The programme to improve how water retailers and wholesalers in the non-household market work together to deliver for customers reached another milestone today, with the successful launch of the next tranche of bilateral processes.
Bilateral transactions between retailers and wholesalers have been a major source of friction since the NHH market opened in 2017, increasing trading party costs and impacting customer service.
MOSL has been working closely with trading parties since September 2020 to develop and introduce a central ‘hub’ to manage all bilateral transactions and begin agreeing a standardised approach to more than 60 bilateral processes.
The hub and first and most frequently-raised bilateral process – meter verifications – was launched in September 2021, followed by the release of additional functionality in February 2022.
After extensive testing and confirmation of trading parties’ readiness, another four processes went live in the bilateral transactions hub today, each with a retailer and wholesaler-initiated version: meter repair or replace, customer complaints, customer enquiries and trade effluent enquiries.
The latest release also provides new functionality, including the ability for trading parties to decide whether to connect to the hub via the web portal or system-to-system integration for each process, enabling deferrals for non-business days and improving the quality of performance reports.
John Gilbert, Head of Planning, said: “This is the first time we have added multiple processes to the hub at the same time, so I’m delighted that the first stage of the launch has been a success.
“The hub now contains five of the most important bilateral processes, which are raised around 90,000 times per year across the market. Now that each process has been standardised and added to the hub, each process will be faster, simpler and more reliable than ever.
“Agreeing standardised processes and sharing information via a central hub also means that we, as the market operator, have unprecedented visibility of each process from end-to-end, enabling us to identify snags and benchmark companies’ performances.
“But most importantly, the creation of the hub and standardisation of processes benefits non-household customers by ensuring service requests are resolved in a timely and effective manner.
“We are very grateful to trading parties for their continued support and engagement and look forward to supporting them while they implement these processes and begin looking at the next processes that are due to be delivered in the coming months.”
