One of the biggest challenges facing IT Outsourcing providers is the new expectations that payments are made against actuals, when assets or services are actually live on the network and being consumed. Although this seems like a reasonable demand from IT Outsourcing customers, it’s a major problem for service providers – even the largest ones.
Billing for the assets that are actually consumed is complicated in complex IT environments and, if done manually, expensive, time-consuming and prone to errors.
The trouble with those errors: they place a heavy strain on the service provider/customer relationship and create a lack of trust.
When the baseline – the foundation of the relationship and of the outsourcing contract – is inaccurate, the result is disagreement and constant disputes around billing. This was the case for one of our customers, a service provider. They were dealing with a client who had complex infrastructure – hundreds of servers, thousands of PCs, and many assets in remote locations.
Since there was no realistic way to run a wall-to-wall inventory under these circumstances, the Infrastructure Outsourcing contract between the provider (our customer) and their client was established on an inaccurate baseline, which resulted in time wasted on disputes – for both sides. This included bi-weekly billing calls and got to the point where the business relationship became strained.
At this point, the service provider sought our help. Using Blazent enabled them to automatically establish an accurate baseline for that relationship, to automate ongoing billing and monitoring to reduce costs, and to provide their customer with pre-invoice validation.
In the Blazent customer’s own words, “The beauty was, that for the first time in this relationship, we were finally able to say, ‘here’s an accurate account of all the assets under management.’ It became a fact-based discussion – we have found these assets, they are real and billable. The dispute was over.”
For this customer, invoicing is now 100% error-free, there are no more bi-weekly billing calls, and no more disputes. This of course translates into big savings for both parties, in terms of both time and money.
As the customer says, Blazent was the enabler of getting this business relationship on the right track.
