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Before choosing a telemanagement system, it's critical to consider the specific functionalities needed to effectively operate a telecom services back office.
To efficiently operate the back office, the following basic functionality is required:
- Account administration
- Billing
- Provisioning and order management
- Service ordering
- Trouble ticketing
- Circuit administration and billing
- Switch interfaces (5ESS, DMS, SL-100, and/or PBX's depending upon the customer's network configuration)
- Equipment inventory administration
- Warehouse control
- Cable inventory management
- Vendor management
With this many pieces of functionality required to operate the back office, how does one decide which system or combination of systems will provide a solution that will best support their business?
Unfortunately, many companies select the system before they decide how they want to run their business. Once they have chosen the system, it tends to dictate business structure and processes.
Proper implementation of a back office solution dictates that the business strategy is defined and process flows are developed before system decisions are made. When it is time to choose the system, the choice should be made on the basis of its fit with the business strategy and process flows of the company. Careful planning is required to ensure that the correct system requirements are defined and the proper systems are selected for the operation of the business.
When planning a back office strategy, there are two fundamental system strategies to decide between: independent systems for each required functionality, or an integrated system that provides all of the required functionalities in a single platform.
The more traditional approach is to choose independent systems for each area of required functionality. However, the cost, implementation time frames, and ongoing operating and support costs of multiple systems can dramatically lengthen the interval between start-up and profitability. The decisions made at this point in the planning process have major impacts on the ongoing cost structure of the company.
Choosing independent back office systems
If a multiple system solution is chosen, the following actions must be taken in order to choose the products needed to deliver the required functionalities.
Requirements definition
A requirements document must be created for each of the required functionalities, in order to define the capabilities needed in the respective areas. Each document must define:
- Required functionality
- Process flows
- Data management requirements
- Interface requirements to other systems
- Report generation capability requirements
- Management requirements
Vendor identification and selection
Once the system requirements are defined, vendors (for each functionality) must be identified, qualified, and selected. Contracts for products and their associated services must be drafted and signed. The steps involved in this process include:
- Creation of Request for Quotation (RFQ) documents for each required functionality
- Identification of potential vendors for each required functionality
- Vendor qualification
- Creation of a bidder's list
- Non-disclosure agreements
- RFQ release to selected bidders
- RFQ response evaluation
- Vendor selection
- Contract negotiation (including required product enhancements)
- Contract signing
Planning
Once the suite of systems to be used is selected, one must plan how the systems will interact within the processes and data flows that have been designed to operate the business. This additional planning step is required to ensure that:
- The functionality that was planned for is delivered in the suite of systems that has been selected
- Process flows remain as planned based on the selected suite of systems
- Data flows remain as planned based on the selected suite of systems
- Interfaces between the various systems in the suite of systems exist or are included in the contracts that have been signed
- Test plans are created to properly test the end-to-end operation of the suite of systems
- Action is taken to correct or work around identified process and data flow disconnects
Implementation
The implementation phase of the project is where the back office takes shape. This first opportunity to actually see the selected systems in operation enables one to validate the process flows and business assumptions. The implementation phase of the project includes the following activities:
- Site preparation (computer rooms, cabling to work stations, office layouts, etc.)
- Hardware installation
- Software loading
- Data porting from any existing systems to the new systems
- System testing (each individual system must be tested)
- Process flow testing
- Integrated system testing (if electronic interfaces between each system was part of the procurement process)
- End-to-end acceptance testing
- Training of users
- Documentation of end-to-end processes and system interactions
- Development of reporting routines at the system and business unit level
- Development of audit trails to provide integrity checks
- Creation and staffing of a help desk for system users
Costs of independent back office systems
While this approach to building a functional back office can succeed, there are significant costs inherent in choosing independent systems for each required functionality. These costs include:
High first costs
Multiple systems mean high initial implementation costs.
High operating and support costs
Multiple systems and large support staffs required.
High upgrade costs
As the systems evolve, each system must be upgraded annually to be kept current with the support processes of each vendor.
High administration costs
Management reporting requires report generation from each system and then consolidation at the business level.
