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‘The Eagle' makes payment processing
more efficient
Sometime close to 5 a.m. each weekday, an average of $15 million in Georgia Power electric service payments is delivered to the remittance processing center located at 241 Ralph McGill. That is when a team of dedicated employees go to work and begin the process of sorting, opening and processing the payments.
The employees are aided by a massive machine known simply as "The Eagle." The Eagle, a machine manufactured by the OPEX Corporation, opens, sorts and images approximately 80 to 85 percent of the payments. Most days, this amounts to about 25,000 to 30,000 payments.
The Eagle accomplishes this at a dizzying rate – up to 14,000 remittances per hour. The maze of belts and pulleys moves bills and checks through the machine at a speed of 120 inches per second.
As part of the new processing, the check and bill images that are made by high speed cameras on The Eagle and on the other equipment are stored on local servers. Prior to this technology, when a payment inquiry was made to remittance processing, an employee had to contact the bank in order to obtain a copy of the processed check. This could take several days. Now, all it takes is a couple of mouse clicks to access the image of the check.
The high speed cameras are so sensitive that they will pick up anything a customer might notate on the bill. These images are sorted to a special queue for employee review and appropriate follow-up.
The machine, only the fourth one of its kind produced by OPEX, was installed three years ago. There is an identical machine at the remittance center in Birmingham that processes payments for Alabama Power, Gulf Power and Mississippi Power. Due to the employees' knowledge and efficiency, as well as the equipment and software that was implemented at the same time, the remittance processing center in Atlanta has been able to reduce both the number of contract employees and regular employees by a total of 14.
"The main advantage of The Eagle and the other equipment and software that was installed in 2006 is efficiency," according to Tracy Sorrells, remittance processing manager. "Since we are able to get the payments processed more quickly, the customer receives credit on their Georgia Power account more quickly and the money is deposited in the bank faster."