Service provider case study: Bringing automation and transparency to the B2B sales-to-order process

A tier-1 operator seeking to accelerate enterprise and midmarket growth was constrained by a slow, complex legacy sales order process. With Amdocs’ innovative, integrated Sales-Quote-Order solution, the company deployed omni-channel commerce-engine functionality that was typically only seen in the consumer segment. Today, the solution can create a single proposal for hundreds, even thousands of customer sites – each with complex, unique network requirements. Benefits include cutting ordering time in half, significantly reducing order cancellations, creating contracts in minutes, reducing sales-to-finance cycle time, and simplifying and accelerating the creation of mega-proposals.

• The challenge to be addressed: Despite the operator’s expanding network and continual introduction of new products and services, competition remained strong. At the same time, customers were demanding better, more flexible services, as well as an improved customer experience. One of the company’s most significant challenges was responding to customer RFPs, which typically involved an average of 4000 sites (with some as large as 10,000) and requirements for both on-net and offnet serviceability. The main stumbling block lay in the orchestration of its sales-to-order process, which was very slow, cumbersome and heavily reliant on manual procedures. In addition, the company’s RFP response process was overly dependent on spreadsheets, emails and telephone communication. Moreover, due to the lack of end-to-end project orchestration to govern the process and P&L monitoring, financial modelling was often inaccurate, leading to the generation of unprofitable proposals and delivery SLA violations. As a result of the above, as well as to capitalize on the rapidly growing enterprise market segment opportunity, the operator understood the solution lay in improving the speed and efficiency of its sales-to-order process. This would enable them to improve proposal profitability on one hand, while providing an unparalleled customer and employee experience on the other.
• The solution: Amdocs was awarded the project to completely revamp and modernize the operator’s sales-to-order process and capabilities. These objectives were achieved via an innovative, integrated and automated CPQ and ordering solution, built upon digital technology that delivered functionality of an omnichannel commerce engine. The benefits for the operator’s enterprise customers that were served by the configure-price-quote, ordering and pre-integrated project management capabilities included cutting ordering time by half and reducing order cancellations by 30%.

• Scaling the enterprise: As the operator expanded its B2B footprint in the large enterprise market, a significant challenge to accelerating growth lay in the ability to respond to customer RFPs, which typically involved an average of 4,000 sites (and sometimes as many as 10,000) and included network requirements for both on-net and off-net serviceability. The main stumbling block to addressing the challenge was the orchestration of its sales-to-order process, which was very slow. By creating a new sales-to-order platform, Amdocs provided complete transparency into the mega proposal-driven sales process. For example, its P&L analysis capabilities provided internal line-of-business stakeholders and project managers with a significantly more transparent view of the opportunity cost than was previously possible. It also provided immediate access to a P&L analysis for any proposal at any stage, thereby enabling close monitoring of financial performance, adherence to guidelines and the ability to make informed, context-driven exceptions.
• Expanding to mid-market: After successfully “scale” testing the solution in the enterprise market, the operator expanded its use into the midmarket segment. With full integration with Salesforce.com’s SFA system, Amdocs’ solution not only enabled a completely seamless data flow during the lead-to-cash process across multiple B2B product lines, but the operator’s sales force could now generate a final contract in just 10 minutes, instead of two days. Continuously executing the customer migration from the legacy system, customer orders today continue to flow smoothly from sales (opportunity creation) to finance (notify billing) and operations (fulfillment and install). Meanwhile, benefits are flowing through to users across all aspects of the process, with increased operational agility resulting in a 40% reduction in the sales-to-finance cycle time.
• Proven business benefits: During first 12 months after going into production, the operator’s new platform supported 155+ mega-proposals for enterprise customers, with 111,000+ sites in total, 156,000+ serviceability requests and around 670 P&L reports generated during the sales process for managed connectivity services. The system has also been the backbone of 20%+ year-to-year enterprise-segment revenue growth. Since going into phased production for the mid-market segment, order processing time has been reduced by 40%, sales-quote creation by 60%, and first bill creation from several days to a few minutes. Also, salespeople need to fill out only 30 fields to enter a new order, down from around 800 previously, resulting in very positive user feedback from employees.