Emerging Market Communications Service ProviderBlazing a Trail to High Performance with New Telecom Billing System

An emerging market communications service provider offers customers a wide variety of services and solutions such as wireless, landline and television and Internet services.

Business challenge As the islands comprising the country in which this company offers communications services enter the digital and mobile age, their residents are seeking an increasingly modern mix of telecommunications services. They also, like telecom customers around the world, demand a fast, consistent, and high-quality customer experience.

However, the emerging market communications service provider’s telecom billing system had been developed in an earlier era, when landlines were the chief need of island residents. By the late 2000s, this system was beginning to show its age. The system made it difficult for the company to bring to market quickly the bundled service offerings that customers were demanding—in fact, one such offer required more than a year to be developed and offered for sale. In addition, the system’s shortcomings kept the company’s provisioning process from being as efficient as possible and resulted in inaccurate billing as well as in misalign-ments between in-store stock levels and the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Finally, because it was heavily customized, the system could not be upgraded easily.

The communications service provider could not afford to ignore these issues: New competitors were winning its customers away, particularly in the mobile space. Aware that it needed to replace its core system with a single, cost-effective platform that would enable it to provide market-leading customer service and offers, the company realized it needed external assistance with its billing system project. They asked Accenture to help because of its deep experience in the industry and in the implementation of Oracle-based solutions.

How Accenture HelpedAs a first step, Accenture worked closely with the company to gather its complete set of requirements for this new billing system. A key focus area for the Accenture team during this initial stage was fostering collaboration between the company’s business and IT representatives, which would be essential to supporting widespread usage and acceptance of the chosen solution once it had been implemented. In total, Accenture collected approximately 600 specific requirements, the most important of which were a graphical user interface that used the country’s native language, greater speed-to-market for new product and service bundles, the ability to be upgraded more easily than the current system, a high degree of scalability, and cost effectiveness.

In light of these requirements, Accenture advised the company to focus on packaged software solutions that could be customized as needed, but which featured powerful capabilities right “out of the box.” More specifically, Accenture’s goal was to help the company find a solution that was 70 percent usable immediately, with no more than 30 percent of its functionality derived through custom development. This approach would reduce the cost, time, and effort of the initial implementation and of future upgrades.

Together, Accenture and the company’s internal IT experts solicited and evaluated bids from a wide range of technology vendors, keeping these key requirements in clear focus. The combined team narrowed down the list of potential vendors to a few promising candidates and the company ultimately selected the Oracle Communications Business Support Systems (BSS) suite of applications.

Comprised of Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Oracle Application Integrated Architecture (AIA) and Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM), the Oracle BSS solution is an integrated, end-to-end enterprise software suite tailored to the telecommunications industry. This solution would help the service provider dramatically accelerate the speed with which it could bring differentiated bundles to market while providing easier upgrades and ongoing maintenance. It also had the right balance between out-of-the-box features and the capacity to be customized. As an added benefit, the existing relationship between Oracle Corporation and the parent company allowed the communications service provider to obtain favorable pricing for the solution.

The company was pleased with the structured and comprehensive approach Accenture had used to help it select this platform and, thus, asked Accenture to play a leading role in the implementation of the Oracle-based solution as well. Working in close collaboration with the company’s internal IT experts, Accenture led the design and development of the solution, including smart customizations to meet the provider’s specific require-ments, and facilitated cohesive integra-tion between the new platform and the technologies supporting the company’s ERP, order management, inventory management and other key business processes.

Accenture also worked with the company to provide in-depth training for the new system’s prospective users. This aspect of the project provided the Accenture team with some challenges: While many employees embraced the new system, others were not as open to it. Accenture provided as much training as possible to all of these users. In fact, in some cases employees underwent additional training until they were completely comfortable with the new system. In addition, Accenture worked to solicit employee feedback on which aspects of the system could be more user friendly and adjusted interfaces accordingly.

With these adjustments in place, Accenture conducted extensive testing of the new system and, as part of a phased implementation, rolled it out within the communications service provider’s mobile, landline and multimedia divisions. Throughout these implementations, Accenture focused on incorporating user and executive input to derive as much value as possible from the solution while leveraging the inherent cost and perfor-mance advantages of a packaged solution.

High Performance DeliveredFor smaller, regional telecom companies, achieving competitive advantage depends upon a careful balance between cost efficiency and customer responsiveness. By taking advantage of the inherent cost effectiveness and flexibility of Oracle Communications applications, Accenture’s approach to this project has supported the pursuit of this balance, and already has delivered significant benefits.

The communications service provider’s new system allows it to launch innovative bundles that deliver the company’s full range of products, services, and brands with much greater speed and efficiency. The provider was able, for instance, to develop and launch an offer combining a new personal computer with IPTV, DSL, and mobile broadband in just one week, while launching a similar bundle previously would have required more than a year. In addition, a new mobile bundle allowed the company to win approximately 1,400 new customers, including several hundred from the competition. This improved ability to present innovative offers quickly will be key to the company’s continued growth in its small, heavily saturated market.

The company’s new platform also has allowed it to improve several business processes that have a direct impact on the customer experience and on financial performance. One such advancement: The new system provides better visibility into and control over stores’ stock levels—which, according to Accenture research, is a top priority of telecom consumers around the world. The system also has cut the time required to provide

customers with on-demand invoices from two days to just a few minutes. And in terms of financial performance, the company now has a more effective, highly automated approach to collecting unpaid invoices, as well as an easier, more streamlined way of closing financial accounts.

Perhaps most importantly, the communi-cations service provider’s new telecom billing system supports all three divisions of the company and its full range of products, services, and business processes with one easily upgraded solution, cutting IT costs and boosting efficiency.

The work that Accenture and the company have done together on this project is designed to deliver value throughout the diverse family of operating companies under the parent company’s umbrella. In fact, Accenture has been able to package the solution it developed jointly with this service provider and Oracle. The solution is a pre-customized BSS solution for up to 4P telecom operators.

This innovative Oracle-based solution provides ready-to-use components pre-packaged within a robust integration framework. The solution’s component-based technologies, combined with its high interoperability with legacy systems and third-party software products, can have the fit of custom-built software with the speed and affordability of a package. And because the platform can support a variety of different access methods and types of services, it helps communications companies more efficiently offer their subscribers the wide range of services they demand.

In short, Accenture and this emerging market communications service provider have done much more than just implement a new telecom billing system: They have charted a course to high performance that the entire business now can follow.

About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and out-sourcing company, with approximately 246,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. 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. The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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Accenture, its logo, and Accenture High Performance Delivered are trade-marks of Accenture. This document is produced by consultants at Accenture as general guidance. It is not intended to provide specific advice on your circum-stances. If you require advice or further details on any matters referred to, please contact your Accenture representative.