Enemalta has nearly halved the average time taken for the provision of services from a month in 2013 to just under 17 days.
This applies to both the provision of new services as well as to changes to existing connections, such as addition of load.
The utility company said that the time went down to less than 11 days for the installation of new services in areas already reachable by the existing national electricity grid infrastructure, with many applications for new electricity connections now being serviced within two weeks.
The improvement in the response time was referred to by chairman Fredrick Azzopardi in an interview in the internationally-distributed CEO magazine, although the article did not give specifics.
Explaining what he described as a “paradigm shift” in operations, he stressed that “delivering a quicker service was one of the essential factors in improving customer satisfaction”.
As a result of this focus, Enemalta reviewed the provision of all its services to reduce turnaround times for services and requests for technical assistance.
This involved an extensive reorganisation of its technical support teams and, in some cases, customers are being provided with appointments on weekends and public holidays to cut delays.
Last year, the company introduced a number of specifically- trained customer response teams including some 40 technicians. The in-house training covered different technical operations related to the maintenance and development of the electricity network and the provision of services to customers. Some of these employees were formerly working at Enemalta’s older power stations.
The utility company also improved the response with regards to street lighting, most of which has now been devolved to local councils and other national entities. Until last year, local councils had to follow a longer application procedure to install and connect new street lights to the national electricity grid. As from January 2016, this procedure was simplified to speed up the process.
Mr Azzopardi said in the CEO article that, by 2017, the old power plants would all have been shut down and the oldest power plant would be less than five years old – complemented by the interconnector and the new gas-fired plants which should be in operation by then.
Enemalta is also investing €80 million to improve the distribution network and reduce power outages. He noted that 94 per cent of customers were now equipped with ‘smart’ meters.
The company was also expected to register a profit for the first time this year, earlier than the original 2017 target, he said, referring to the promise outlined in its 2014 audited results – the last available.
In 2014, the company registered a loss before tax from existing operations of €53.4 million, down from €100.1 million in 2013.
It also reported a profit from the discontinued operations of its petroleum division of €9.3 million.