High data integrity and data management costs
Data that is common across multiple systems must be entered separately in each database (often in different formats). The cost of duplicate data entry and mismatched data can be enormous.
Considering an integrated telemanagement system
What can be done to simplify the implementation of a back office solution? The ideal answer is to reduce the number of systems required. This requires that one search for a multi-functional system that provides more than one back office function. For every individual system that is eliminated, the following activities are no longer required:
- Vendor selection
- Implementation planning
- System implementation
- Integration testing
Requirements definition is still an integral part of the process because the required processes and data flows of the company must be defined in order to implement the back office in the desired manner.
The ideal solution would provide all required back office functionality in a single system utilizing a single database. Choosing a single system solution eliminates the most challenging and time-consuming aspect of back office implementation: the integration of multiple systems into a cohesive and efficient back office system.
Does such an integrated system exist? Fortunately, the answer is an emphatic yes.
One such system is COMIT, from PCR, Inc. COMIT addresses all the required functionality in a service order driven system that utilizes a single database to manage the back office. Every transaction within the system is based upon a service order, enabling the system operators to view the status of every system transaction from a single point. With the Oracle database, exception reports can be produced at regular intervals to identify overdue, incomplete and pending activities.
Integrated telemanagement system cost savings
The savings that are generated by the use of multi-functional systems such as COMIT can be quantified as follows:
Reduced first cost
Multi-functional systems generally cost much less than the comparable suite of individual systems required to provide the same functionality.
Reduced implementation costs
Fewer systems mean less implementation effort, fewer people and shorter implementation intervals.
Reduced support costs
With fewer systems there are smaller IT functions required, fewer functional operating groups (and usually fewer operations people), fewer annual system upgrades, reduced maintenance costs, fewer hardware platforms to support and fewer points of failure in the back office.
Increased data integrity
With a smaller number of systems there are fewer databases to worry about synchronizing data across, and the more accurate the data of a company is, the lower the life cycle cost of the back office is.
Increased awareness of the total business
Employees that are exposed to multiple areas of the business through multi-functional systems tend to be more aware of the total business and how it operates, which strengthens the organization.
COMIT addresses all the required back office functionalities:
Billing
COMIT has both local and long distance billing and reconciliation capabilities. On the local side, COMIT supports both SMDR billing and vendor-based billing.
Provisioning
COMIT integrates the switch feature administration, can provision equipment and services, and can automatically update switch features. Since it is integrated with the switch (DMS-100, SL-100, Meridian 1, and 5ESS), inventory management can be accomplished at the circuit or feature level. COMIT also provides interface to E911. Provisioning includes both voice and data circuits including POTS, CLASS, Centrex, ISDN, PRI, T-1, Frame Relay and packet switching interfaces.
Order management
Order management is a fundamental capability of the COMIT service order driven system. The status of every order can be tracked, from initiation to completion, by use of a single system query.
Service ordering
COMIT is a service order driven system. In addition, COMIT can (optionally)
support IVR, on-line or web-based account inquiries.
Trouble ticketing
COMIT trouble ticketing is a sub-set of service ordering.
Switch interfaces
5ESS, DMS-100, SL-100, Meridian 1, and Avaya switch interfaces are available, enabling flow through provisioning and on-line service verification.
Benefits of an integrated telemanagement system
There are several advantages to choosing an integrated telemanagement solution.
- The single, internal system database allows for efficient and valuable management reporting.
- Data entry is required only once (as opposed to multiple times in multiple formats in a multiple system back office implementation). Entry sessions for each of the systems in a multi-system back office are very resource-intensive.
- The single database solution with audit trails makes resolution of data integrity issues a simple operational process as opposed to the nightmare of resolving issues across multiple databases. When multiple databases must be compared, resolution of data integrity issues is an extremely expensive proposition.
Conclusion
Proper implementation of a back office solution dictates that the business strategy be defined and process flows developed before system decisions are made. Once the system requirements are defined, an integrated back office solution should be strongly considered, due to overwhelming cost savings and data integrity benefits.
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