Case Study
Large Multi-National Energy Company Adopts Gotransverse to Automate Usage-Based Billing to Shorten Time-to-Cash, Enable Faster Forecasting, and Allow More Customer Focus
Overview
This sustainability resource management company provides resource management services to help multi-site businesses monitor consumption and develop new conservation strategies to reduce their carbon footprint for a more sustainable world. Using sustainable resource management services helps organizations monitor the use of energy, waste, water, and telecommunications services to drive efficiencies and reduce environmental impact.
However, with ongoing monitoring and management of diverse, complex services there also comes complex billing, including both subscription services and usage. As the company’s service model evolved it became clear that their billing had to become more sophisticated. Senior management recognized the need for a cloud-native billing engine that was as sophisticated as their resource management services and that could keep pace with company growth.
That is when they turned to the Gotransverse billing platform. At the same time, Gotransverse reduced errors and helped them scale billing with their business, making it easy to add more product lines to billing. which automated their rating and billing.
Automating Billing for Sustainability Transformation
This Gotransverse customer is offering a new kind of SaaS business to promote sustainability transformation. Just as globalization and digitization are disruptive forces that have transformed the global economy, the economics of sustainability offers a new opportunity for every organization to incorporate a holistic environmental strategy into their operations that has an impact on operations, product design, logistics, digital technology, brand reputation, recruitment, customer satisfaction, risk management, and more. Companies understand that they can benefit from sustainable transformation, but most organizations don’t know where to start.
To help their customers achieve sustainability transformation, this SaaS provider simplifies the complexity and fragmentation that goes into identifying where to invest in order to reduce greenhouse gases and realize consistent performance to reduce environmental impact. They help customers build a tailored sustainability strategy, manage resources, and track and analyze the results.
Monetizing this business model is complex as well. In addition to subscription fees for resource management services, the billing system has to account for consumption as well. Services are billed based on the number of resources used and a commission on the value of resources saved. Accurate billing requires tracking rates and fees for energy consumption, waste removal, telecom services, and water usage, including multiple rate structures and variables for peak usage, usage discounts, and other variables. It was clear that what was needed was a sophisticated and scalable intelligent billing platform with a configurable billing engine that could adapt to its own changing business needs and that could grow with the company. That’s when they engaged Gotransverse. After assessing several options, it was clear that Gotransverse offered the best partnership, most flexibility, and the highest ROI.
Gotransverse Delivers Rating and UsageBased Billing
As with all Gotransverse engagements, this engagement started with a need’s assessment, an understanding of their existing infrastructure, and a review of immediate goals and future objectives.
The priority was to eliminate manual processes and automate the billing system to scale with their growing business and shorten the time required to issue invoices.
Implementing Gotransverse made it possible automate the rating and billing process, including integrating all the charge rules to the various rating models. This enabled them to reduce the time it took to prepare the invoices 67%, from 15 days to 5 days. As customers got invoices earlier, payments were received earlier, improving time to cash. Having an earlier accurate accounting of customer charges enabled earlier forecasts as well.
A major incentive for automating the billing system was to ensure absolute accuracy.
With Gotransverse everything is automated and standardized, so it leads to complete billing transparency with better controls in processing and reduced errors.
Another reason the company selected Gotransverse was because of its integration capabilities. For example, one of the factors that makes billing so complex is accounting for regional taxes. To solve the problem, the development team integrated the Gotransverse billing engine with Thomson Reuters OneSource tax software. Gotransverse also integrates with Salesforce, making it easy to track billing activity and payments as part of the CRM platform, and SAP for their ERP system.
Standardizing on Gotransverse has helped transform billing accuracy and delivery. Automated billing means that 40% less billers need to run the monthly invoices, a reduction from five billers to three, and that their billing can scale as they want to add more product lines for billing.
Conclusion
As this company’s global business continues to expand, they will rely even more extensively on the Gotransverse billing engine. In addition to new corporate clients, the company plans to take on even more complex sustainable transformation initiatives, including smart cities. They also plan to standardize best practices and governance across the company’s global offices, using Gotransverse as the common platform to automate billing.