• Canada (francais)

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Project Overview

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Telcom, a world leader in telecommunications, strives to streamline their customer billing system. Their aim is to bring their customers the best in modern technology in an efficient, friendly, and cost effective way, but they have faced a high level of customer credit default. In an effort to lower their overall level of delinquent accounts, Telcom initiated a process improvement program to analyze and improve their billing process and lower the amount of time it took to process customer billing. Before this could be achieved, Telcom had to document and analyze their processes to diagnose and rectify their billing process.

The Challenge:

Telcom was experiencing a 5% delinquency rate, placing a significant strain on their cash flows. In order to reduce this liability, Telcom targeted their billing process to encourage prompt payment with the objective of reducing their non-payment rate to below 4%. To achieve this, Telcom began a process modeling and analysis project in order to diagnose and find a solution to their problem.

Model Processes:

• Map processes at a high-level & decompose
• Map activities to create the flow of work
  • Activities, activity types
• Build the organization structure & resources
  • Organization chart, roles, resources
• Assign resources & materials to activities & validate the process model
  • Input & output materials, resource allocation
• Add performance attributes & check model structure
  • Duration, delay, cost, input volume, etc.
  • Structural checking

Analyze Processes:
Improve model accuracy by defining resource utilization calendars
Identify inputs and outputs and analyze cross-department informational flows
Identify the problem areas in the model
Make the appropriate changes to the model and test the ideas
Compare the results of the As Is model with the To Be models.

   

The Solution:

Now that Telcom understands their processes and how they are affected by resource allocation and other factors, they can propose specific changes in their billing process that will result in lowering customer credit default. With the help of the EPC simulation tool, they were able to:

• Test new ideas to minimize non-payment
• Test resource reassignment
• Remove bottlenecks and relieve critical resources
• Change manual activity to an automated method when preparing treatment notices before they are sent to the customers.

With this knowledge, Telcom was able to arrive at the following solutions that allowed them to reach their target and lower their overall customer non-payment rate to 4%:

• Provide earlier notification to customers
• Offer automatic payment option from designated bank account
• Offer discounts to customers who pay in advance
• Have steeper consequences for paying late, such as higher interest rates

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