Itron Provides City of Cape Town with Smart Payment Online Vending System

Cape Town — 17 July, 2009 — Itron announced today that the City of Cape Town (CoCT) has successfully implemented the Pre Payment On-Line Vending Platform 2009, with Itron's Eclipse On-Line Enterprise Vending System. This vending system enables the City of Cape Town to have access to a real time on line system to manage their electricity prepayment customers.

The architecture includes an online SAP interface, which will allow the system to be used in real time via a Web interface by CoCT engineering, vending and call centre departments and customer contact management across all areas of Cape Town. The implementation of this system will provide numerous benefits for CoCT such as improved customer service, a larger footprint of vendors and a consolidated database.

The Itron Eclipse Enterprise software system was deployed in four districts, namely in Blaauwberg, Oostenburg/ Helderburg, Tygerberg and Cape Town with a total number of half a million prepayment customers. The main challenge faced by the project team was amalgamating four completely segmented prepayment systems from various vendors into one centralised on-line Itron Eclipse system.

Hoosain Essop, Vending Manager, City of Cape Town, said: "One of the main benefits the new system provides is that our customers now have the ability to buy electricity anywhere within in the City where a vendor is present, nationally at any of the major retail stores or internationally if he/she buys over the internet, something that was not available when operating four disparate systems."

Dhasi Naidoo, Business Manager Itron South Africa, explained: "The Itron online system provides CoCT benefits of a real time, on-line system enabling the elimination of costly replication processes and the risk of fraudulent transactions. This centralised information system will result in immediately improved customer service".