Customer billing relies on an extensive underlying infrastructure to monitor, record, maintain data and apply required contractual parameters for accurate billing.

Billing Operations teams manage 100s of component processes which interface with a variety of systems, often legacy, and have no fully end-to-end documented processes. Systems and applications must have the available capacity to store data and have this available for the correct billing period.

Complex processes must often run sequentially, not in parallel, to achieve correct client billing. This is fraught with complexity and is either lost revenue to the CSP, or provides for a very frustrated customer later in the cycle. For example, misapplied or miscalculated discount policies and roaming charges; these must be applied in the correct order to enable them match the agreed contracts. If you discover an error this after the bill has gone out you either correct in a subsequent bill, or write it off. Likewise, you might accidentally over-charge a customer.

In our experience, customers quickly identify over-charging to you, but are somewhat slower relaying an under-charge!

Stages within the Billing operation process require a high level of supervision, manual involvement and availability. Teams are often working 24×7 to manage sub-process with runtimes, look for failures and essentially keep everything flowing. When this spans more than one shift of workers, it gets increasingly more complex. In most cases, this is because there is an inconsistent application of process rules. The knowledge of the process is too often contained in the Billing Operations team members, along with all the variations and the troubleshooting techniques.

The Customer recognised the risk they had, and the value they only had in the heads of their billing team. They needed to translate that in to a layer of automation and orchestration capability which removed dependency on the human, and created a place for those same humans to move from ‘doing stuff’ to adding value to the organisation.

By adding automation, the customer already knew that they could improve accuracy, ensure consistency, and feel confident that the delivery of billing information would always be on schedule. By introducing an Automated Billing Management capability, this would enable the Service Provider to execute at machine speed and at full capacity.

Moreover, the customer did not want disruption to their Billing team to run for very long. Being involved with IT projects was always going to add stress and pressure to a team for whom failure is not an option. It was vitally important that a significant amount of automation could be achieved quickly, freeing up time and money to then reinvest in iterating and recycling the automation efforts of the function. Achieving automation needed to come in a few weeks or months, not years.

CORTEX was integrated to a number of software applications within the customer. The solution was used to automate the execution of the billing stages from specification, through the billing stages, and then help ensure that the cycle completes. If a stage fails, CORTEX was configured to pause the remainder of that individual instance of that process and notify the Billing Operations team, whilst other instances and processes remain running inflight. This client sought to have a human-in-the-loop when stages failed.

Human-in-the-loop automation is achieved through Role Based access controls which limit who can initiate, pause or modify the Billing Operations processes. Its useful when you trap new scenarios, or when you want a manual intervention by design, not owed to necessity. As each scenario which warranted a pause was handled, a new automation segment was added (if appropriate) enabling CORTEX to remedy the issue next time it occurred. Over time, the customer has been able to iterate nearly all edge cases which affect billing sequences.

The customer had a reasonable, but strategically important rapid time-to-value ambition. CORTEX helped achieve this through deploying automation in a staged approach. The MVP was delivered in just 4 months, and other significant leaps in automating the billing process followed a few months later. Indeed, more time has been spent capturing and automating the ‘edge case’ process requirements. ‘Edge cases’ are a never ending journey for a CSP as new services or conditions make an impact, but with CORTEX, you can be self-sufficient very quickly, having had the major share of value early on in the automation journey.

The customer now reports that Pre, Post, and billing day activities within the billing eco system are nearly 100% automated processes, running as a 24×7 Digital Operation. They were witness to a 75% reduction in manual effort, achieved in less than 9 months from Project initiation.