Executive Summary

Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) is the only Utility supplier of Electricity in Sri Lanka
providing this essential service to about 5 million consumers island wide. The majority
of the revenue of CEB is from the domestic sector and are collected by energy
purchasing in a monthly basis after issuing the consumed bill for the previous month.
This task is done by a group of employees called Meter Readers.

The case problem discussed here is the shortage of Meter Readers in Kekirawa Area in
CEB, where it has caused a 6 million rupees monthly income outstanding in each month
and also caused a significant increase of bill arrears position in Kekirawa area.

This problem has occurred due to poor strategic choices made by the government and
the higher management of the CEB. As a solution to the lack of labours in Meter
Reading and other categories, CEB management has implemented a strategy with the
approval of the Cabinet, to outsource the meter reading task to a Private Company
called Energies (A subsidiary of CEB).

But later, with some political agendas, these Man Power employees demanded to make
them permanent employees in CEB by integrating them to CEB service. So, when the
integration of those employees to CEB happened, seven number of contract readers lost
their jobs due to lack of qualifications and as a result a problem of excess 15,000 bills
were remained without distributing.

As solutions to this problem several alternatives were suggested as; Sub contract the
meter reading, posting assessed bills, unread, new recruitments, using the same meter
readers with proper compensation. With the having authority two of them were
currently executed and they are posting of assessed bills (terminated due to increased
issues) and unready (currently done) and the best suggested alternative is to implement
new recruitments for the existing vacancies of the meter reader positions in Kekirawa
CEB.