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.”
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