Billing System Conversion –
Executive Dashboard Management & Decision Support
Fortune 500 Wireless Communications Carrier

Business Challenge

This wireless carrier selected a large, converged billing and customer care platform to replace several of their Operational Support Systems. This platform provides a unified customer view. This includes integrating customer information regarding multiple service offerings of wireless data and voice technologies including digital cellular, short messaging, data transmission and wireless Internet services. This implementation is part of the carrier’s 7-year outsourcing agreement with the billing vendor.

The first conversion contained a small customer base in a geographic market. Four months prior to rollout, the carrier had not yet properly involved the business areas beyond IT to determine if the company was prepared to use this new system. The system’s readiness was technically inconsequential if the business had yet to adapt to its use.

In order to make the critical go/no-go decision, the carrier’s senior management needed a way to track progress, status and issues from over 20 business units, ranging from billing operations to finance. Additionally, they needed a common mechanism to review this information at various levels of detail.

Solution

The Acumen Solutions team devised and presented a dashboard concept, which would aggregate and summarize tasks, metrics, statuses and issues to the carrier’s senior management. In addition, the team developed the process and procedures to meet the carrier’s strict deadlines and requirements.

Acumen Solutions chose technology that was readily available and understood to eliminate the costs associated with training and licenses. In addition, the team solicited the Acumen Solutions’ Information Architecture Department to assist in designing and enhancing the end user experience. Both techniques enabled the carrier to save money and develop a robust, usable solution to support the executive’s decision making.

The application used a formatted Excel template to capture tasks, statuses, metrics, related issue numbers, task owners and expected completion dates from select project managers throughout the carrier. The spreadsheets were distributed to business owners who then uploaded them to the carrier’s Intranet on a weekly basis. The data was stored in an Access database.

The ASP front end contained three levels of dashboards, which were integrated to allow the user to drill down to a desired level of detail. At the lowest level of detail, the tool reported at the task level, mirroring the detail found in the spreadsheets. At the middle level, the dashboard, which was geared toward directors and department heads, summarized the tasks and statuses for all the spreadsheets maintained by the department. This dashboard also contained all the open issues pertinent to that department.

At the executive level, the tool utilized a dashboard that summarized status across departments and contained only critical, company-wide issues and risks. It allowed client vice presidents and directors to conduct an open forum that provided a status and commentary for their individual departments. This status was captured directly in the tool, independent of the weekly spreadsheet upload, allowing directors real-time status reporting capability.

A collection of the carrier’s senior vice presidents and CXOs served on an Implementation Committee (IC), which met weekly to track progress and discuss major rollout issues. In order to effectively facilitate these discussions, the IC relied heavily on the executive dashboard. On several occasions the IC utilized the drill-down feature of the dashboards to review lower level, complementary dashboards in order to further understand the basis of a particular department’s status. The tool provided the executives instant access to critical data and allowed them to focus on decision making instead of misappropriating time tracking down information.

Return on Investment

Acumen Solutions’ created the Executive Dashboard to provide the data and overarching view the Senior Executive team needed in order to make difficult project decisions in a fast paced environment. The tool made it possible for them to complete the challenging billing system project on time and under budget. They were able to enhance the billing system to provide the following benefits due to the creation of the Executive Dashboard:

Technology/Business Expertise

For this project, Acumen Solutions offered technology expertise in the following areas: