Accenture Brochure Communications Billing
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Transcript of Accenture Brochure Communications Billing
Accenture Communication Solutions
Achieving High Performance in the Communications IndustryHow Accenture Helps Operators Develop Superior Billing Capabilities
3
Accenture is the trusted provider
that helps leading telcos around the
world address their most pressing
billing challenges and achieve high
performance. In fact, our successful
track record, and leading-edge
thinking and ongoing research on the
characteristics of high performance in
the communications industry have led
the industry analysts to rank Accenture
among the top professional services
firms in the billing arena. According
to Gartner, Accenture was ranked
second in the overall Telecom
Operations Management Systems
market worldwide in 2008.1
Our three decades of experience in
billing processes, organization and
systems implementation—which
includes working with the leading
billing software packages—gives
Accenture important insights and
an independent point of view on the
best approach to improving billing
operations. In fact, Accenture has
successfully completed billing projects
for more than 200 communications
clients around the globe and has one
of the largest installed bases of billing
systems in the world. Furthermore,
our portfolio of billing and revenue
assurance offerings covers the full
breadth of billing operations and
leverages the skills of more than 2,500
billing professionals and the Accenture
Global Delivery Network.
Drawing on these key resources and
assets, Accenture can help telcos
address their billing challenges by
transforming their billing function and
enabling it to meet the requirements
of today’s converged world. We do this
in three key ways. We can develop and
implement new billing systems and
processes that support convergent
billing, billing for content and prepaid
and postpaid billing. We can create a
superior revenue assurance function
that enables telcos to bill for and
collect all the revenue that is due.
Responding to increasing competitive challenges and shifting customer demands requires telcos to have a highly flexible, cost-effective billing function. Yet many global telcos face a major challenge when it comes to billing—especially in terms of leveraging their billing systems to support convergent billing and identifying and eliminating sources of revenue leakage.
And we can assume responsibility for
a part or all of a telco’s billing function
through an outsourcing or managed
services arrangement.
Telcos such as Telstra and Zhejiang
Telecom have benefited from Accenture’s
billing knowledge. They have realized
dramatic improvements in billing
efficiency and effectiveness, thus
reducing the cost of the billing function
overall while facilitating the timely
and accurate collection of revenue.
They have created a more compelling
billing experience, which serves as a
competitive differentiator that helps
attract and retain customers. And,
they have developed the ability to
more quickly launch new products and
services to capitalize on fast-emerging
growth opportunities.
We invite you to read on to learn
more about how Accenture can help
your organization transform its billing
function into a distinctive capability that
can help you achieve high performance.
5
The case for change in the billing arena
The forces of convergence are reshaping
the communications industry. Service
providers everywhere are migrating
to all-IP enterprises and 3G at an
accelerating pace. For wireless, wireline
and cable companies alike, broadband
network capabilities and devices are
enabling next-generation, multiservice
offerings. Developing and profiting
from such offerings will be a key to
achieving high performance in the
coming years.
However, many operators face a
significant challenge: Their billing
and revenue management capabilities
and systems are not keeping pace with
the revolutionary and rapid changes
occurring at the network and device
levels which, in turn, has a significant
impact on telcos’ financial performance.
According to a recent Accenture
survey2 of 100 leading telcos worldwide,
ineffective billing capabilities caused
global telcos to lose an average of
4 percent of revenue annually among
enterprise customers and 9 percent
among consumers. Separate Accenture
research found that operators, on
average, lose at least 1 percent of
their revenue because of outdated
and incomplete revenue assurance
capabilities.
Increasingly, communications service
providers are turning to Accenture to
help them develop the next-generation
billing capabilities needed to achieve
high performance in the age of
convergence. Accenture Communications
Solutions that address next-generation
billing and revenue management
already are delivering measurable
improvements in performance for
providers throughout the world. These
new capabilities are helping telcos to:
• Increase revenues and profitability
by offering and billing for attractive
new product bundles with content/
broadband-based services, and
offering the same services to all
customers regardless of payment
methods.
