CGI Helps Bell to Implement Inbound – Outbound Flat Rate Base in Record Time

In the spring of 2000, Bell Canada embarked upon a wide-ranging revenue-stimulation campaign in order to meet its revenue projections for the year. An important part of that campaign was to introduce new, more flexible toll pricing plans for the large to medium size business market. At stake was millions in potential lost revenue, as increasing numbers of customers switched to competitors’ flat rate long distance plans. To enable the pricing changes that would help the Sales and Marketing organizations to retain and/or win back these customers, Bell first needed to update its mainframe legacy billing systems and the Bell Customer Contact System (BCCS). Bell’s IS/IT group called upon their customary partner, CGI, to work shoulder-to-shoulder with them on what would be the fastest-ever release on the BCCS platform.

The Challenge
The Inbound – Outbound Flat Rate Base project amalgamated two distinct revenue-generating billing initiatives in order to leverage synergies and reduce overlap and contention. The Inbound-Outbound component was intended to eliminate discounts on business customers’ calls originating overseas. These discounts, which applied under the Advantage Optimum Overseas pricing schedule, were often so deep that they were, in fact, revenue-neutral for Bell. The Flat Rate component required the delivery of functionality to enable Sales teams to negotiate a selection of toll plan pricing parameters in order to win back or retain business customers.

For this urgent project, the biggest challenge facing CGI and Bell’s IS/IT group was the extremely tight time frames to make the necessary changes to the billing and BCCS platforms. What would normally take 16 weeks to implement had to be accomplished in just 10!

The Strategy
In the interest of saving precious time, and getting the new pricing applications up and running on the individual workstations, CGI undertook the first-ever “mini release” of the BCCS platform. (A full-scale release takes about four months.) This required that everything, from project documentation to business methods, be streamlined so that only the essential, mission-critical things got done. In addition, CGI assigned to the project only very senior-level billing and customer care experts, who could be counted on to make quick, accurate and informed decisions. In what was very much a joint effort, it was essential for the Bell and CGI teams to work together as hand-in-glove. Bell’s task was to define the requirements and perform the necessary system testing; CGI’s role was to find and implement the system solution. Part of that joint approach was a Bell-CGI steering committee consisting of senior executives who could resolve issues quickly and definitively.

The Technology
In the past, releases to the mainframe BCCS platform have taken place about four times a year. Normally, these upgrades are fairly routine from a technical standpoint, requiring that code be re-written to accommodate specified changes to pricing plans or customer care initiatives, then rolling the changes out to the workstations of customer contact personnel. The difference, with this first-ever “mini release”, was the compressed time frame that put all processes and procedures on a fast-track. Even the testing process was accelerated so it was done at a unit, or application level rather than at system level.

The Results
By streamlining processes and procedures, bypassing non-essential work, and close coordination of the CGI and Bell IS/IT teams, the June deadline was successfully met. The project was deemed a major success and resulted in significant business retention and win backs for Bell. That year, Bell surpassed its revenue-stimulation objectives and was able to meet its year-end revenue projections in a hotly-contested market.

Says Scott Freeth, Bell’s Project Manager for New Product Introduction, “CGI helped us to bring this project to a successful deployment within an extremely aggressive timeline. The CGI and Bell teams worked very well together. CGI focused on the things that would ensure success and showed the necessary flexibility to move forward quickly.”