April 26, 1999
Simplifying Order Management for Telecom Firm
Primus says intranet application lets it handle more orders, with fewer errors
By Kathleen Murphy
Primus Telecommunications Inc., McLean, Va., turned a labor-intensive order management system into an automated procedure on its intranet that is saving bundles for the company.
Primus provides domestic and international long distance voice, data, and private network services to more than 200,000 small and midsize businesses. Its complex process for adding new accounts involved multiple operational support systems and data sources. The system was making it difficult to keep up with a rapidly changing and competitive market.
Larry Whitehead, director of MIS in the United States for Primus, said that before the intranet changed everything, orders were processed slowly on a variety of separate platforms. Orders include information such as names, phone numbers, cities, ZIP codes, primary language, and the product the customer is ordering. The international consumer marketing group had to keep track of orders in 14 different languages.
"The heart of our business centers around our ability to get an order in-house and processed very rapidly," Whitehead said. "There's a direct relationship between the time in which we can get that order and our ability to retain them as a customer." SpaceWorks, Rockville, Md., a supplier of e-commerce software, used its OrderManager application to help solve Whitehead's problems. Primus nicknamed the resulting application Primus Order Entry Management System (POEMS), and it has become the most heavily used feature of the intranet, Whitehead said.
SpaceWorks deployed a seven-person team to integrate its OrderManager application into Primus' existing enterprise environment, and completed the project within four months. The initial cost was $250,000, Whitehead said.
Originally Primus was simply looking to manage order entry. But the OrderManager software allowed Primus to automate the way it operates with sales representatives, customer service reps, and third-party multilevel marketing organizations, and SpaceWorks delivered an application that supported the automation of buy-side and sell-side processes.
Elizabeth Sara, SpaceWorks co-founder and vice president of marketing, said OrderManager provides corporations with a modular, flexible means to automate business transactions up or down their supply chain. The modular features were key to Primus' choosing SpaceWorks, Whitehead said, because OrderManager was easily adapted for the telecommunications industry.
Primus has grown mainly through merger and acquisition, so scalability was also a key factor. "Because the product is so flexible, and because it is intranet-based, it's allowed us to migrate the platform to wherever we've acquired additional companies," Whitehead said. "The part that turned out to be most challenging was just getting our own in-house process stable long enough to get the platform deployed." Whitehead, as project manager, assembled a team of colleagues to help nail down the in-house work processes, integrate the project with different departments, and swing the odds for success in his favor. His five-person in-house team included representatives from MIS, sales, provisioning, an anti-fraud unit, and a few senior executives who served as advisors. A critical component was good commitment from senior executives that "this will be a platform the company will stay with," Whitehead said.
"You need a good team on your side of the fence," Whitehead said. "We had a very good in-house team. Second, you have to understand your market and be prepared to modify the platform very rapidly according to your market." SpaceWorks' Sara said that understanding a project's goals is half the battle. SpaceWorks' consulting arm worked with Primus on formulating the project's direction.
"Our goals were a few," Whitehead said. "One was to improve quality of service to our customers. Secondly, we wanted to have a platform in-house that would be a repository for our data, where we could go by and check the status of any order at any time. A third matter was to make sure we had an automated process by which we could collect an order and give it to our billing platform." Primus' final goal was to automate orders to feed the fulfillment process without errors.
About 400 employees use the OrderManager application, including the international consumer marketing group, commercial sales, a call center in Tampa, Fla., and a customer service group based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
"POEMS is the hottest thing on our intranet right now, because our sales folks found they could get out in the field with this product, sit in front of one of our potential clients, and tell them exactly where our telecommunications network is," Whitehead said.
Whitehead estimates the system has saved Primus $500,000 [bold added by me] annually by increasing productivity. Average order-provisioning time was cut in half, from two weeks to one week, and customer service has doubled the number of orders handled monthly without adding more staff. POEMS also helps keep orders from being lost or misfiled.
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