• Reduce revenue leakage by achieving
real-time credit control and revenue
management reporting and
monitoring.
• Rationalize legacy billing architectures
to increase internal efficiency and
reduce operating expenses by
supporting all services on a single
converged billing and revenue
management solution, and sharing/
reusing billing capabilities across
multiple affiliates and/or business
segments.
• Achieve faster time to market when
launching new offers or tariff plans.
• Support new business models (for
instance, by supporting revenue
control and sharing across the value
chain).
6
How Accenture can help
1. Developing and implementing a new billing system and processes to support convergent billing, billing for content and prepaid and postpaid billing.In developing new billing systems for
our clients, we leverage the Accenture
Next-Generation Billing Solution. This
solution is built on leading assets,
including a convergent billing
architecture, to support high
performance through coverage for a
wide-range of billing capabilities, all
supported by a common integration
framework. The framework helps
deliver rapid, modular integration of
the various products necessary to
create a robust solution in today’s
varied communications environment.
Capabilities supported by the Accenture
Convergent Billing Solution are
comprehensive across the spectrum
of voice, data, content, wireless,
wireline and interconnect billing. This
end-to-end view provides the necessary
level of solution integration, beginning
with the business strategy phase,
through vendor capability analysis,
and on to delivery and support of the
billing system. The solution enables
telcos to accommodate real-time
rating, billing for content, and prepaid
and postpaid billing.
See the sidebar on the opposite page
on how one telco has benefited from
Accenture’s billing system experience.
Accenture helps telcos address their billing challenges
by transforming their billing function to support
the requirements of today’s converging world.
We can do this in three key ways.
Implementing a new billing system at a European mobile operatorOne telco that has benefited from
Accenture’s billing system capabilities
and experience is a European mobile
phone operator. With the launch of its
3G mobile phone services, the company
needed a new billing system that would
support both prepaid and postpaid
customers, as well as track and bill all
types of usage on its network.
Working with Accenture, the telco
modified the global billing portion of
a leading billing software package and
put it into operation. Accenture was
involved in the entire spectrum of
systems development—from collecting
requirements and defining feasibility,
to designing the software, to building
and testing the system, and finally to
helping test the platform to confirm it
met the company’s needs.
The billing system now supports nearly
9 million customers and has helped
enable the carrier to take major strides
toward high performance by:
• Launching (and collecting revenue
from) a number of important mobile
phone video events.
• Reducing bad debt and fraud, while
increasing cash flow, through the
system’s online rating function.
• Reducing the high expense of credit
collection.
• Offering “tryouts” of services on a
prepaid basis.
• Reducing billing costs by generating
invoices for different services with
the same software.
Case studies
7
8
Creating a new revenue assurance function at VimpelComVimpelCom, a leading Russian mobile
telco experiencing robust growth,
hired Accenture to help develop the
revenue assurance capabilities the
company would need to identify and
eliminate sources of revenue leakage.
Accenture worked with the telco’s
professionals to design and build
VimpelCom’s first-ever revenue
assurance function and implement
both a set of effective quick-win
solutions and a new cutting-edge
switch-to-bill monitoring system.
Together, the new function and system
help managers quickly prevent, detect,
analyze and fix revenue leakages all
along the revenue stream.
With its new capabilities, VimpelCom
is better positioned to drive high
performance. The company now can
closely monitor the revenue chain
from the point at which a new
subscriber begins using the company’s
network to the generation of accurate
invoices for that usage. The new
capabilities helped the company:
• Achieve 99.8 percent reconciliation
accuracy, despite processing more
than 1 billion call data records (CDRs)
in 26 different data formats per day.
• Save several million dollars in just
four months after the new revenue
assurance capabilities, which is
twice the cost of the solution itself.
• Save more than three percent of
the company’s total revenue annually
and identify more than one percent
of revenue losses to be controlled
and minimized.
2. Creating a superior revenue assurance function.A major challenge for telcos today
is verifying they are billing for and
collecting all the revenue they are due.
