Real-time management reporting (RTMR) improves forecasting and profitability of top-end Telstra accounts

"The deployment of RTMR enhances Telstra's ability to collate, integrate, and report on critical financial data - creating financial and operational benefits and improved customer relationships."

The Client
Telstra is Australia's original and largest telecommunications provider, serving the consumer, business, government, and wholesale markets. Providing PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network), mobile, and data services, it is the leading fully integrated telecommunications company in Australia, and one of only 17 worldwide.

The Challenge
While Telstra has a stand-alone credit management tool for its mass-market retail customers, its top-end (corporate and government) customers required a more sophisticated approach to manage outstanding debt and minimize bad debt expense. With large business customers, Telstra often must treat a single organization as many different customers. For example, different departments within an organization may each have its own working relationship with Telstra, encompassing different Telstra services and their respective points of contact. Moreover, Telstra has contractual arrangements with many business customers involving unique payment terms that are individually negotiated, and that may not always be reflected in the individual billing systems.

The multiple dimensions of Telstra's top-end accounts presented systems complexity and, in turn, bottlenecks in the consolidation, presentation, and analysis of critical financial data. Customer information originated from several sales, financial, and customer care systems, and there was no centralized, holistic view of the customer.

Difficulties in tracking and reporting this information began to affect Telstra's bottom line: interest penalty payments were foregone; discounts were incorrectly passed to customers; and, thus, Telstra was burdened with the cost of carrying additional debt. Furthermore, the process of gathering this information was manually intensive and time consuming, resulting in an inefficient operation and a fragmented view of the customer.

To gain a more holistic view of its major accounts, and to improve revenue and relationships, Telstra selected CGI to design and implement a real-time management reporting (RTMR) system. This real-time dashboard system provides daily information on credit performance for Telstra's large business customers.

The Strategy
CGI led the design and implementation phases, and worked with Telstra to define and prioritize the critical information to be supported by the RTMR solution. CGI used Acta^TM to extract, transform, and load data from three billing systems and a master customer data repository into an Oracle® data warehouse. Next, CGI integrated Business Objects® reporting engine with the data warehouse, providing users with secure, Web based access to reports.

RTMR delivers a true total-customer view, leveraging and aggregating information from these source systems to provide a complete debt position (such as billing, payments received, and disputed debt) for more than 20,000 customers. Extracts are delivered to RTMR on a nightly basis, so information to support decisions or customer communications is always current. RTMR currently has over 40 defined personalized views. At the highest level, RTMR provides a global view of all accounts under debt management, allowing any level of "drill down" to the component data elements. This "roll up and drill down" gives Telstra a powerful analysis tool with which it can effectively manage customers.

Access to the RTMR hierarchy of reports is based on user profiles. For example, credit analysts are only able to see debt data for the specific accounts in their assigned portfolios. Team leaders can view portfolios of all their credit analysts, and then drill down to specific details of individual credit analysts, customers, accounts, and invoices. RTMR also has the ability to generate ad hoc queries, whereby users (based on security levels) can design and run reports at any time based on their specific requirements. These might include queries to display the current hierarchy of accounts within the credit centers, the top 10 accounts with highest open debt balances, or a list of all accounts with non-standard payment terms.

Finally, to improve internal workflow and easily adapt to organizational and responsibility changes, data in the RTMR are based on both Telstra's credit and sales organizations. Accounts are assigned to credit analysts, team leaders, credit center managers, and sales account teams - all of which can change over time. Should an account or portfolio be transferred within either credit or sales, RTMR allows users to easily re-assign accounts to reflect the new responsibilities.

The Results
The deployment of RTMR enhances Telstra's ability to collate, integrate, and report on critical financial data -creating financial and operational benefits and improved customer relationships. RTMR provides Telstra's credit analysts with a real-time status of payments received and amounts outstanding, which is crucial to Telstra's bottom line. With key corporate customers able to have potentially hundreds of accounts running simultaneously, having the ability to understand this information is a powerful tool.

Since RTMR utilizes a customer-centric approach and takes customized payment terms into account when calculating the aggregate debt position of an account, Telstra is better able to leverage bonuses and penalties that are outlined in major customer contracts. While Telstra may not decide to directly pursue these interest penalties with customers, having this information in hand gives Telstra a powerful negotiation (and customer retention) tool. Similarly, the ability to identify various levels of payment compliance ensures that Telstra does not over-discount.

The performance of the credit organization can be closely monitored. RTMR tracks customer accounts as assigned to credit analysts, team leaders, and call center managers. RTMR provides debt statistics at both an aggregate level and in "aged debt buckets," allowing users to see not just the total outstanding debt, but also the age of various components of this debt. Credit management can use this information to assess the performance of credit analysts working with customers to resolve debt issues.

Finally, RTMR gives Telstra the ability to leverage information to other parts of the organization as required. For example, an extract of data will be uploaded to the Intranet site used by the sales support organization for improved account management capability. This provides the sales organization with instant access to key performance metrics, such as total and aged debt, without having to log into the RTMR application itself.