In the aftermath of mergers, acquisitions, and the introduction of new products and services, many carriers have inefficient order management capabilities, supported by too many order management applications, processes and organizations. This inefficiency is creating extraordinarily high business and IT operating costs.

Carriers must strive to:

• Reduce order-entry errors
• Enable efficient order correction (in source system and the ordering platform)
• Support and consolidate multiple front-end ordering systems and interfaces to billing, provisioning, and network applications
• Increase the efficiencies of order and provisioning workflows, examining both system interactions and manual tasks

Product models within a provider’s ordering system are often the limiting factor in bringing new services and new service bundles to market. This delay is evident in:

• Very long timelines to introduce a new bundle of services
• Lost revenue opportunities when selling a bundle
• No one single view of the customer across products
• No capabilities to support selling the right bundle to the right customer
• Customer churn due to lack of ownership of entire communications experience

Carriers also struggle with the best ways to manage orders for new content offered over non-traditional channels. Ultimate ownership of the customer experience and relationship is often unclear as service and content providers become more and more tightly coupled.

Examples include:

• Ring tones, graphics and videos available over wireless devices
• VoD storefronts
• Web-based purchases of songs and other content, as well as traditional MRC’s

Capabilities:

Cognizant brings proven methodologies and tools to help providers assess their current order management and product catalog capabilities, and then creates a plan to implement improvements.

Benefits include:

• Increased flow-through
• Shortened time to market for new services and new service bundles
• Flexibility to support new ordering channels and products
• Decreased churn
• Reduced cost for manual tasks like order entry and correction

Cognizant delivers solutions with an efficient on-site, off-shore delivery model minimizing the investment required to deliver swift results.

Services:

Cognizant offers a full suite of services that help providers set their strategic direction and transform their order management and product catalog capabilities to enable competitive advantage:

• Evaluation of potential opportunities to consolidate order management processes, applications and organizations, and the associated return on investment from those actions.
• Assessment of the potential of next-generation service revenue possibilities and the ROI from introducing new ordering channels.
• Development of a realistic strategic plan (transformation plan and implementation roadmap) for migration to an order management solution that delivers ROI in an incremental and successful fashion.
• Delivery of robust application consolidation and data migration/integration delivery capability to migrate business rules, customer, order, and product data into the target platform(s) using a low-cost off-shore delivery model.
• Creation of a bundled services solution recommendation to identify and design the target business architecture for delivering bundled products. Minimize the number of applications, organizations and resources necessary to deliver the customer’s bundle.
• Development of a bundled services transformation plan that defines an incremental approach to delivering the solution with maximum ROI.
• Implementation of a bundled services solution delivery that provides the target business architecture utilizing offshore delivery capability and appropriate application solutions.
• Deployment of experienced resources to handle manual order entry and fallout correction tasks using a cost-effective offshore delivery model.