Telco Networks
Business Challenge.
National Telco Networks (NTN) a very lean business was created as a joint venture of two small telcos. Each on their own could not justify creating a network, however combined a business case was put together which made cut price DSL delivery a reality. NTN was a virtual business it had no full time staff, no offices and its only real assets were infrastructure items located in data centers in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The business was setup from day one to be a break even business. Profits were to be enjoyed at the next level down by the two key companies it supplied. The challenge for the business was the billing. It had a system in place to place orders for DSL services however the physical placing of order with its two suppliers Telstra and AAPT were manual and required entry additional to entering in the order system. A simple billing system was in place but lacked the sophistication required by a business that quickly grew to turn over hundreds of thousand dollars a month. The billing system was dependant on recurring charges and required manual intervention to address timing differences between when a service was requested to when it was actually delivered and installed. This sounds like such a simple problem to address however investigation will show it is common place in the industry. To make matters worse early disconnection fees were not being calculated or on charged.Activation o f services required manual entry into Radius servers and IP address assignment were manual. This created its own challenges with duplicate IP addresses sometimes being assigned. The premise of setting up this business was automation solving all. The key problem was there was no automation whatsoever.
The solution.
Utilibill implemented their solution which enabled one step provisioning. In one sweep operators could now sell a DSL service, send a churn or activation request off to Telstra or AAPT, provision username and password information into radius for Authentication, submit ip address details into their shaping server infrastructure, post email username and password to the mail server and set the service up for billing. This set of steps were all consolidated into one process.Treatment for early disconnections saw a scheduled task run each month to calculate how long each DSL service that disconnected or churned out that month had been connected for. If they were under 6months an early termination was auto charged to the wholesale customer who in-turn billed their customer.LOLO certificates were removed ensuring all orders for service were directed through a single channel. This meant that at bill run time no manual labour was required to address exception reporting (dealing with services present in monthly files but not present in the billing platform).
Reporting.
It is impossible to manage a business you don’t have good visibility over. This is another challenge that NTN faced. The business now has in-depth reporting which breaks down customers, by speed, state, average download, time connected and so on. Again these reports are all simple reports that were not available under the old regime. NTN efforts are now spent managing the ongoing bandwidth growth challenges and works on ways to provide a higher level of service in a more efficient manner. The introduction of Utilibill has changed forever the way NTN to business.
