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Automation of Risky Manual Billing Process
SITUATION: A
regional North American telecom carrier relied heavily on
a revenue stream derived from terminating long distance
calls of its wholesale customers.
Contracts with wholesalers were very complex,
taking into account not only the distance of call
termination, but also how rural and remote the areas of
termination were.
The carrier had a goal of adding fifty to seventy
wholesale customers within a year since this revenue
stream had been identified as critical to the business.
The
carrier had two legacy billing systems, one for wholesale
customers and one for retail customers.
Their IT department lacked the subject matter
expertise on the legacy systems to be able to implement
complex new wholesale customers into the existing systems.
When
the carrier’s billing team attempted to integrate new
customers into the legacy systems – a process that took
them 12 months - the resulting bills were so inaccurate
that they were all discarded.
A Revenue Assurance analyst at the carrier took matters
into his own hands and built a manual desktop-based
billing process using Microsoft Office applications and
siphoning raw traffic off the carrier’s mediation
device. Although
he did a good job of creating an ad hoc solution, it was a
very risky solution since he was the only person who knew
how to run it, and also involved a long development window
to add each customer since the process was entirely manual.
OUR EXPERIENCE:
· Familiarity
with both legacy billing systems: CABS for wholesale and CBP
for retail.
·
Ability to create
repeatable, automated solutions.
SOLUTION:
An
Alliance project manager and team of developers were engaged initially to
build a comprehensive and repeatable requirements
template. Next
they selected two new wholesale customers and developed
code that integrated with the legacy billing systems and
produced accurate, automated bills. The approach was table-driven, modular, and easy to
apply to new wholesale customers as the business signed
additional contracts.
RESULTS:
The
initial development window using internal resources was 12
months per wholesale customer and resulted in failed code.
Alliance’s development window adding its first wholesale
customers was a total of six weeks, from signed contract
to billable records and including the time required to
create the solution, and the code was successful.
Having laid the foundation for a repeatable process,
Alliance’s second wholesale customer addition required
less than four weeks. With the addition of yet
another layer of scalable, table-driven architecture, the
addition of the third customer required two weeks,
and customers number four and beyond can be added in a
seven-day development window.
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Please
contact us to discuss your goals and let us demonstrate
the value of our industry experience. Call 847-782-1500.
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