Moving from Excel Spreadsheets to Better Telecom Cost Assurance Tools
December 10, 2010
By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Software vendors “have been offering automated products for telecom cost assurance for several years now, yet many telecoms are still working from Excel spreadsheets and paperbound processes.”
Sosays Dan Baker, prefacing an interesting talk he had with Jim Buttafuoco, the founder and chief programmer for Contact Telecom in Manchester, N.H., which provides Billing Data Analyzer (BDA), a SaaS (News - Alert) offering that now serves several small to mid-sized carrier clients:
Dan Baker: Jim, you run a very lean operation. I’ve been in your offices for 10 minutes and have met most of your employees and toured your data center. How do you do it?
James Buttafuoco: What you see here, Dan, is the result of automation and the user self-service philosophy that we embody in our product. First of all, I’m an automation fanatic. Ninety-nine percent of our data retrieval, processing, reporting is automated. We have automated routines for taking in the monthly bills, confirming the data integrity and presenting accurate reporting to the client within minutes of file receipt.
We bring the data-processing expertise and guide the client in understanding the data, but we don’t apply our opinion, and this is where we differ from the other cost-assurance vendors in the market. We enable our clients to be analysts, not data processors.
DB: What is the biggest challenge you face when implementing with a new client?
JB: Managing the rollout where the client’s manager may want to implement BDA, but the staff is resistant to change. The staff is comfortable with old habits and current processes. They’ve always managed their costs in Excel and they’re unwilling to move up to something better.
Managers love the accountability they get with BDA. Often for the first time, they can retrieve an answer to their question at the push of a button, or see an audit trail to follow what’s happened to an invoice, so they can ask the question: “What’s this charge for? You approved it."
DB: What should a carrier look for in a SaaS solution for Cost Assurance?
JB: One of the first things you need is near-real-time reporting. With some other vendors, once the user uploads their data, they might not see the results for three to six weeks. Unbelievable.
The system should support cost management on an individual invoice level, near real time.
Each invoice needs to be loaded and presented individually, in the workflow, based on the invoice bill period. The invoice is fully loaded with all the supporting detail, and augmented with detail from outer reference sources, to support comprehensive auditing. In this way, the analyst can file claims on disputes at that time, allowing them to pay the invoice on time and short pay the claim as warranted. This makes the invoice management very clean and efficient.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Juliana Kenny