From volumes produced to revenue collected

For an electricity or water utility, the chain from volume produced to revenue collected is a succession of losses. Between what leaves the facilities and what reaches customers, technical losses: leaks, overheating, ageing networks. Between what is delivered and what is billed, commercial losses: faulty meters, unregistered connections, under-estimated consumption, fraud. Between what is billed and what is collected, collection losses: unpaid bills, old receivables, disputes.

Each link has its own causes, its own owners and its own remedies; confusing them is the first reason why loss-reduction plans disappoint. As long as the operator cannot say where the value disappears, each department has an explanation: commercial blames the network, technical blames billing, and the effort scatters into an action plan that targets everything and reaches nothing.

First, see: the flow balance

The starting point is not a massive investment; it is a balance. Establish, zone by zone, the full cascade: produced, injected, delivered, billed, collected, and keep it up to date. The exercise seems elementary. It is demanding, because it means reconciling data the operator has but which lives apart: production metering, remote or distribution readings, billing files, receipts.

This balance transforms the debate. Losses cease to be a global percentage, cited in committee and unverifiable in the field, and become located gaps: this zone delivers a lot and bills little, that one bills well and collects poorly. The discussion changes in nature: it is no longer about a problem, it is about places.

Then make reliable: billing as the backbone

At the centre of the chain sits billing, and at the centre of billing, a reference set: the customer file. A misidentified customer, a wrongly linked meter, a wrongly applied tariff produce losses as surely as a leak, with one advantage for the operator: those losses are corrected without works.

Making reliable here means: a customer file reconciled with the field (the delivery point exists, the meter is the one assumed, the customer is identifiable); readings whose quality is measured and tracked; anomalies detected through data (prolonged zero consumption, unexplained drops, profiles inconsistent with the declared activity) and handled by teams whose mandate that is. General experience of the sector shows it: a significant share of so-called commercial losses is in reality a loss of information.

Finally, steer: collection as a discipline

Collection rarely suffers from a lack of energy; it suffers from a lack of segmentation. Treating in the same way the household in temporary difficulty, the large consumer who is a habitual bad payer and the administration whose debt is an institutional matter is to guarantee inefficiency. Data makes it possible to separate these populations, to adapt the actions (reminder, payment plan, disconnection, institutional negotiation) and to measure what works.

The revenue unit: holding the chain together

There remains the question of organisation. Each link of the chain belongs to a different department; the whole chain belongs to no one. That is the function of a revenue unit: a small cross-cutting team, mandated by executive management, that keeps the flow balance, prioritises zones and actions by recoverable value, and reports on a single figure: the gap between the value produced and the value collected, and its trajectory.

Its strength lies there: replacing the standoff between departments with a common reference set of facts. Its condition for success too: the unit prepares and measures, but the actions remain carried by the business departments, with their teams. A revenue unit that turns into a second management line reproduces the problem it was meant to solve; a unit that equips and transfers its methods leaves, beyond the revenue recovered, a lasting capability.

This is the final stake, and it goes beyond the subject of losses. An operator that can measure its value chain, locate its gaps and steer their reduction has built something more precious than a loss-reduction plan: control of its own revenue.