The company
Skellefteå Kraft’s vision is to be one of the leading energy companies in Sweden and to be perceived by its customers as the best alternative. Using its own energy assets, its extensive expertise and constant development, the company wants to create security and competence for customers, owners and employees.
The challenge
The private energy market in Sweden is characterised by price-conscious customers who switch quickly if they find a better offer somewhere else.
And for Skellefteå Kraft, communicating with its private customers is a major challenge.
“We don’t believe that we can spend a lot of money on invoices, so we’re adapting our e-invoicing solution to suit all of our customers, from companies to private customers,” says Per-Erik Hedström.
It’s a cheap, simple and effective solution that also saves paper, which is good for the environment. At present 26,000 of e-invoice customers are private. Most are outside the grid area. The target is that 50 per cent of customers will have e-invoices in 2011.
The solution
In November 2010 they sent out an information enclosure stating that in future it would cost money to receive a paper invoice. The road to a fully functional e-invoicing system has been a long one for Skellefteå Kraft. The company has grown quickly and other issues were prioritised.
But a lot of work was put into this recently, and at the end of the year the new system was released, giving Skellefteå Kraft much more flexible flows.
“We expect to be running everything on an XML base before the summer, which means that we can work in a totally new way.”
The XML solution brings several benefits. For one thing they can combine invoices, which means sending invoices for several plants to one customer in the same envelope. They also achieve better, cheaper handling of enclosures, and have an opportunity to include a message with the actual invoice.
The invoice is also more flexible and easier to modify – and there’s the facility to use different layouts for different customer groups.
Result
Receiving and dealing with an e-invoice is and must be simple for the user.
“Our customers make their choices in their online bank. But the base data are actually held at Stralfors,” says Per-Erik Hedström.
An application for an e-invoice is sent via the bank to Stralfors, who send the information to Skellefteå Kraft, who enter the information in their system.
“When we then run the invoice file, it contains information about who is to have a paper invoice and who is to receive an e-invoice. And Stralfors does the rest.”
The future
A lot of companies are hesitating before switching to a pure e-invoicing solution, as the invoice mailing has such a high reader value.
“We believe in the Internet. By creating ‘My Pages’ online instead, we achieve the same result, if not better. Here our customers can see consumption statistics, they can see all their invoices in one place and it’s also possible to link in special offers here. It might even be possible to sign new agreements here,” says Per-Erik Hedström.