Ascertain ISR for Wholesale Broadband and Telephony Finance Reconciliation

Executive summary

A major UK communications provider had decided to expand its service offering using a Wholesale provider introducing Broadband (via ADSL) and Voice services (via WLR and CPS). A monthly, automated reconciliation was required of the telephony and broadband products and services provided to the end customer with Wholesale provider’s charges.
This reconciliation needed to match the ongoing, per-subscriber charges associated with the products and services delivered to the end customers, with invoice-specific one-off charges from the Wholesaler, and the associated rental, maintenance and additional charged-for usage.
The focus of the initiative was to assure revenue and associated cost. This required a solution to undertake financial reconciliation of all line items on the wholesale invoice and ensuring that the revenue was being billed completely and correctly, including the ability to cope with refunds and postponed transactions, through reconciliation of wholesale, CRM and billing data.
Cartesian rapidly implemented the Ascertain ISR solution for financial reconciliation. Ascertain ISR provides operators with an in-depth reconciliation and monitoring environment, through which they can effectively analyse the subscriber lifecycle while accurately tracking their provisioning patterns.  This helps customers to better prepare for any unexpected scenarios and challenges that may arise as they continue to expand their service offerings on multiple service lines.  In addition, Ascertain ISR users will also have access to an assisted correction option that enables rapid clean-up of any errors or exceptions encountered to ensure automated and immediate resolution of data integrity issues.
The client now has a robust data and billing assurance platform, which, in the six months in which it has been operational, has successfully processed over 10 million transactions, with a financial value of over £30 million.

Background

Cartesian’s client, a major UK communications provider, had branched out into triple-play services, by buying in a variety of telephony services from a telecoms wholesaler.  As their broadband, telephony and customer base grew wholesale transactions ran into millions per month, the value running into several million pounds per month.  It therefore became imperative both to be able to reconcile these invoices against their own BSS data, and to fully automate this process.

The challenge

The client’s main goal was to be able to parameterise and audit wholesaler invoice data against their own BSS data.  One of the key challenges came from the fundamental differences between the wholesale cost model and the clients’ subscriber reconciliation, which must consider money-over-time-period, rather than just a snapshot at a particular time; and with monthly transactions running into the millions any errors could prove costly.
A number of challenges were overcome to achieve the desired outcome:

1. The data required for analysis was held in a number of disparate systems.
2. Data from CRM and billing systems did not map directly to the install and subscription-type transactions detailed by the wholesaler.
3. Wholesalers’ billing cycles involve an overlap period of several days, so transactions occurring towards the end of a billing cycle could be delayed to the next cycle. Furthermore, invoices at busy periods may involve an event backlog, possible not appearing for several months.
4. Due to delays, latency and SLAs, transactions on the wholesaler side may not cover the exact same time period as those on the CRM/billing side.
5. For financial transactions it is the net effect per subscriber that is of prime importance, consequently delayed transactions may be accompanied by corrective transactions.
6. Wholesalers change their line item descriptions, often without prior notice.

The solution

The client already had deployments of Ascertain ISR, providing data assurance in other areas of their business.  Cartesian were engaged further to use ISR to provide both data and billing assurance for the client’s wholesale-bought services.
In particular, Ascertain ISR provides support for:

• User-defined reporting capabilities including the Business Intelligence Reporting Tool and OLAP analytics
• Graphical visualisation of end-to-end systems and processes
• Automated production of key performance indicators via user-configurable dashboards
• Sophisticated financial reconciliation capability to reconcile wholesale versus retail costs over time
• Extended integration of Case Management for exception handling.

The solution to the client’s principal requirement of reconciling the wholesaler’s invoices with their own BSS data lay in parameterising the incoming invoices, filtering them by type, and comparing them against their own CRM and billing data.

Ascertain ISR addressed the specific challenges the client had as follows:

1. ISR has the capability to collect, merge and compare data from disparate systems, to provide both data and billing assurance.
2. The CRM data were therefore used to create ‘implied’ data within ISR.  Specific states and state changes are linked to specific charges (e.g. installation, disconnection, ongoing subscription, pro-rating) which can be reconciled with wholesalers’ invoices.
3. The net effect per subscriber can be modelled over time using a financial float to cope for late, early, or cancelled pairs of transactions against the same account. This also allows for ageing of transactions, to flag up any particularly long delays.
4. ISR has an automatic discovery function for new line item descriptions.  Mapping entries for these descriptions are automatically created, and flagged for manual intervention to link them to the correct transaction type.
5. The ISR float can also allow for this eventuality, if configured to do so.
6. The parameterisation of charge items in ISR allows for configurable tolerance levels and ranked matching algorithms to ensure the correct transactions are reconciled.

The system was implemented with a series of custom reports, allowing full drill down to individual line items. In addition, the BLE component of Ascertain allows the easy definition of custom reports. As reconciliation for multiple wholesale service types is available on a single platform, these reports can be used to determine any systematic data failures occurring on any related system.
From initial design, it took 3 months to implement wholesale services reconciliation on ISR with this customer. As well as a rapid turnaround, the system is parameterised as possible, allowing CRM and billing systems to be plugged in and out with minimal effort.

Summary

The client now has an Ascertain ISR deployment, processing around 2 million transactions per month, with a financial value of over £5 million, maintaining a float of around £50,000.  The Ascertain ISR framework and parameterisation allowed for a rapid deployment, within three months of the start of the project.
The reports within this system, including the capability to create user-defined reports, allow for constant monitoring of reconciliation status, and, as results build up over time, monitoring for systematic failures in particular data feeds, that may only become apparent over the medium- to long-term.  In the short-term, month-on-month discrepancies can be flagged up as soon as they are detected, which has allowed the customer to rapidly follow these up with the wholesalers in question, recuperating the charges in question.
The reconciliation of the billing and CRM data has allowed for multiple data cleansing exercises to take place, which have allowed for seamless migrations of customers from one wholesaler to another.  This has also resulted in the identification of stranded assets, giving a further logistical and financial benefit.
If you would like more information about this case study, Cartesian’s capabilities or how we might be able to help you, please contact Bill Hill by phone on: +44 20 7643 5555 or by email at bill.hill@cartesian.com.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under Case Studies.