My Apprenticeship Blog:
Series 5

I have now been working at West Mercia Energy for a year! It has gone by so quickly and I have learnt so much about being in the workplace and the business itself.

My college work is coming along really well and pleasingly, I am ahead of target, so I should hopefully be finishing my apprenticeship earlier than expected. If all goes well, I will be put in for my End Point Assessment (EPA) after Christmas, so I have begun preparing for this. My EPA consists of a project to improve a system function within WME, and a presentation.

After my time working within the siteworks team, I have decided to do my project on developing and improving the internal siteworks reporting function.

The report I am improving shows all the open siteworks queries we have, and is used for monitoring query resolutions, outcomes and reporting to customers. I have identified several improvements to date and have been working with our IT team, to improve the format and data within the report.

The other half of my project is improving the siteworks function within our CRM system. This involves IT development to ensure we capture more bespoke information, depending on the specific siteworks job. Currently the data captured is very generic. This will make it easier for whoever works on these jobs and that they will find it easier to remember everything that is needed.

I am also going to improve the way we report on the live status of each open siteworks job which should hopefully make things easier for the siteworks team moving forwards.

I have now moved onto the billing part of my training; however, I am still working with the siteworks team to complete any jobs that I had started before I moved. This is good, as it means I still get siteworks practice whilst also working in a different area of the business.

The work in billing is very different again to anything I have done previously as I am using a completely different part of the WME IT system than I have before. WME have a unique billing operation whereby we sit in between the supplier and customer for billing. Our aim is to ensure that all customer billing is 100% correct.

So far, my core job role has been validating invoices and issuing read reminder emails. This is complimenting my time in siteworks and customer services, as many of the issues raised in those departments impacts on customer billing.

I have sat in on billing meetings between WME and our key suppliers, which has also helped me develop my knowledge. I’ve also raised lots of queries and requests for invoices to be altered with our supplier when validating bills.

Since working in the billing team I have needed to plan my time well as I have needed to fit my other jobs around whatever I need to do in billing. I do this by allocating certain jobs, to certain days, but this can change depending on what arises.

I am looking forward to continuing to work towards my end assessment and further my development and understanding within the billing team over the coming months.

Thank you for reading!