Public Sector - Licence Fee Administration

The issues

This public sector body, an association of multiple public and state administrations, is responsible for collecting broadcast radio and television licence fees of £6 billion per annum from almost 40 million homes in the Federal Republic of Germany. This covers both traditional devices and program content over internet capable devices, regardless of whether the devices are ever internet connected.

Prior to the engagement of icon, the bills have been created by multiple legacy (PL/1) applications running on mainframe host. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and update these old applications and the operational risk to the business was recognized as becoming unacceptably high.

Furthermore, no central templates repository was available which meant considerable time and effort was required whenever  documents needed to be changed or updated

The icon solution

icon was selected as the solution provider and, utilising icon Suite’s document assembly solution, pre-defined AFP modules are compiled in batch jobs during the creation of the production AFP print job.

This resulted in a million pages being created and processed per hour ­ meeting the key performance requirement and removing operational and financial risk.

The supporting IT infrastructure includes frontend client on Windows with a backend Linux-Server, with DB2 under z/OS environment.

Client Benefits

• Improved cash-flows and reduced fee collection administration expenses
• Improved processes with all the client billing correspondence working with the same text system based on one centrally maintained templates’ repository
• Increased performance means even late changes can be easily incorporated ­ even switching to multi-media channels
• Cost reduction with dispensing of rare and expensive programming staff for maintaining the multiple PL/1 applications
• Significantly lower operational risk through migrating to icon’s standard software  enabling the client to work within defined support levels