Outsourcing Industry Case Study
One of the country's top outsourcers was having difficulties tracking assets in
the vast private network of a financial institution and millions of dollars in margin
were being lost.
The Crisis:
A Fortune 50 outsourcer is delivering the entire communications network for a top
financial institution. The circuits and infrastructure comprise possibly the most
complex private network in the US. 17,000 locations generate data related to circuits
and billing information. Millions of records are created monthly and recorded on
numerous databases in varying formats. Available technology was not capable of tracking
accurate billing information or constant changes in network inventory or circuits
recorded on differing data formats. Data was stored at thousands of locations and
it was almost impossible to merge and also track alterations and updates. A crisis
developed because there was no adequate technology for managing the network's inventory
and millions of dollars were likely being lost to poor asset management over the
vast network.
"Available technology was not capable of tracking accurate billing information
or constant changes in network inventory or circuits recorded on differing data
formats."
Protocols:
The outsourcer maintains an inventory of circuits and various items billed monthly
to the financial institution. Charges are millions of dollars. The outsourcer also
maintains a separate database of circuits and numerous items that it is billed for
by the various vendors it uses to deliver the financial institution's entire network.
In order to ascertain profit at each site on the network, data is delivered from
many different sources. These include billing, inventory, vendor, and provisioning.
Data is also received from numerous different applications, which include spreadsheets
and proprietary "laptop" databases.
Challenge:
The outsourcer needs a comprehensive and reliable technology for assessing the discrepancies
in databases that have records of services delivered so they can be compared against
services billed. Complicating the problem of potential over billing by the telecoms
is the fact that the databases are compiled in differing formats by the numerous
vendors providing the network. The outsourcer is acting as a re-marketer of the
telecom services to the financial institution.
"Complicating the problem of potential over billing by the telecoms is the fact
that the databases are compiled in differing formats by the numerous vendors providing
the network."
Consequently, this puts it in the position of possibly losing significant revenue
as a result of billing inaccuracies that are not discernible in the huge databases.
Solution:
S3 conducted a profile of all data, transformed the data into a workable format,
and used its proprietary TeraMatch® to eliminate redundancies and expose exceptions.
S3's technology is able to discover minute differences in databases of billions
of records and cleanse the data in real time as TeraMatch® finds the variances.
The process runs 10 times faster than other database cleansing and matching technologies
and results in a final database that is approximately 5 times more accurate. In
the case of this outsourcer, S3's most important work was to search for differences
between what was actually used on the network of the financial institution and compare
it against what was ultimately billed.
"The net cost savings for the outsourcer was $17 million per year."
Benefits:
S3's technology discovered more than 5,000 circuits that were disconnected but were
still being billed monthly to the outsourcer. The findings were confirmed with the
telecom carriers and removed from billing. The net cost savings for the outsourcer
was $17 million per year. S3's technology continues to work within the network to
track disconnects and add-ons of circuits to prevent further improper charges. An
accurate database of all billing information is also constantly maintained using
work flow and appropriate reporting. |
|