£135M annual cost saving from supplier invoice assurance.

Telecom / Revenue Assurance / Supplier Cost Management / Invoice Reconciliation

The project improves supplier-invoice management and revenue assurance for a leading UK telecommunications carrier. The organisation faced supplier invoices arriving from different sources, multiple inventory systems, poor data quality and multi-linguistic invoices. The solution created a centralised, automated framework to gather and reconcile supplier invoices, normalise them, validate external supplier costs, identify unused network elements still being billed, track cost-saving opportunities, automate revenue-assurance activities, periodically audit supplier billing, and stop billing for identified unused network elements.

Business requirements & challenges

Business requirements & challenges

There was no consolidated view of what suppliers were charging — and the underlying data was fragmented, low-quality and multilingual.

Major challenges

• No single source containing all commercial invoices received from suppliers
• Multiple inventory systems supporting global and domestic products
• Poor data quality across systems made end-to-end external cost validation difficult
• Supplier invoices from various geographies were multi-linguistic and needed normalising
• Need to identify quick cost-saving opportunities early and automate the revenue-assurance process

Solution

Solution

Three components: invoice gathering & reconciliation into a single normalised database; automated network polling to establish a BAU process for identifying incremental opportunities; and an automated reporting framework to track revenue-assurance progress and actions. The framework identifies unused network elements still being billed, automatically stops their billing, and runs periodic audits to verify.

• Invoice gathering & reconciliation into a single large, normalised database
• Automated network polling establishes a BAU process for incremental opportunities
• Automated reporting framework tracks revenue-assurance progress and opportunities
• Revenue assurance for third-party telco spend — validating what's being billed
• Identifies unused network elements that are still being billed by suppliers
• Automated bill-stop for identified elements, with periodic audits to verify billing stopped

Stack

Technologies used

How it works

Process workflow

1. 01Supplier / team invoices — gathered from different sources
2. 02Invoice reconciliation and normalisation into a consistent structure
3. 03Single central database — one normalised source for all supplier invoices
4. 04Third-party telco spend validation — check whether charges are correct
5. 05Automated network polling — BAU identification of incremental opportunities
6. 06Identify revenue/cost opportunities and unused network elements still being billed
7. 07Bill stop — automatically stop supplier billing for identified unused elements
8. 08Periodic audit — verify that supplier billing has actually stopped

What's new

Key innovations

Business benefits

Business benefits

A centralised supplier-invoice database, an automated unused-element identification and bill-stop process, and an automated reporting framework — underpinning the headline saving.

• Single database of supplier invoices from teams and suppliers
• Automated process to identify unused network elements and stop their billing
• Automated reporting framework tracking revenue-assurance progress and opportunities

At a glance

Key highlights