Background
The customer, a leading telecom expense management firm that serves businesses in the healthcare, financial services and other industries, initially approached Cloud Age for help integrating the EDI data feeds from certain telecom carriers into the TEM’s electronic invoice readers. The Cloud Age team has years of experience working with the different EDI-based invoice delivery formats used telecom carriers and is often called on to help TEMs, WEM’s and Service Providers integrate these data feeds.
Once Cloud Age’s team completed this initial assignment successfully, the TEM’s executive team asked us to look at the TEM’s overall process and technology for reading and converting carrier invoice data and recommend potential improvements.
“Staying on top of telecom carrier invoice formats is about as complicated as keeping up with the federal tax code. Businesses use accountant to do their taxes, and TEM’s benefit from having Cloud Age handle their telecom invoice processing. It’s all we do, and we do it well”
An Expert Team + an Unrivaled Library of Telecom Invoice Readers
THE CHALLENGE
After an assessment of the TEM’s invoice processing environment, Cloud Age and the TEM’s IT team identified two challenges impacting the TEM’s business goals and the satisfaction of its end-user enterprise customers.
Slow Invoice Processing. While some of the TEM’s custom invoice readers could read certain telecom carrier invoice data quickly, other readers were very slow, sometimes taking days to process incoming telecom carrier data and converting it into a usable format for the TEM to analyze. This slowed the time the TEM could demonstrate its performance to its enterprise customers and created the risk of delayed invoice delivery.
IT At The Breaking Point. In some cases, the TEM was receiving over 60 different invoice feeds, from over 20 telecom carriers, in different formats and media for a single enterprise customer. Every time a carrier made a change to one of its invoice formats, the TEM’s IT team had to work overtime to adjust their invoice readers. In a fast-growing environment, where the TEM was adding new enterprise customers weekly, its IT team was stretched to the breaking point, forced to deal with invoice readers instead of high priority IT requirements.
THE SOLUTION
Cloud Age and the TEM’s IT team quickly realized that it made sense to leverage Cloud Age’s turn-key telecom invoice management solution, which includes UNI-Bill and Super USOC. The Invoice IQ team is 100% focused on designing, expanding and continually improving the performance of its extensive library of telecom invoice readers. Invoice IQ co-founder and COO, Eric Pitches, explains: “Staying on top of the invoice format changes that big telecom carriers make every day is about as complicated as keeping up with the federal tax code. Businesses use accountant to do their taxes, and TEM’s benefit from having Invoice IQ handle their telecom invoice processing. It’s all we do, and we do it well.”
Most importantly, Cloud Age delivered significant value to its TEM customer. “The TEM’s IT team said we helped cut the time from enterprise customer contract signing to implementation of TEM services in half,” says Pitches. “And what was taking months of custom coding work for their IT team was reduced to days.”
