"We actually listened to our customers," said Karel Landman, financial director at Orion Telecom "and made changes to our billing system to suit them. Instead of them fitting into our system, we`ve developed something that fits their needs."
Sounds like the old clich'e but it really happened. Orion Telecom has developed a consolidated billing engine which enables its nationally distributed clients to receive centralized billing for payments, while offering distributed reporting for management. The developments were done in-house over a period of some months in order to provide customers with the information granularity they required.
According to Landman: "We have invested significantly in the development and maintenance of our billing and information systems and are now reaping the rewards. Firstly being able to offer the customization and different reporting levels for clients gives Orion a competitive advantage, but more importantly, it gives our clients what they actually want."
"We have developed the system in such a way that we can continue to adapt rapidly to changes in the industry and are able to set up customized billing profiles for each of our clients," Landman said. "We believe that this is the only integrated telecommunications billing system in our industry, offering this level of flexibility at present."
The system is able to provide structured invoices from one invoice per group company right down to one invoice per SIM card. Orion can also send these out in the traditional way or through its ebilling system where encrypted invoices and statements are delivered via email. This is fully South African Revenue Services compliant.
Integrated billing benefits clients for payment of accounts, reporting of expenses and reporting of savings, which can be customized for each client at different levels of granularity.
Account consolidation is required firstly where Orion offers multiple services, such as Cellular Least Cost Routing, SMS, Faxing services and International Call-Back to the same client and secondly where the client has multiple branches (e.g. a bank) and the main account must be paid centrally. In many cases the branch account is required at the branch itself for management purposes while the head office handles the payment and branch allocations.
Consolidated Billing is available in Parent and Child levels while cost savings reports and usage summaries are available as multi-level reports. Consolidation is settable at Head Office level and at Branch level so maximum flexibility has been designed into the system.
Information detail goes down to Branch/Site, MSISDN number, type of charge (e.g. subscriptions) and actual call charges, all of which can be included or excluded from the client`s report. Moreover, these can be summarized by the mentioned parameters too.
The group billing parent that is set up for the client will receive one invoice with one line per branch site stating the total amount for that month. They will also receive an addendum per MSISDN, that shows them the detailed billing for that SIM card. In this way individual cost centres at the client can receive the billing relevant to them, while the head office responsible for payment will receive the Invoice and Statement. The system also has the facility to exclude any branch sites that have no billing for that month.
For Jacques du Toit, national sales and marketing director, integrated billing is a major benefit to clients: "Everyone talks about adding value here and adding value there, but unfortunately this is often perceived as another sales pitch by clients. However, when we show them what our billing engine is capable of, their mindset changes. It has helped our business enormously."
The system was developed using various interfaces on a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 platform. All integrate into the back-end financials including general ledger, debtors, creditors and the CRM system (also in-house developed).
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