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AAPT plans massive billing & provisioning upgrade

IT Industry - Strategy

AAPT says it will spend around $80 million on a massive project centred around BearingPoint's Infonova BSS/OSS to streamline and automate all its service ordering and provisioning systems.

CEO, John Stretch, told iTWire that this was the estimated spend over two and half years starting from March 2005 and included payment to BearingPoint and other suppliers, costs for internal resources, change management and staff training. Another key supplier is Talgentra which will provide its customer revenue management system.

If AAPT achieves its stated goals for the upgrade it could  give the company a significant edge in terms of speed to market with new products and services and reduced costs.  All carriers are moving in this direction but few  are close to realising the goals which AAPT hopes to achieve by year end.

Stretch said there were three key performance criteria that Infonova had to be able to meet. "They had to demonstrate a reduction in product development cycles from 10-12 months to two weeks by manipulating objects rather than cutting code.

"Second we have 44 interfaces into various internal and external systems. Thirty some of those are manual and they had to prove they could automate all 44.  They failed on that one. Two will remain manual. One will remain as a web-based portal. For the other we are relying on one of our suppliers to come to the party with an XML interface. We think they will, but  we can't confirm that.

"Third, we have to be able to design and develop products that are 100 percent self configurable by our agents, our channel partners or the customers themselves should a customer choose to do so."

AAPT is hoping to achieve this transformation by the end of this year in release 1.2 of the system, Stretch said.  In the meantime the first release, scheduled to go live this month should enable AAPT to take a real-time electronic feed  from Telstra of  local call billing information for Telstra services resold by AAPT.

Currently this information is often about a month behind billing information for AAPT's own services, such as long distance and international  which creates frequent customer service problems