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Billing System Vendor Selection
SITUATION:
A young North American wireless
carrier was experiencing a strong growth trajectory,
nearly doubling their subscriber base every two years.
They were approaching the capacity limits of their
billing system and were also encountering problems with
their billing system architecture, including inability to
meet key business requirements such as real-time rating
and voucher management. The carrier planned to upgrade to their current
vendor’s next generation billing system but found that
the new product was not fully developed. The carrier brought in Alliance to analyze the
progress of the upgrade project and course correct the
failing conversion project. The current vendor was unable to meet required
corrective actions, and a determination was made to
explore different systems to meet the carrier’s
projected growth.
· Deep
expertise
and experience in all phases of system selection:
requirements development and analysis, RFP creation and management,
criteria weighting, price negotiating, gap analysis, and
joint application design. · Deep expertise
in
functionality and architecture of all leading billing
vendors, which was essential to understanding the
carrier’s business needs. · Program management
skills
to coordinate, integrate and oversee other project
managers through a complex undertaking while keeping the
project on target and within budget. · Systems analysis skills to
ensure that the client's requirements were met in all
deliverables. · Training skills to
successfully transfer knowledge and expertise to client's
permanent staff.
SOLUTION: The
first component was to review the carrier’s initial work
on plans to upgrade to the current vendor’s next
generation billing system. Our consultant served as
program manager, supervising project managers responsible
for systems such as data warehouse, customer relationship
management, and networks. He introduced Project
Management Institute (PMI) methodologies, development of
an integrated project plan, identified the project’s
critical path, identified risks, and developed specific
acceptance criteria to make the current vendor accountable
for deliverables for a production environment.
Critical tests revealed that the product would not meet
production requirements and a decision was made to seek a
new solution as part of contingency planning.
Alliance was engaged to spearhead the system selection
process; the second component of this project. The
selection process had several key components:
· Review and augmentation of
the requirements - resulting in 1400 requirements · Categorizing and formatting
the requirements to create an RFP · Alliance review of existing
billing vendor and client selection of seven to invite to
respond to the RFP · Definition and weighting of
the requirements based on stakeholder needs · Organization and scheduling
vendor presentation · Selection of two finalists
for final decisions by client management · Gap analysis of finalists and Joint Application Design sessions with vendors to address the gaps. This process included development of use cases and stakeholder reviews.
RESULTS: ·
In the first phase of
the project – evaluating the upgrade plans – our
recommendation to discontinue the implementation project
saved more than $1 million per month and prevented a
costly upgrade to an untested system that would not have
met the business’ basic requirements. · The
system
selection by the Alliance-led project was on track to pay
for its costs by the fourth year due to lower total cost
of ownership. · The
project
management process improvements substantially increased
the effectiveness and intellectual capital of the
client’s employees, thereby allowing them to decrease
future dependence on software vendors and third party
resources. _______________ Please
contact us to discuss your goals and let us demonstrate
the value of our industry experience. Call 847-782-1500. |
