Billing transformations are arduous and complex. This is what we've learned from customer implementations on how to make them more efficient

Despite an uncertain economy, enterprises are investing heavily in digitally transforming their billing processes. In fact, this perhaps further fuels the need to speed up billing transformation. Why? Two key reasons are customers increasing demands for customised and personalised offerings, not to mention shareholder demands for business growth. You could also throw in risk of losing customers, and revenue leakage which we've highlighted previously.

According to a recent Gartner survey of CIOs and technology executives, 59% say that digital initiatives take too long to complete, and 52% say they take too long to realize value.

“The pressure on CIOs to deliver digital dividends is higher than ever,” said Daniel Sanchez-Reina, VP Analyst at Gartner, speaking about the Gartner survey.

“CEOs and boards anticipated that investments in digital assets, channels and digital business capabilities would accelerate growth beyond what was previously possible. Now, business leadership expects to see these digital-driven improvements reflected in enterprise financials.”

When it comes to digital transformation, billing and quote-to-cash processes have a critical role to play. When these processes are fully digitized and automated, it unlocks better customer experiences, faster invoicing and new business models.

Yet, reality for most enterprises is that they have a starting point which often is a legacy integration system that are slowing them down. Here’s what you can do to take control of the situation, reduce risk, and dramatically speed up the transformation.

The problem with legacy integration systems

Many enterprise billing systems are not set up today to handle the high volumes of data coming in from different sources and in different formats.

Legacy integration systems, which capture this data and process it into a format that other systems can use, might have worked fine when there was less data coming in, at slower speeds. But not any longer, which is especially problematic when some of this data is critical to revenue.

The problem gets worse when you consider that many enterprises have several different integration systems and billing systems deployed across their business units.

These systems are often complex, highly customized, and optimized for specific use cases, which requires significant resources for day-to-day management and configuration.

They also often rely on manual processes, which are prone to human errors, and have poor data traceability and quality. This can lead to billing inaccuracies, invoicing delays, and revenue leakage.

So what can CIOs do to speed up billing transformation?

The solution doesn’t have to be a complete rip and replace of your integration and billing systems that takes years to complete and realize value. That’s good news, right?

At DigitalRoute, we typically support enterprises transform their billing and quote-to-cash processes in a stepwise process. Unlike most integration solutions, our software is built specifically for billing systems, and for high volumes of data from different sources.

Translated into customer value it means our software automatically collects and processes all data relevant to billing from any system before it hits your financial systems. It enriches the data from other systems, binds it to specific users, then sends clean records wherever you need them to go (billing, analytics, etc.).

It also has built-in error correction capabilities to ensure that no data is lost, which means no revenue is lost.

Bottomline is, instead of a complete rip and replace of all integration systems, you can with the right solution gradually take over responsibility for specific systems, which can then be retired. This means you can consolidate your siloed landscape step by step.

What billing transformation could look like for your organization

Digital transformation projects usually have two main goals – optimize current capabilities and add new capabilities. Our solution does both. When Forrester studied five enterprises using our software, they found it:

• Reduced hardware and operational running costs by 65%, by consolidating or retiring legacy integration systems.
• Reduced IT maintenance activities by 60%
• Sped up invoicing by 80%
• Detected revenue leakage amounting to 10% of operating income.

Aside from optimizing processes, DigitalRoute's solution enabled the enterprises to launch new business models faster, from months to days. With real-time data processing of customer usage, the enterprises could create new services and charge for them in new ways, such as usage-based pricing.

Get in touch to discuss how we can help you and your business. And check out our podcast where we go deeper into these topics.