SOA Based CRIT

The client was a leading global communications solutions provider and serves a large number of Fortune 500 customers. The company delivers advanced IP, data, voice and wireless solutions to large businesses and governments. With a global footprint, the company provides services across multiple verticals to a variety of business customers and has developed expertise, over many decades, in maintaining and managing highly complex networks.

The company’s customer contract capture system involved 120 processes and 35 systems that handled 28000 contracts per year. Because of a large number of acquisitions, the company was left with a plethora of overlapping processes and systems that required a high degree of manual intervention. This led to a large number of errors, which directly translated into customer satisfaction issues. Specifically, misinterpreted or incorrectly implemented rates accounted for over 50% of all corrective billing credits or approximately $100M/year in billing adjustments.

The client wanted to provide a superior experience to its customers by ensuring consistent and accurate billing. The company sought to enable electronic billing as well as offer billing analysis, reporting, and inquiry capabilities. The client had a large number of heterogeneous systems (including legacy systems) based on different platforms and technologies. Leveraging these systems to maximize value from existing investments required complex integration between existing and new systems.

Aricent Solution

Aricent was responsible for implementing a Contract Rate Implementation Transformation (CRIT) program that would result in rules driven automated pre / post contract processes supported by an audit operation.

The solution was built on a BEA WebLogic framework using the BEA Aqualogic suite. It was designed to run on a combined mid-range and mainframe environment and had to interface with a number of orders, network and billing applications.

CRIT enabled the following critical features –

• Flow through ordering
• Capability to produce a single bill for all products for each customer
• Contract acceptance and workflow (Contract Rate Management)
• Workflow management for rate determination and approval for an order based on contracts
• Increased flexibility and customization for special pricing and discounting
• Reduced manual intervention through process automation resulting in improved operational efficiency
• Increased billing accuracy and reduced post billing credits

We recommended a CMMi Level 5 compliant organizational model to deliver this service and deployed a team that was already familiar with the customer environment and used an iterative SDLC methodology for delivering this solution. In addition, 60% of the team worked offshore resulting in a huge amount of cost savings for the customer.

Results

The clients reaped huge benefits through the CRIT implementation as it significantly reduced operational expenses through automation and improved accuracy of customer bills. It is estimated that savings to the tune of USD 4.8 million per year will accrue through this implementation. Improved billing accuracy also has a direct positive impact on customer satisfaction.

Finally, because the CRIT solution shared a common architecture with the in-house circuit pricing tool solution, the client benefited from further cost and overhead reduction.