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From Order to Cash: Want That "To Go"? Adan Pope, Chief Strategist and CTO, Telcordia If the last 12 months have taught us anything, it’s that the more complex a business is, the more difficult it can be to spot serious threats to the company’s viability. Though the headlines have been in insurance and banking, there is no doubt that telecom can learn from their bitter experience. Telecom too has its own complexities, so right now it’s no surprise that service providers are indeed trying to ensure that they have ways to measure the key performance indicators (KPI) that reveal the health of their operations. No provider would rely solely on subscriber counts or revenue figures to prove efficiency and confidence. But it is often the case that due to the complexity of the organization, such high level metrics quickly descend into many departmental metrics, potentially masking some cross-business operational issues affecting near term viability. One way in which operators are working to establish a better overall view of the operating health of the business is by viewing the business as a set of core processes:
Each one makes a distinct contribution to the critical drivers of the business: cost reduction, revenue enablement and customer satisfaction. In this article we’ll focus on “order-to-cash”; in other words, the steps between capturing a customer’s order and successfully monetizing the resulting delivered service which ultimately leads to impacts in all three areas of the business; top line, bottom line and competitive position. Order-to-Cash vs Fulfillment As consumers of services are presented with a widening range of services, the customer experience will be determined as much by the experience of the delivery process as by the service itself. Orders that take too long to complete, or arrive in too many pieces, or that fail due to lack of basic information will frustrate customers and potentially lead to cancelled services. Within the OSS community, we are used to regarding service-specific provisioning or fulfillment processes as a worthwhile end goal. However, as services become increasingly decoupled from the network technology that supports them, and bundles of services become more common, operators must now view the fulfillment of multiple services at a new level. Order-to-cash is about being able to address the end to end view of “what is a service?” in full commercial terms, not just technical. The consideration of a single order-to-cash process across the business is becoming more important as the lines between service classes become blurred. For example, it is increasingly difficult to state whether or not a given product is only a consumer or business product, let alone constrained as a wireless or wired offering. What about broadband access? Applications? Content downloads? This further reinforces the need to consider order-to-cash as a core business capability, not a sub-process hidden with a sector- or service-specific business unit. So as service providers become increasingly multi-service providers, it’s necessary to consider how well those multiple services are supported by common capabilities. We often like to represent the big blocks of telecom as operating in a loosely coupled way. In fact, experience tells us this can’t be so. The order-to-cash process necessarily can require, in real time, the support of planning and engineering resources. It also requires the ability to test a service prior to customer acceptance, thus “borrowing” capability from a (post-delivery) service assurance function. However, there are several challenges now to be considered and overcome in improving the performance of the order-to-cash process.
Transforming Order-to-Cash For many services providers, the need to update their entire order-to-cash environment does not come with any one new direction or product. Rather, the case for it is gradually added to over time. So is it necessary to wait for an overwhelming “big bang” project, or is it possible to move towards a more modern order-to-cash system incrementally? Experience suggests that a bottom-up process of evolving order-to-cash is not only possible but more likely to deliver near-term benefit at lower risk than transformation programs. The bottom-up approach still requires some careful planning, but is essentially a two-stage process, beginning with consolidation (or federation) of processes across service lines to improve efficiency. As a second stage, introducing high-level (service-level) flexibility to map to new, more sophisticated business models. Consider an example where consumer usage of one service changes their entitlement to another – for example, use of a mobile phone to make payments to particular retailer generates a 1-month credit for movies delivered via home broadband. This sort of example helps appreciate how much new capability, and new customer experience, is enabled not in the network, but in the systems and processes supporting operations. The benefits of making changes speak directly to the agenda of revenue generation, cost savings and customer experience improvement: by increasing flow-through with automated order validation, distribution, service assign and design, and activation, operators have gained greater than 95% flowthrough on 100,000 orders per day. They have also been able to significantly cut the time-to-revenue for high-value services; in one case from 21 to just 7 days for enterprise orders, reducing OPEX in the process by 40%. And how much more satisfied are the customers of a provider reporting a 19% jump in the number of services successfully delivered as ordered, on-time? The Last Word “Order-to-cash” is assuming a new importance as service providers converge, and seek differentiation and performance not in terms of technology alone but also in terms of speed and quality of business execution. Today’s service-specific fulfillment stacks can continue to play a role within an overall, bottom-up, two-stage process to establish a sophisticated order-to-cash environment. A converged order-to-cash architecture that supports all services will provide valuable transparency into a critical operational process, and help ensure that complexity does not get in the way of delivering a high-quality customer experience. This converged architecture comes with the promise of improved efficiency and customer delight and significant cost savings. Operators have reduced errors by 40%, and handling cost by 30% with an overall reduction of OPEX of up to 40%. All this while delivering 19% more services as-ordered successfully and on time! For more information, please contact Adan Pope, CTO, Operations Solutions, Telcordia at apope@telcordia.com or download a new white paper, Order-to-Cash: Smaller Steps Take You Further and visit our website. |
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