Working with one of North America’s leading telecommunication companies, ASC has identified various business processes into which contract management can be injected to drive cost savings and to identify opportunities to improve overall gross margin. ASC’s Carrier Management Solution (CMS) captures this knowledge in a suite of tools that can be implemented individually or as an integrated solution to automate the buying and selling of telecommunication services. These tools, based on ASC Contracts™, are designed to interface with existing and other third-party products to align contract terms and conditions with service and customer information.

Sell-Side Automation
The process of ordering new telecommunication related services can be automated to reduce costs and to improve customer service. Whether customers are individual consumers, commercial accounts or other communication service providers, the ASC Carrier Management Solution offers tools to ease the workload for customer service representatives and account executives. In many cases, these tools can be made available to customers so that they can do some or all of the work on their own. Tools to automate the sell-side processes include:

• Contract creation tool for developing master contracts or sub contracts to a master agreement.
• Pricing tool that takes into account master contract terms and conditions for each customer.
• Quoting tool to facilitate getting a quote for a particular service.
• Order tracking tool to monitor the current status of an order.
• Data Exchange tools to support the bi-directional interaction with back-end systems to "push" and "pull" data for ordering, provisioning and billing.
• Apply contracted rates to usage data.
• Analysis tools with which to better understand the selling process and to identify opportunities for improvement.

Buy-Side Automation
Fulfilling a customer order may require the purchase of “off-net” services from other communication services providers. Whether these purchases are covered by a master agreement or are procured through a competitive request for quote from several suppliers, the ASC Carrier Management Solution offers tools to automate many of the underlying business processes. These tools include:

• Supplier master agreement search and retrieval tools to identify preferred vendors and rank suppliers.
• RFx tool to coordinate the process of generating the purchase request (request for quote, request for tender, request for information, etc), manage the resulting responses, perform reverse auction, generate customer quotes and issue supplier notifications.
• Order Tracking tool to coordinate and monitor order status with suppliers.
• Validation tool to maintain information needed to facilitate invoice validation.
• Consolidation and verification tool that feeds external verification systems.
• Analysis tools with which to gain critical insights into the buying process.
• Content Management
• Local Reciprocal Compensation
• Integration with major carrier pricing and quoting tools.

Consolidation, Verification and Validation
While reducing sales and procurement costs can certainly have a meaningful impact on overall profitability, perhaps the most significant impact can be obtained by integrating information about the services that a customer has ordered with information about the “off-net” services used to fulfill the order. By doing so, it is possible to confidently determine whether:

• The customer agreed to accept the order
• The supplier agreed to provide the service required to fulfill the customer order
• The service required to fulfill the customer order has been ordered from the supplier and has been provisioned and activated
• The supplier invoice has been cross referenced to internal systems to determine if the supplier has been paid

The ASC Carrier Management Solution consolidates information about customer services, the external services that supports each customer service, and the contractual terms and conditions governing these services into a single procurement repository. Verification tools provide a mechanism for retrieving the information contained in this repository and quickly verifying the relationship between a supplier service and a customer service.  Through interfaces with the ASC Carrier Management Solution, external invoice validation tools, either homegrown or from vendors such as Teoco and Lavastorm, can use this source of verified relationships to validate supplier invoices.

ASC Carrier Management tools for consolidation and verification include:

• Procurement repository for circuits, phone, services, etc
• Links to internal systems (orders, billing, provisioning)
• Moves, Adds, Changes and Deletes (MACDs) notification
• Discrepancy management
• Revenue & costs representation
• Feed verification data in a normalized format to external validation systems

ASC Contracts - Solution Benefits
Armed with the ASC Carrier Management Solution expect to obtain significant benefits, such as:

• Operational Efficiencies - Cost Savings
• Automate contract generation with data population
• Reduce activation times with up front edit checks and parallel approval workflows
• Bar code automates workflow process and mechanizes image capture
• Automated expiry and milestone notifications
• Ability to locate contracts (central repository, global name changes, contract hierarchy, alternative name searches, etc.)
• Revenue Assurance & Cost Management - Maximize Revenues
• Control rates via business rules
• Exercise penalty clauses, eliminate erroneous credits
• Route non-standard rates for approval
• Facilitate invoice validation (rates, terms, commitments, etc.)
• Continuous Compliance & Governance - Risk Management
• Control terms and conditions
• Automate approvals and sign-offs
• Audit trail and signed images online and at your fingertips

Communications – A Unique Industry
Communication services providers, unlike companies in most other industries, buy and sell extensively from one another. In many cases, the single largest purchase for many of these companies is services procured from their competitors. Given the volume of transactions and the number of different systems that track information related to these transactions, ensuring that the services listed on an invoice have actually been ordered and are currently in use is a significant challenge.