Order close out and Billing activation
Global CSP automates billing activation to improve cost accounting
The CSP built automation around its ping testing, which is the final check in its equipment installation process. Remarkably, this charmingly simple – and, indeed, quick-to-build – solution is now saving around half a million dollars each year by redistributing eleven people away from administrative activities to more valuable work.
The ability to prove that devices are functioning correctly, from installation, offers major benefits right across an organisation. In particular, it’s very useful to the accounting function. Notification to start invoicing enables billing teams to automatically trigger invoices for onward processing. Moreover, construction costs from service installations can be passed on to the accounting team, enabling them to be recouped.
The CSP’s Head of Automation said: ‘This has just added some nice speed and certainty to the final stages of service delivery. We get automatically alerted to any equipment that’s not behaving as expected, and we can get straight into billing. Our finance team is also able to account for any construction costs – digging up roads and so on – from the installation.’
When the CSP’s engineers confirm they’ve installed and tested equipment at a customer site, CORTEX becomes able to identify what’s been installed by polling their systems. After retrieving the network details, CORTEX will then automatically ping each device to check that it is functioning correctly.
Ensuring operational readiness…
If equipment isn’t behaving as it should—or doesn’t meet the appropriate security standards, or there’s some other failure then the software will raise an exception, and someone in fall-out management will be alerted. They will attempt to remediate the problem and then, again, mark it as installed in the same way as before. In turn, CORTEX will then pick it up and ping the device again until it’s proven to be functioning correctly.
Activating billing…
CORTEX will then move all the relevant data into billing activation. In fact, the billing system already knows what to expect because – at the point of order decomposition, prior to installation – it was primed with details of the customer and their services. So, this is typically straightforward, and simply a notification from CORTEX that it’s time to start billing.
There are also cases where what’s actually been installed may not be the same as what was planned during the order validation process. If a third-party supplier (or ‘off-net provider’) no longer offers a service by the time of deployment, a necessary change to what was installed may have been necessary. Such adjustments can all be automatically reconciled in the billing system through CORTEX.
Accounting for construction costs…
Additionally, any expenses that arise due to physical construction costs – associated with digging up roads to lay cable, for example – are also now automatically passed through to the finance teams. That means they can be accounted for properly, and allocated appropriately as part of the overall project cost.
The big picture…
This particular implementation of order close out was limited due to the focused needs of the CSP. They continue to extend this automation and are now implementing CORTEX’s established ‘ready for service’ process – a comprehensive series of diagnostic and testing automations.
Phase one of the automation that CORTEX built around the CSP’s equipment ping testing is actually the final leg of the CSP’s customer experience for service installation. Working backwards through CORTEX’s ‘ready for service’ use case is a sensible way for the CSP to incrementally improve that customer experience. As they then continue to automate their own equivalent model – ‘test and turn up’ – the CSP will build on its reputation with customers, and improve retention and acquisition.
Future the CSP innovations might include CORTEX potentially configuring equipment as it arrives on-site. Currently, their devices are configured in the warehouse before being mailed to the customer location, where they’re installed by an engineer. CORTEX can perform remote configuration – and, crucially, re-configuration – of on-site equipment. That would enable the CSP to maintain a set of default customer profiles that can evolve over time. Using CORTEX, it could automatically refresh its configurations on remote equipment.