That Certen something

As these Canadians mount what could be North America's biggest billing consolidation project, the eyes of the telecom world will be on them. But far from the guarantees the company's name implies, success is anything but a sure thing

Bell Canada took to heart the words of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham — “Make no small plans” — when it decided earlier this year to embark on a billing consolidation project that, if successful, will put into practice what most of the industry thus far has given but lip service.

The communications giant (by Canadian standards), along with Amdocs, a multinational software billing company, created a new corporation chartered with melding nearly 200 disparate billing and customer care systems within Bell Canada Enterprises.

The new company, Certen, is located in Montreal. Its architect is CEO James Hubley; the integration project belongs to Chief Operating Officer Marinella Ermacora. And the armchair quarterbacks — or, for NHL fans, the wannabe Michel Therriens — will be legion. Amdocs' competitors, industry analysts and anyone who has ever been involved in a billing conversion project of any kind (and has heard that Certen plans to do this in just two years) will be tracking its progress with professional and prurient interest.

Also watching closely will be the major incumbent local exchange carriers whose own consolidation projects await, including SBC Communications, which owns a 20% stake in Bell Canada.

Paul Atkinson, Amdocs' senior vice president of marketing, says that the stars are aligned for success. He may be looking in the right general direction. Given its scope and complexity, and in particular its aggressive schedule, this project may require a little divine intervention.

Strolling the streets of Montreal — especially Old Montreal, just a few short blocks from Certen headquarters — one gets the feeling that if such a phenomenon could happen anywhere, it could happen here. Street signs at virtually every intersection offer the inspiration of the saints: Sandwiched between Rue Saint Jacques, the patron saint of (bill) printers, and Rue Saint Catherine, named for the saint whose vision resulted in the “Miracle Medal,” and just northwest of Rue Saint Gabriel, the patron saint of telecommunications workers — honestly — Certen is surrounded by spiritual helping hands.

Of course, ordinary people must get the job (not Job) done, and Hubley believes he has the people in place to pull it off: “This will live, die, succeed or fail on the people that are in Certen. And I am absolutely impressed with the knowledge they have about billing.”

Commencer du début
(Starting from scratch)

As if dealing with the complex issues of consolidating, converging, integrating and streamlining 200 billing processes and designing, building, testing and implementing a new system while maintaining or improving the level of customer care were not enough, there is the small matter of building a company.

So why create a new company when there are so many billing providers lining up to sell their software and services, including Amdocs?

“Expense,” Hubley says. “We have to do this in a way that is affordable.” (For which he might look to St. Matthew, the patron saint of money managers.)

Starting from the premise that 70% of all customer care and billing projects fail because they don't meet the original business case, Hubley says a different mindset and organizational structure are required for a project of this size. “If you are a division within a company, no matter who you are, you are budget-driven. You try to maximize the amount of money you get, and you go spend it.” Amdocs' decision to join the venture stemmed from a different premise: The customer is always right. “[Creating a separate company] is what Bell Canada was looking for,” Atkinson says.

Still, Atkinson agrees that creating an independent entity was the best solution. “It had to be sort of an arm's-length venture from Bell Canada where billing was a core competency. And BCE was interested in using this vehicle for other Bell Canada properties.”

La contre-culture du canada
(Canada's counterculture)

Setting the corporate structure is only the beginning. Injecting the entrepreneurial spirit into its work force and evolving that into a vendor mindset is no small task.

'You can't put blinders on and make believe nothing is going to change. You have to allow for change.' — James Hubley

“We have a lot of employees that have maybe three generations of their family that worked for Bell. When you change from being a Bell company to something called Certen, it makes people nervous,” Hubley says.

The five-and-a-half years Hubley spent as executive vice president of the Czech Republic's national carrier Czech Telecom should help. There he managed 22,000 people who thought nothing of maintaining a 24-year waiting list for dial tone. Hubley soon implemented detailed billing and price packages using Amdocs' Ensemble billing — the same technology forming the basis for Certen's converged system. His mission at Certen is to get people thinking differently about their jobs: “If we do business as usual, we aren't going to get where we need to be.”

Résultats sans surprises
(Results with no surprises)

Hubley's commitment to Bell Canada is to decrease the cost of producing a bill, build an infrastructure that supports convergence and timely service creation, and provide care for its approximately 12 million customers. His mantra is “results with no surprises,” which he says necessitates discipline and a near-fanatical commitment to defining customer requirements. “You have to put the time and effort into talking to people about their requirements. You also need a very formal process — a disciplined way to do that. You can't do it by e-mail messages at the end of the day or phone conversations. It has to be much more disciplined.”

Close but no cigar Convergys, with whom Certen could compete in the outsourced billing space once its ultimate solution is market-ready, signed a huge deal with Orange France last month to provide billing and customer care services to the mobile carrier's 15 million subscribers. Although the number of subscribers rivals those in the Certen project, the Convergys deal is currently focused on only one business unit. However, that could become more complex because the contract allows Orange to use Convergys' Atlys billing systems for its numerous global affiliates. Déjà vu. Convergys also began its life as a Bell company spin-off when it split from Cincinnati Bell in August 1998.

But discipline, like the help of patron saints, goes only so far. “You can't put blinders on and make believe nothing is going to change. You have to allow for change,” Hubley says.

