Billing Operations

Background

The operator hoped by automating their billing process it would free up skilled members of the team to work on more strategic initiatives.

Billing cycles were plagued with inconsistent data, stalled processes, bottleneck steps and jobs. As such, there was a significant level of manual intervention to free up stages of the billing cycle, ensuring the correct sources of data arrived completely and consistently, and that they completed in the correct sequence, so any calculations were accurate.

This process was business critical to the MNO and such was the risk and the scale of the challenge, that human error was a significant factor in seeking advanced automation and orchestration from We Are CORTEX.

Objectives

The operator recognised that to generally improve the process so as to de-risk its dependency on human know-how.

manual steps, and to the extent a billing cycle will leverage a human-in-the-loop, that it could increase their productivity. Automated billing processes would result in cost reduction, risk reduction, and would contribute to revenue assurance and improve employee satisfaction.

Solution

Once implemented CORTEX validated the billing system readiness for running a specific operational process.

It then runs the operational processes, requesting data, reading data and ensuring completeness. It relates procedures, monitors continuously the status of the jobs, log files, interrogates specific statuses, and determines the completion status.

During this process CORTEX monitors the billing system continuously for on screen notifications and takes necessary precautions either re-running steps, adding a human-in-the-loop or otherwise flagging any new edge cases which interupt running the billing processes. Some steps are still operated manually by the MNO for their own process Governance. CORTEX enables the user to interact with the ongoing jobs by planting breakpoints, pausing and resuming them on demand.

When an issue arises, CORTEX sends notifications to operational users informing then need for human intervention.

Outcomes

This is a very successful set of use cases for our Customer.

Billing operations are entirely automated where this is appropriate.

This means that Billing end-to-end processes are 98.5% operated according to the design.

The Customer has redistributed 18x FTE, reallocating them to less administrative roles, which in turn has improved moral and reduced employ churn. Employee churn was not precisely measured but was noted as a material benefit.

There has also been a 60% improvement in operational accuracy owed to the machine driven processes.