options and internet options. SAPand OpenText enabled us to do that,” said Iyer. “You can convert
the SAP data to AFP, EDI, mobile, HTML, email, etc. We use it togenerate AFP documents, to generate PDFs, EDI, text messaging.
That is the true power of OpenText Document Presentment. I
don’t know of any other document creation solution that is able toprovide that wide a variety of formats.”
Since the utility bill is such a critical point of contact with customers,
PSE also used Document Presentment to make the bill easier forcustomers to understand. Using customer feedback, the bill wastransformed from a single black-and-white page to a two-pagestatement in color, complete with graphs for ease of understanding.
“One of the greatest features about OpenText Document
Presentment Live is that graph. We did such a successful jobthat we have other utility customers calling us and asking,‘Hey, how did you do that?’ And we say, ‘Well, we used OpenText
Document Presentment Live,’” explained Iyer. “Plus, our customers
are very, very, very happy with the color bill. It’s nice to know that
we have the customer’s back. And in turn, OpenText has our back.
So, we’re very happy with that.”“When we archived
the SAP data using
OpenText, system
performance
improved
dramatically. We
went from about
two or threeminutes for dataretrieval to undera few seconds.”
Anu Iyer

IT adviser
Puget Sound Energy

Washington State utility energizes customer experience with OpenText

With more and more millennials entering the workforce, buying homes
and signing up for electricity and gas, Iyer noted that increased
communication channels are critical: “We want to be able to engage
the customers in the manner in which they want, whether it’s
Facebook, Twitter, mobile, etc. OpenText Document Presentment
provides that kind of omnichannel foundation. That’s one of thethings that I really like about Document Presentment—it’s keeping
up with all the new ways that we provide our customers withthe data that they seek.” As an additional benefit, OpenText’s tightintegration with SAP means that PSE can leverage the analytics featuresof its recent deployment of SAP HANA to determine how customers
want to engage with the company.

From minutes to seconds: SAP Archiving improves
speed and agility
Using Data Archiving for SAP Solutions, PSE can now securely store
older data but ensure that it is instantly available when users need it.
The large amount of data in the SAP system had been affecting thespeed of retrieval, which resulted in longer customer wait times via
the call center and the web portal. “When we archived the SAP datausing OpenText, system performance improved dramatically. We
went from about two or three minutes for data retrieval to undera few seconds. Overnight, our document archival rates increased
to 1,200 documents per minute. The system practically inhaledthem. We produce about 80,000 bills and items of correspondence
every single night, so that is a huge amount,” said Iyer. “That speedtranslates to a better customer experience, which translates tokeeping the business happy. This, in turn, makes management
happy. It is a win-win situation all around.”Single enterprise-wide solution eliminates siloes;
provides foundation for ‘Get to Zero’ initiative
In addition, Extended ECM for SAP Solutions replaced PSE’s multiple
departmental information silos with a single, central repository forenterprise-wide data that serves multiple departments within thecompany. “We needed a common platform that would eliminate
these silos while still providing the users what they wanted. We
needed it to be scalable, tightly integrated with SAP and with theability to enforce document retention and disposition rules. We
needed to have all of this in one product. OpenText Extended ECM
came through for us—it is the answer to all our prayers,” said Iyer.
Extended ECM now plays a critical role in another important PSE
customer initiative: The GTZ (Get to Zero) initiative aims to reduce
the number of customer calls to zero. “We needed a solution thatwould enable us to predict what the customer wants and be able toprovide it to them even before they knew they wanted it. The GTZ
initiative has heavily leveraged SAP and OpenText to provide that.
And OpenText Extended ECM is a huge part of being able to dothat,” stated Iyer.
Looking to the future, PSE envisions continued change and innovation
to meet the energy needs of its customers and it sees OpenText
and SAP as partners in that future. “It’s a perfect partnership. SAP
understands the business. OpenText understands the data anddocuments. And business is driven by data and documents. This isa very strong, very strategic partnership,” concluded Iyer.

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information about
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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