The Accenture Event-to-Cash Solution
is an end-to-end approach to addressing
revenue leakage that overcomes the
shortcomings of traditional efforts and
helps telcos take major strides toward
high performance. On average, telcos
that have adopted Accenture’s
solution—which addresses both the
business and technology sides of
revenue assurance—have realized cost
savings of between 2.5 percent and
3.5 percent in little more than three
to four months for a comparatively
minor investment.
Accenture’s approach to revenue
assurance spans four phases, each of
which encompasses a set of activities
that address specific revenue-
assurance challenges. In the Startup
Phase, Accenture conducts a detailed
assessment of a telco’s revenue-
assurance function and capabilities,
as well as all areas of the company
in which revenue leakage can occur.
In the Definition Phase, we work with
the telco to develop a set of target
business results it would like to achieve,
define new key performance indicators
that will help the telco measure its
progress toward reaching those targets,
and design new revenue-assurance
business processes that will enable the
telco to more effectively identify and
address sources of revenue leakage.
In the third phase, Deployment, we
implement the newly designed
revenue-assurance business processes
and design and roll out the relevant
prepackaged technology solutions that
support the new revenue-assurance
organization and processes. The final
phase, Tuning, involves refining and
enhancing the revenue-assurance
business processes and solutions for
optimized performance, enabling the
telco to support the ongoing review,
detection and repair of future issues
that could lead to revenue leakage
and bottom-line degradation.
See the sidebar below on how a leading
Russian mobile telco experienced the
value of Accenture’s revenue assurance
capabilities.
9
Outsourcing and managed services at an Italian mobile operatorThe Poste Italiane group, which
provides postal services and integrated
communication, logistics and financial
services and products throughout Italy,
hired Accenture to help the company
begin selling mobile phone services
as a mobile virtual network operator
under the name ”PosteMobile.” In its
role of mobile virtual network enabler,
Accenture built and maintained all the
IT infrastructure needed to support
PosteMobile’s core business processes.
In addition to providing and maintaining
the IT platform, Accenture was asked
to provide operations and management
services as well as business process
outsourcing services that included
service configuration and testing of the
handsets and SIM cards (the "Subscriber
Identity Module" cards that identify
each unique mobile device).
Accenture completed the design and
implementation of PosteMobile’s
infrastructure in fewer than five
months, during which Accenture built
102 interfaces and integrated 41
systems, including those from Poste
Italiane and the company's selected
network operator. Accenture helped
enable 60,000 dealer users and 13,800
Poste Italiane Offices to sell mobile
services. In the first month of operation
as a startup company, PosteMobile
attracted 100,000 subscribers and
captured 7,000 activation orders
per day at the peak of this growth.
Within two months of the launch date,
PosteMobile became the leading Italian
mobile virtual network operator in
terms of customer base and is well
on the path to high performance in
a highly competitive industry.
3. Outsourcing billing operations and providing managed services.Numerous global telcos have opted
to outsource their billing operations
to Accenture. In such an arrangement,
Accenture provides a solution that
encompasses a telco’s entire billing
capability: from strategy, business
processes and technology to systems
operations, human resources and
economic structures. This typically
involves the following:
• Billing transformation, including
the consolidation or replacement of
outdated billing systems and processes
and the migration and retirement of
old legacy systems and processes
while insuring business continuity.
• Billing application development
outsourcing to deliver new billing
capabilities that improve a telco’s
time to market and helps the company
launch new offerings and services
more quickly and efficiently.
• Billing maintenance outsourcing to
reduce a telco’s billing systems
maintenance cost and increase the
service quality.
• Billing infrastructure outsourcing
to operate and maintain the billing
platform's hardware, data centers
and applications in a cost-effective
manner.
• Billing business processes outsourcing
to operate a telco’s billing business
processes as a managed service,
including part or all of the company’s
billing functions.
See the sidebar below on how a
new Italian operator capitalized on
Accenture’s outsourcing and managed
services capabilities.
