$600,000 per month in Telecom Billing

Client: University with over 1,000,000 telephone calls per month

Project

A large university had over 10,000 telephone desk sets from which over one-million telephone calls were placed each month. In order to accommodate such a large number of desk sets the university had its own AT&T 5ESS switch. Telecom billing totals approximately $600,000 per month. The university needed to automate the billing of each department for its monthly toll calls and phone line charges. At the time, the IT staff was responsible for creating department phone bills by using a hodge-podge of Oracle SQL scripts and manual commands.

Solution

While the university’s telecom billing process was functional, it had to be run by the IT staff and was prone to errors.  For one complete billing cycle, our analysts shadowed the IT staff and documented each step of the billing process.  Doing so gave us a strong understanding of how the entire process was supposed to work.  From here we designed and wrote a system that a billing clerk from the telecom staff could operate without IT assistance.  Each step was run from their existing menu system and led logically to the next.  No step could be run out of order.

Results

After training the telecom billing clerks on how to operate the system, they were able to distribute subsequent telecom expenses of over $600,000 per month out to the correct departments. By taking an overly complicated manual billing process and simplifying it into five or six logical steps, the appropriate telecom staff was able to handle the telecom billing and the IT staff was freed up to work on technical IT related projects. This solution was cost effective because the billing process is able to run more efficiently and smoothly with the personnel who have the deepest understanding of billing in control.