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The Client, a household name in entertainment with locations around the World, struggled with operations for telephony billing throughout their global infrastructure. Their IT Department handled telephone operations for more than 80,000 phone lines and hardware used by customers, vendors and employees. They used an antiquated system developed in the 1980s to manage billing and service records for phones. This system had very limited access, as it could only be used through one terminal in a single location.
Managing phone billing and record updates was very cumbersome, as technicians needed to log into multiple systems and copy information by hand from one system to another. The highly manual task was both time-consuming and prone to errors. Many of the important records were maintained in spreadsheets, which also were subject to error and corruption. In particular, the maintenance of 911 records for emergency calls in this system created a risk for the corporation if location records were not accurate when 911 service was used.
The Client needed a highly flexible and configurable solution that would be customized to their management operations and business practices. While there are solutions that address billing and invoicing, the Client needed a solution that could communicate with multiple external systems, automate processing and provide a customized interface that exactly matched their business needs. The requirement was to fully integrate and automate all processing to remove the potential for human error. The Client had worked with this older system for decades and had been forced to create procedures around limitations of the software. While their business process had advanced, the software had not, forcing them to limit their ability to handle the phones in use. Due to these limitations, the Client only billed for a small percentage of the total phone lines they serviced.
The Client close FogLifter® for its unique ability to communicate with external systems using varying forms of structured and unstructured data. This enabled the development of a solution that could remove all manual cross-copying of data, thus removing risk with data quality.
The FogLifter® solution was designed to exactly meet the customer’s needs, by mapping and automating the entire manual process used, and moving data between multiple systems for telephone billing and service. The needed workflow was designed and configured in FogLifter® to provide a complete user experience in the UI, as the customer had defined it.
Telephony data records were migrated to FogLifter® and integrations were made with ServiceNow, telephone switching systems from three different vendors and external 911 systems. Communication happens seamlessly, enabling a complete view of all service requests, the status of the phones, automated updates to billing records, generation of invoices, reconciliation of discrepancies and recording of payments. The custom user interface provides a drillable dashboard view of all aspects of telephone inventory, billing and payments. This single UI serves the needs of technicians, managers and executives.
The implementation of FogLifter® fully automated all manual processes and created a “single pane of glass” to access and update all information for any account or phone record. The location of FogLifter® directly on their corporate network enabled the Client to log into FogLifter® from anywhere on their network. They were no longer limited to a single terminal in one location.
Previously, this Client only invoiced for fewer than 2% of their phones because of the enormous work effort required to handle the billing and maintenance efforts in the old system. Since the implementation of FogLifter®, the Client has expanded billing to more than 80,000 phone lines. This accounts for millions of dollars in internal chargeback revenue that previously was not possible. The risks associated with the manual errors for 80,000 phone lines needing accurate records for 911 service were removed. The Client can view, track, maintain, invoice and plan financially for tens of millions of dollars in telephone service easily through a single interface.
