Clients Optus Communications

Optus is an Australian leader in integrated telecommunications, delivering cutting-edge communications, information technology and entertainment services. In 2001 SingTel became the parent company of Optus, paving the way to become a strong and strategic telecommunications player within the Asia-Pacific region.

Overview

There were four departments using an email drop box. Billing Production, Billing Liaison, Billing Development and Billing Assurance.

Each team would receive hundreds of emails daily requesting configuration changes to the corporate billing system. These could not be prioritised, created huge email trails for queries and were a nightmare to administer. We also had no way to track a process from end to end across the four departments, as often one request would spawn related internal requests. We needed a better system! In summary:

		Work requests cannot be prioritised and Work Requests are misclassified
		Can't attach files to the logged issue
		There are no notifications re status (only initial)
		Searching for historical items is very difficult and inaccurate
		There is no time stamping
		The responders are unable to edit the initial logged item if details are incorrect
		There is no reporting available
		Eight people keep logging in to the current system to see if there are any new requests

Objectives

		Link the requests between the Departments
		Improve customer satisfaction (indirect Customer Satisfaction Index impact)
		Improve Billing accuracy
		Improve operational efficiency & cash flow
		Reduce financial risk
		Improve financial integrity & controls
		Improve quality and reduce cost of reporting
		Faster time to market for billing enhancements
		Facilitate ongoing process improvement
		Empower business by owning its own business process environment

Requirements

The Solution must be able to be changed easily, without dependence on IT or a vendor and should not need to have any technical skills knowledge.

The Solution must ensure that every step of a process can be tracked by the originator and actioned by each person within agreed timeframes to meet our service level commitment to customers on a repeatable basis.

The Solution must enable users to make authorized process changes 'on-the-fly' in order to meet rapidly changing business, with no down time.

The Solution must allow the team to be empowered to manage and maintain their own business process environment, without incurring the ongoing and significant costs usually associated with change management and live-in vendor programmers.

The Solution

Optus chose the Metastorm BPM solution. The ease of configuration and development, and more importantly ability to make rapid changes enables us to implement this solution on time and budget.

		MBPM fits readily into Optus' SOE - NT Engine, SQL or Oracle Database.
		Works across Optus' hybrid environment of Macintosh/Microsoft.
		Enables Optus Billing staff to meet compliance requirements quickly and easily by allowing process changes to be made 'on-the-fly'.
		MBPM will integrate if required with existing applications such as Accounts, Finance, HR and Timesheets, across all platforms and merges easily with tools used on an everyday basis such as Microsoft Outlook and web browser.

The Results

		Each request can spawn, and optionally wait for resolution of, requests to other departments.
		Queries can be linked to other drop boxes on the same system, keeping the history together.
		Reporting time reduced from two weeks to 11 minutes.
		Reporting accuracy improved from 60% to 100%.
		Enforced SLAs through automatic escalation.
		KPIs can be extracted from throughput - reduced from 2 weeks to 11 minutes.
		IT/Vendor not required for further development/enhancements as a robust and straightforward solution was chosen by Process Mapping.
		Compulsory fields are mandated, thus ensuring rigorous audit and data integrity.
		SLAs can be set and reported and reports could be produced for customers.
		Provides escalations based on business rules - automated processing!
		Reduce email war - eliminating delays waiting for replies.
		Full audit trails and history available - every change is captured.
		Gives documented procedures - the "map" may be expanded to include all business rules.
		Requests can be automatically assigned to the appropriate SME - based on business rules and an easily maintainable skills register.
		Managers have immediate visibility of all requests - a Watch List is available for all enquiries.
		Turnaround time reduced by 3 days in MBG.
		Requests prioritised.