Managerial Decision Making

Case Problem

1. Identification of the Problem

Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) is the only Utility supplier of Electricity in Sri Lanka providing this essential service to about 5 million consumers island wide. The majority of the revenue of CEB is collected by energy purchasing in a monthly basis after issuing the consumed bill for the previous month. This task is done by a group of employees called Meter Readers.

This Meter Readers have a duty to read the Electricity Utility Meter manually (there are some remote reading meters in CEB as well, but those are excluded in this case problem) and calculate the relevant monthly Electricity Bill and issue the consumer a copy of it. All these Meter Readers have to travel to the consumer locations and deliver the bills by hand, which implies that this is entirely a manual process until the duplicate bills are collected and entered to the system by Data Entry Operators.

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Currently, there is a significant deficit of meter readers in Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB), especially in the North Central Province. Meter readers are the people who read the monthly electricity consumption of each consumer and issue the monthly bill to them in the same moment.

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This case study is focusing about the meter reader issue in Kekirawa Area, in CEB, as there are currently 08 meter readers in short to deliver the bills monthly in Kekirawa Area. So as a result, there are about 15,000 number of bills which cannot be distributed each month. This problem has caused lots of issues for the administration, staff and the customers.

This problem has resulted in following issues currently;

1. Unread bills of approximately 15,000 per month

(define unread, unread process, next bill calculation, etc)

1. Increasing consumer debt position for each month, causing a monthly outstanding loss of approximately 6 million rupees each month

(define monthly outstanding, consumer payment habits, red notice issuing methodology and effect to the disconnection programme)

1. Increased number of high bills and bill errors

(define high bill, bill errors, effect to the customers due to changes in bills)

1. Unnecessary workload for office staff

(define normal routine work of data entry, bill man and ES (Com), describe the additional burdens they have to bear)

1. Unhappy consumers and unhappy staff

(Why they are unhappy, issues occur to customers)

1. Conflicts between customers and employees

(examples for conflicts)

1. Damage to the reputation of CEB

(Paper articles, news articles, public dissatisfaction)

1. Internal issues within the organization

(revenue loss, political issue, union matters)

1. Diagnosis and Analysis of the Problem

This problem has caused lots of issues in the day to day activities in the office and when analyzing the root causes

• Statistics of the problem, consumer data, arias position
• Man Power reader issue
• Political decisions
• Meter reader’s circular
• New recruitment policy issues

1. Development of Alternative

There can be several alternatives identified to solve this issue

1. Sub contract
2. Post (asses)
3. Unread (currently done)
4. New recruitments
5. Use same readers with new allowance or paying method  

1. Selection of Desired Alternatives

Following alternatives have been already selected and executed. But those were not the permanent and last longing solutions for this issue.

1. Post (asses)
2. Unread (currently done)

(describe each with experience and reasons to fail)

1. Implementation of Chosen Alternative

1. got the permission from AGM for 3 month, monthly expenditure was  around 225,000 per month, used 08 trainees to asses the bills, , etc)
2. Agreed with current readers for unread, made a time table schedule, hold the disconnection of those packs)

1. Evaluation and Feedback

1. posting delays, high bills in next month, consumer complains, high rate of bill returns, unnecessary work load, no significant reduction of arias position, very high work load for office staff, unhappy customers, unhappy staff)
2. 6 million of monthly outstanding loss continued, considerably accurate solution, high work load for office staff, unhappy customers, unhappy staff)