Fortune 1000 Bank Shortens Chargeback Process from Weeks to Hours
Our Client is a Fortune 1000 financial institution and the leading provider of financial services to institutional investors. The Client has over $15 trillion in assets and $2 trillion under management, over 26,000 employees worldwide, and operates in 26 countries.
The Client approached SAI about its need to:
- Reduce the time required to produce billing information for the monthly accounting process, from three weeks to less than a week
- Improve reporting for the Divisional Controllers (approximately 40 Controllers)
- Reduce risk by migrating from an in-house legacy application designated as “End of Life” by the supplier
- Improve the accuracy and completeness of chargeback data by incorporating updates from both PBXs and the corporate HR database (PeopleSoft)
Challenges
The Client's mainframe-based CDR reporting package produced paper reports that were not widely used. The main output used was an electronic file that fed the General Ledger for charging back usage and equipment costs to approximately 1,000 cost centers. The legacy application processing took two to three weeks to complete each month due to the batch mainframe processing and paper output. The Client wanted a highly automated Web-based reporting process to make CDR summary and detail information available to 40 Divisional Controllers and the Network Finance Group.
Solution
The Client assigned a project team comprised of both Telecom and Network Finance resources to work with SAI to implement our Sierra Gold On-Demand solution:
a corporate-wide Web-based usage management and reporting system. The roll
out was conducted in parallel with the Client's existing CDR reporting system.
SAI provided standard call accounting services for the Sierra Gold On-Demand
service, including:
Success
- SAI's Sierra Gold solution provided more ways in which to allocate costs than was possible in the legacy application. By taking advantage of the additional allocation features, the Client showed a lower cost per minute on a call-by-call basis across the enterprise and recovered the additional chargeback amounts in their allocated usage charges.
- SAI's PBX Integration module enabled the creation of a more accurate extension database that the legacy application could not provide. PBX Integration pulled the complete list of extensions in each of the Client's PBXs along with the PBX label and set type for each extension, and augmented this information with data from their PeopleSoft system for extensions associated with employees. The result was a database that quickly placed extensions in correct cost centers and provided hundreds of new extensions that were now in the database for the first time and needed to be associated with a valid cost center.
- After a brief period of trial reports to fine tune the rates and allocations and adequately test the file feed to the General Ledger, the Web-based reports were made available to the Divisional Controllers and the General Ledger was successfully updated from Sierra Gold.
- The new, highly automated chargeback process was drastically abbreviated—from several weeks to several hours.
- Based on the successes so far, the Client is now considering rolling out Sierra Gold to locations in Europe and the Pacific Rim. Also under consideration is the incorporation of cell phone usage data along with PBX data so that managers will have one reporting tool for their employees' calling activity.
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