Service Providers – A Headache That Left Money on the Table

April 23rd, 2008 by David Link

A few years back, we were working with one of our service provider customers who expressed a business challenge each and every month. No, it wasn’t spotty cell phone coverage in rural America; it was something that all of us have experienced personally, getting the correct and accurate billing information to accounting on a timely basis for network utilization and the typical overage charge calculations.

We could personally identify with this problem as we had billing problems from carriers with just about every telecom service that we have used over the years, but this time we were on the other side of the table, thinking about the complexities from the side of the service provider.

So we sat down and thought about an innovative way to integrate an automated billing calculation engine within EM7. The resulting feature has been a welcome addition to our service provider customers as it has typically saved them several man-days, and in one case almost a man-month, of very expensive engineering talent to accurately calculate the Bandwidth Billing charges each and every month. And since our customers are all healthy and growing, being successful, i.e., adding more customers, meant even more time spent on what should have been an automated process.

At first we thought it was quite straightforward, however we quickly realized that there were so many combinations of business rules that we had to make the tool universal enough to meet the needs of 95% of the service providers in the marketplace.

EM7 can provide calculations for 90^th, 95^th or 98^th percentiles in addition to aggregating the overall usage of multiple interfaces and then automatically calculating the committed rate and the separate overage rate that a customer has agreed to in their individual Service Contract.

For the original customer that asked us to help solve this problem: the return on investment (ROI) for this was almost instantaneous, given that the first month the customer put this fully integrated EM7 feature to use, they identified $80,000 of previously lost revenue that had slipped through the cracks of their home-grown solution.

Do you feel this pain? Are you realizing the revenue potential of the Bandwidth Billing contractual agreements that you have in place for your customers? Let us know what you think.

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