His vision is not to build features and functionality that change like the playlist at nearby Notre-Dame Basilica, but to build the underlying capability from which features and functions are driven.

The foundation for that capability will be the Ensemble billing platform from Amdocs, which holds a 10% equity stake in Certen plus convertible debt equivalent to an additional 35%. However, the table stakes can be much higher.

“It is a very significant win for Amdocs, and that's a term we haven't used before,” Atkinson says. “Over 200 individual systems being brought over is large even by our metrics.”

The project also looms large in its strategic importance. “It will be a major selling point for them if it is done on time,” says Lisa Cebollero, analyst for The Yankee Group. “Even though it is Certen, it is Amdocs behind it, and it will look great to the market to say they implemented it.”

But that is only if the stars stay aligned, the saints be praised and Hubley, a self-proclaimed son-of-a-bitch, keeps the project on schedule. And that schedule is tight: two years, 200 billing systems.

“To miss it by a couple of months is one thing, but if it gets any further than that it may become a negative image for Certen since they came right out and said, ‘We are going to get this implemented in two years,’” Cebollero says. “And it will definitely put some negative feedback on Amdocs if it can't be done.”

So far, the self-reliant Amdocs hasn't had much problem getting things done. Atkinson claims a perfect track record in his company's 20-year history, and Cebollero doesn't dispute it. But Amdocs is not the lead on this project — Certen is. And even with the number of resources the company is throwing at this project, its success is, well, less certain.

Less certain, that is, until one speaks with COO Ermacora, who says, “We have to deliver successfully on this because Bell Canada's business strategy depends on that success.”

Ermacora is no stranger to complex projects with tight timelines. She led a project for Bell Canada two years ago that delivered a modernized call center with 8000 customer service representatives just as Y2K threatened to wreak havoc on the world. It was the largest North American migration of an OS2 platform to a Windows NT operating system, she says.

For that project, Ermacora led a team of 550 employees, including the billing and customer care group from CGI, a system integrator 43% owned by Bell Canada that also will provide system integration for Certen.

Une chose à la fois
(first things first)

Presented with two choices — to begin migrating large volumes of residential users with relatively simple accounts or move its more complex but coveted customers first — Certen chose the latter. It has already begun migrating Bell Canada's top 300 customers to a new automated system based on Ensemble. These are the customers of Bell Nexxia served to date by manual processes.

Eight months into the project, Certen has completed the first phase by putting the Ensemble platform in place. Ermacora says phase II is on schedule for a September delivery.

“Yes, it has taken us a bit more time and has cost us more, but we have been able to prove and achieve business benefits earlier. And proving that it works is the cornerstone for building additional [features],” Ermacora says.

It will take more than the $200 million both partners have invested in the company to complete the project, but Ermacora says it will be worth it. “After spending roughly the $380 million to carry out all the expectations and commitments, there [will be] lower operational costs to produce each bill. Then we can deliver new price plans and be much more responsive to the marketing department.”

The next step, even as hundreds of other initiatives are taking place behind the scenes, is to begin moving Bell Mobility's corporate customers off Bell Canada's homegrown platform of legacy systems. And by May 2002, Certen expects to have retired the Kenan system currently used in Nexxia and the homegrown billing systems of Bell Mobility.

One of those other initiatives is a “modernization of the rating and guiding” system. Begun in June, Certen expects to deliver an Ensemble-based engine by the third quarter next year. “It is the last important milestone before being able to integrate usage-based billing into the convergent billing platform,” Ermacora says.

As Certen moves through its modernization process, maintaining proper customer care will be a priority. (Because customer service reps have no patron saint, they may want to seek inspiration from Lydwina of Schiedam, the patron saint of prolonged suffering and, yes, ice skating.)

“Obviously, we understand billing without customer care is nothing,” Ermacora says. “There will be major integration work to stay closely aligned on the front and back end with the different organizations of Bell Canada.”

The customer care piece of Bell Canada's wireline business will not transition to Certen; however, Certen will feed billing data to it.

Certen will work with the IT department at Bell Canada as well as Amdocs and system integrator CGI to develop an integration broker to tie the billing and customer care systems to other OSS platforms such as order management and service assurance, which stay behind with their respective companies.

Laisser un héritage
(Leaving behind a legacy)

As all this modernization occurs, legacy billing systems will be retired, but — like many of us at age 65 — must continue to work. Hubley still plans to use the old boxes to collect and sort call detail records and send them to the new system. “There is no cheaper way to do that. [Their] capital was written off long ago, and they are extremely reliable. So unless you have to change something, you just shut out the lights and let them go.”

What the legacy systems can't do is support the future. “They work great, but they are not capable of providing convergent billing in any way, shape or form,” Hubley says. “We're not investing in a new system because it's cheaper; we're investing in new customer capabilities.”

Those capabilities include bundled products and services across all lines of business, single bills for local, long-distance, wireless and Internet services and electronic bill payment — capabilities that have long been touted by the industry but seldom implemented.

The eyes of the billing world will be on Certen as Hubley leads his new company on what analysts agree is a very optimistic schedule. With the discipline, flexibility and commitment Hubley demands, his team could pull it off without so much as a visit to the intersection of Notre-Dame and Saint Sulpice. But it's nice to know it's there.