The Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) has terminated its contract with SOFTtribe Limited, a software developing company due to what it termed as “inefficient and ineffective service delivery.”
According to the Managing Director of GWCL, Mr Clifford Braimah, the activities of the software company has become a drain to the resources of the company as such the earlier the contract is terminated the better.
Speaking at a press conference yesterday in Accra, he explained that as part of efforts of GWCL to improve their customer service delivery they had contract with SOFTtribe in 2016 after the company introduced their new software dubbed “MX-Platform.”
“Together we developed tools for meter reading, customer application and hosted them on SOFTtribe platform, they were responsible for managing the systems updates and database engine,” Mr Braimah said.
He observed that after working with them for two years his outfit began to receive notice of resignation from the employees of SOFTtribe which led the utility company to experience system challenges.
Mr Briamah noted that the replacements of workers made by SOFTtribe could not work up to expectation and they supplied bills which were inconsistent with the bills generated by GWCL.
“Balance statement of accounts was different from water bills making it difficult to handle customers’ queries, E-Manager that allows managers to monitor the performance of meter readers and other allied staff started experiencing data compatibility issues,” he bemoaned.
In addition, Mr Braimah said Disconnection and Reconnection application could not be developed, thus could not deliver the call centre management system.
He noted that the problem started to affect revenue collection from 67 million a month, stressing that “we dropped to 60 million and below.”
Mr Braimah stated that GWCL informed them about the challenges and gave them a year to fix it but they were unable to do so which led to the termination of the contract.
“Their Chief Executive Officer (CEO) told us to purchase Point of Sale (POS) devices to allow all our cashiers in the country to be hooked on the system. We spent GH₵700,000 to procure the devices yet they could not fix it,” he said.
Mr Braimah stated that his outfit could not continue to render loss and reiterated their commitment to keep providing potable water and accurate billing to serve customers’ needs.
He urged management of SOFTtribe to seek redress in court if they have legitimate concern about the contract termination, adding “if not they should not try to get public sympathy by fabricating stories against us.”
BY JOYCELINE NATALLY CUDJOE
