Summary

The client, a major German telecommunications company, is a provider of broadband Internet, fixed telephone & mobile services, digital television, and on-demand entertainment for its residential and business customers. The client wanted DigitalSkunks to help troubleshoot and fix issues in their billing processes which were causing revenue leakages and incorrect invoice generation.

DigitalSkunks employed DevOps technique to assess client’s billing system processes, identify potential areas of improvement, and define optimization and automation requirements. The existing Billing System was based on IBM’s AS400 database. DigitalSkunks developed a requirement management and incident management strategy in preparation of future enhancement to the existing system.

DigitalSkunks efforts in enhancing and automating the billing system and processes resulted in significant reduction in overall billing costs by reducing errors and resulting manual intervention, and by plugging revenue leakages.

Background and Challenges

• Client hired DigitialSkunks to conduct an extensive review of its Billing Processes and benchmark their cost of issuing customer a bill as well as errors associated with that activity with that of the industry.
• The review revealed a higher cost of billing, process issues and system errors related to customer billing as compared to industry standards.
• Improving the billing process would require bug fixing in their system and fixing issues in their billing process and deployment of automation to meet business and analytics requirements.
• Over the years, the legacy billing software had been customized for client’s needs. The short-term view on enhancements made the system complicated to maintain, upgrade and link-up with other applications. Thus, reducing the time to roll-out any software enhancements was a priority for the client.
• DigitalSkunks was asked to help with the enhancement of the entire billing system and process. DigitalSkunks used Agile Model coupled with DevOps to and manage the project with a DevOps perspective.

Solution

• DevOps was employed to sustain the continuous delivery process that was required to achieve the goals efficiently and effectively.
• DigitialSkunks implemented a data management strategy to prepare for the introduction of new enhancements in the future.
• This was performed in conjunction with data cleansing effort to prevent post deployment errors and bugs.
• DigitalSkunks conducted a Business Process Redesign to streamline the billing process, reduce errors and as part of project implementations, the project team developed and implemented an AS400 based CRM extensions. This led to improved customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs.
• Additionally, routine workflows were automated to reduce manual intervention in the proposed billing process to reduce operational impact of cycle billing.

Outcome

• Reduction of cost per bill by about 30%.
• Reduce time of cycle billing by 40% and time-to-rollback by about 25%.
• Reduction of estimated data errors by more than 90%.
• Create a system to meet the growing business demand.