A customer portal for Purmerend District Heating
Stadsverwarming Purmerend
Service
Solution
Sector
Purmerend District Heating (SVP) manages the district heating network of the municipality of Purmerend as an integrated utility. This means that both production, delivery and billing are with the same party. They manage a heat plant, the distribution network and provide heat to around 30,000 connections in the region.
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SVP uses the MECOMS software package from supplier Ferranti. This is a software package based on Microsoft Dynamics. A 2012 version of this was used that was migrated to a 365 version. As a result, the existing customer portal would have to be reconnected and needed to be renewed. In addition, there was a need for a customer app to serve customers better.
The OutSystems low-code solution was chosen to design a new customer portal and app that should provide customer communication, self-service and more insight into consumption. This is entirely based on data in Dynamics/Mecoms via APIs.
Customer portal and app
We set up a Figma prototype in 2 weeks to determine the design and check all the necessary integrations. In addition, together with design agency 210, we continued to design an intuitive and good-looking app. After that, we started developing the app and portal in OutSystems, where all components in both the app and portal were reusable and the Figma design could be adopted 1 on 1. A team of 2 consultants ran the entire process from idea to first test session in 9 months.
The benefits
With this system, SVP customers can:
- Become a customer and log in from the existing website
- Change their own data without customer service intervention, which can reduce operational costs
- Making requests for removals, new delivery sets or reporting faults
- Gain insight into consumption data from the smart meter data so that they have the opportunity to make more targeted savings
- Receive communication about heat interruptions via, among other things, receiving push notifications or receiving news messages via a CMS that was also built
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