Communications Service Provider Secures Substantial Savings through Business Process Consolidation

The presence of multiple business support systems (BSS) frequently gives rise to a complex infrastructure, which is unequipped to deliver cost efficiencies and customer focus prescribed by modern enterprises. Tackling this issue was paramount to the competitive strategy of a large wireline and wireless Communications Service Provider (CSP) within the United States.The North American CSP chose Capgemini to help them consolidate their five regional billing systems into one strategic billing system. As part of this process, Capgemini was tasked to reverse-engineer the existing legacy code (32 million lines of code) and provide business requirements.

The Solution

The CSP conducted an exhaustive solutioning and selection process, and found Capgemini to be a leader at every step of the process. Capgemini’s extensive understanding of the functioning of communication companies and the knowledgebase and assets it offers made the choice of a solution-provider an easy one for the CSP. Capgemini was primarily expected to provide business requirements by analyzing the legacy code within the five legacy billing systems and consolidate the data within them into one single biller as part of the data migration process.Capgemini approached the CSP’s issue with a dual-component process. In the Discovery component, the team performed Business Rules Extraction (BRE) on over 32 million lines of legacy application code with the use of industry leading BRE automation tools. In the Data Migration component, over 7 million customer records from the legacy billers were converted to the target platform for customers using bundled internet access, telephone, and television services. This approach leverages Capgemini’s Communication Transformation Platform (CTP) assets as a critical accelerator.

As a result, Capgemini successfully reverse-engineered approximately 32 million lines of the source legacy billing code, including COBOL, Assembly, and PL/1, enabling the code to be exported to other tools for documentation and redevelopment purposes. The Capgemini team created the business requirements to perform gap analysis, which, in turn, facilitated the enhancement of the target system. Thereafter, the relevant billing data was migrated into the new target system billing system, thereby reinforcing the efficiency of the overall billing process.

The Result

The consolidation and migration performed by Capgemini successfully reduced and retired a large number of custom legacy applications and interfaces, resulting in significant cost savings. More than 3,500 interfaces within the legacy billing systems and over 35,000 products were critically analyzed, rationalized, and defined during the process. The analysis helped the teams extract more than 7,500 billing requirements from the legacy code.Significant improvements were observed in the cost-to-bill, cost-to-serve, and revenue-to-cost ratios. Through the consolidation of business process achieved across the five regions, the Capgemini solution helped the CSP reduce their operating expenses, thus enabling them to utilize these savings for further business development.

How the Communications Service Provider and Capgemini Worked Together

Capgemini assisted the client in analyzing all of the existing interfaces between the five regional billing systems and interfaces with the external systems and rationalized the list of interfaces that will be needed in the target billing platform. The CSP’s technical teams provided assistance, wherever required, on reviewing the outputs provided by Capgemini and provided inputs on updating the requirements.Furthermore, Capgemini helped the client in rationalizing their product set by analyzing how the existing product set was being utilized within the five regional billing systems. The CSP used the requirements documented by Capgemini to build the needed functions in the consolidated system.