BAM! Saving Money by "Watching" the Business Flow
- Business Challenge
- The Solution
- Technical Details
- Implementation and Deployment
- Results
- Conclusion
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Business Challenge
Few industries move faster than the financial market, and a key enabler for quick moves is a proper telecommunications infrastructure. Let's consider a client, a major financial conglomerate, that spends $300 million annually on procuring and provisioning its telecommunications backbone as part of its overall $10 billion annual IT budget.
Like most financial institutions, this client has gone through a period of mergers and acquisitions in the last decade. While these changes significantly increased the client's competitive position in the marketplace, they also created a series of redundant processes and potential inefficiencies.
In the past, the client used manual processes for requisitioning and tracking orders for circuits. The ordering process was fraught with errors, which lengthened the ordering cycle and made it difficult to estimate delivery dates accurately. Business units couldn't track their orders and often had to delay the launch of new financial products. Cancellations could not be confirmed. In many cases, services were overbilled.
In addition, the circuit inventory effort was inefficient. It was difficult to determine circuit ownership and allocate ownership and usage costs to appropriate business units. There were also problems with retiring circuit assets that were no longer needed.
These problems were compounded by the fact that circuit order processing occurs in hundreds of locations around the world. In addition, mergers and acquisitions resulted in multiple undocumented and ill-defined business processes from different originating companies.