Billing operations at Orange

Keeping up with relentless rounds of invoicing…

Seven times a month, Orange Romania has to compile bills for its customers. This long-running process runs for upwards of 17 hours, with over 70 sub-process stages, and hundreds of other activities too.

As a manual task, it was hugely complicated and prone to errors. Each job had to be run, tracked accurately, and then validated. Every dependency had to be remembered at the right time and executed correctly. This was highly challenging, time-consuming and stressful.

So, every month, the existing team had to work around the clock, in shifts – including very unpopular night shifts – to ensure bills were created, checked and sent out as quickly as possible.

Bridging the skills gap and increasing velocity…

They were doing that with a billing system that’s due to be replaced – in favour of a new state-of-the-art Oracle system. The skills required to operate the existing platform were becoming ever more difficult and expensive to find. Moreover, the majority of Orange Romania’s billing system team members were approaching – and, indeed, clamouring for – retirement. The monthly push was slow and stressful, and the manual processes inevitably gave rise to errors.

Implementing CORTEX automation around the legacy billing platform has increased accuracy and sped things up by about 10-20% – even despite this being only part of the overall process. That’s enabled the team size to be reduced without concern – which was a key goal – as well as ending the night shift. Information is now pulled automatically from external systems. It’s then translated into the format necessary for it to be entered onto the billing system.

That legacy mainframe platform can then run its batch processes as usual and get the bills out to customers, quickly and accurately. Indeed, this process now takes just hours, rather than up to seven days, even with the reduced headcount.

Kick-starting the evolution…

The process began in late 2019, with a CORTEX comprehensive kick-starter proof-of-concept project. Within just two days, an intelligent automation solution was prototyped for Orange Romania’s specific needs. The launch program guaranteed tangible outcomes within three months, and then delivered on its promise.

Bridging future technological advances…

As well as building an operational exoskeleton around Orange Romania’s legacy system, the CORTEX platform can be easily adapted to augment its incoming Oracle billing system.

This new, state-of-the-art billing platform has market-leading autonomy features. Yet, CORTEX’s automation capabilities far surpass those. Indeed, it’s predicted that at least half of the current automation functionality will be required even after Oracle has been deployed.

Moreover, the CORTEX platform is so flexible and easily re-configurable that it can be used to help the new billing platform integrate with Orange Romania’s existing business processes. Then, over time, as the business’s needs evolve and change, both CORTEX and the Oracle platform can be configured together to offer the best of all worlds.

Looking forward…

Since augmenting the billing platform in 2020, CORTEX has been used by Orange Romania in numerous other ways, from change management to incident support.