10
Accenture is a leader in telco billing solutions
For leading telcos around the world,
Accenture plays a key role in helping
them address their most pressing
billing challenges.
We have nearly three decades of
experience in billing processes,
organization and systems
implementation—covering completed
billing projects for more than 200
telco clients around the globe—which
gives Accenture unique insights and
an independent point of view on how
to transform billing operations to
support the pursuit of high performance.
In fact, Accenture has one of the
largest installed bases of billing
systems in the world: The billing
solutions we have implemented or
maintain currently support more than
220 million subscribers every month,
while our revenue assurance work has
helped these organizations recover
more than $90 million in lost revenue.
Our portfolio of billing and revenue
assurance offerings covers the full
breadth of billing operations, and
includes proven software packages
assembled within a robust integration
framework. With more than 2,500
billing professionals, Accenture has one
of the largest pools of highly skilled
billing resources. Plus, the Accenture
Global Delivery Network provides an
efficient and cost-effective delivery
model for our clients, helping them
save significant deployment costs while
reducing time to market. Furthermore,
our longstanding relationships with
billing and revenue assurance software
vendors provide Accenture with deep
knowledge of existing best-of-breed
technologies and platforms as well as
future development roadmaps.
Leading industry analysts rank
Accenture among the top professional
services firms in the billing arena, and
Accenture’s prominence is widely
acknowledged in the industry. According
to Gartner, Accenture ranked first in
data processing and hosted services
and second in customer billing
management and professional services
based on 2006-2008 global market
share based on revenue for those
years.3 Forrester Research also named
Accenture the leading Oracle billing
implementer in 2008.4 In addition,
Accenture has won its share of awards
for its billing work. For instance, we
received the Best Project award from
Billing China for our work at China
Telecom Zhejiang in 2007 with
Comverse. The billing system we
developed for Slovak Telecom also
was recognized at the seventh annual
World Billing Awards ceremony—which
acknowledges excellence in billing
solutions—and was the first-place
winner at the 2008 CTIA Emerging
Technology Awards.
11
On the journey to high performance
In an era when telcos are under
increasing pressure to attract and
retain customers while managing
the change and complexity spawned
by convergence, the billing function
is more important than ever.
Accenture’s proven track record,
deep experience and extensive skills,
and strong alliances with leading
billing software vendors enable us
to help telcos address their billing
challenges—helping to reduce the risk
to clients’ operations while delivering
substantial business benefits.
In short, Accenture is the trusted
business provider telcos need to help
transform their billing function into a
true competitive differentiator that
helps them achieve high performance.
Copyright © 2007 Accenture
All rights reserved.
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High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
Copyright © 2009 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
About AccentureAccenture is a global management
consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company. Combining
unparalleled experience, comprehensive
capabilities across all industries and
business functions, and extensive
research on the world’s most successful
companies, Accenture collaborates
with clients to help them become
high-performance businesses and
governments. With approximately
177,000 people serving clients in
more than 120 countries, the
company generated net revenues of
US$23.39 billion for the fiscal year
ended Aug. 31, 2008. Its home page
is www.accenture.com.
Contact UsFor more information about how
Accenture's distinctive solutions and
services can help you achieve high
performance by creating, developing,
delivering and managing innovative
services more efficiently and
effectively, please send us an email
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Notes1 Gartner Dataquest, Market Share:
Telecom Operations Management Systems
(BSS, OSS and SDP), Worldwide, 2006-
2008, Martina Kurth, Kamlesh Bhatia and
Norbert Scholz, May 2009
2 Achieving High Performance in
Telecommunications through Superior
Billing, December 2008.
3 Gartner Dataquest, Market Share:
Telecom Operations Management Systems
(BSS, OSS and SDP), Worldwide, 2006-
2008, Martina Kurth, Kamlesh Bhatia and
Norbert Scholz, May 2009.
4 “The ForresterTM Wave: Oracle
Implementation Providers, Q1 2008”.