Solutions
TCSF offers an "Outsourcing ERP," for both consumers and vendors of outsourcing services. It is based on Internet Enterprise Java technology (J2EE) and supports the leading relational database software. We deploy on all Java platforms, with commercial, or open-source, application and database technology, offering tremendous savings to clients in software license fees as a result. Our modules work independently, or in conjunction with each other.
Whether you are a consumer or vendor of outsourcing services, the governance of those relationships is tremendously complex. Governance groups, on both sides of the relationship, face enormous challenges. The challenges include; massively complex contracts, global engagements, complex system integration challenges, multi-vendor and multi-client environments, corporate hierarchy integration (floating hierarchies), mapping raw transactions to negotiated service and pricing models, calculating "Additional Resource Charges/Reduced Resource Credits (ARCs/RRCs) and Service Level Penalties", using country specific pricing rates and taxation rules, distributing costs across the detailed corporate hierarchy, identifying invoice errors (9% standard error rate in industry) and so on.
Believe it or not, most governance groups, including those who work for vendors of outsourcing services, do not have automated solutions to help them. Most of the work is done with labor intensive spreadsheets. There are a handful of ISPs addressing this market space, but their offerings are almost exclusively focused on managing Service Level Agreements. TCSF is unique in offering a complete governance solution, for both vendors and consumers, especially with respect to financial management. Our solution modules are listed and briefly described below.
If you are interested in discussing our solutions in more detail please call or send us an email to request more information.
Client Management
The Client Management module manages client related information. Clients can estabish multiple, heirarchical views of their organizations, such as geographical or financial heirachies. It manages the relationships between the heirarchies. Client information, client contact, accounts, bill to, and ship to information, is maintained. In addition, allocation models for global, regional and custom allocation, are maintained. Allocation models allow outsourcing charges to be allocated across geographical territories, lines of business, departments, accounts or other heirarchies. Hierarchies, and allocations, can be updated, before any bill processing occurs. The client hierarchy is also used, to define and control client user access to data, on the billing and transactional data warehouse.
Product and Service Registry
The Product and Service Registry, manages and unifies a standard set of managed services, and products, offered by an outsourcing vendor or desired by an outsourcing consumer. The catalogue, or registry, contains product/service descriptions, visual representations of products, one-time/recurring indicators, inclusions, exclusions, assumptions, warranties, SLA performance criteria, client prices, vendor costs, client specific billing rules, pricing level (/global/region/country,) client contracted baselines, allocation indicators, country specific taxation rules and tax rates, etc.. In addition, the registry can be used to generate responses to client proposals for outsourced, managed services.
Demand Management
The Demand Management, or Order/Quoting module, is designed to process new orders for managed services. Orders contain assets, services and products, that the associated client organization(s)/departments have authorized for payment. The order contains both one-time charges and recurring charges. The Order also operates in quote mode, or active order modes. Versions of the quotes/orders are maintained, for audit purposes and delivery control. It allows clients to model the cost of future managed service requirements, without committing to the order. The order provides information to clients, finance/billing, asset management, project teams, procurement, and service providers. It controls when billing can be enabled for items on the orders, as delivery is completed. It provides asset management, with requests for new/existing assets and resources. It provides business and capacity planning, with details on upcoming product and services, so that these can be incorporated into the 18-month rolling plan. Reconciliation is provided between items on the order, and invoiced items, to ensure appropriate billing occurs and revenue leakage is avoided.
Invoicing and Financial Reporting
The invoicing or billing module provides a mechanism to process order line items and billable items from external ASCII feeds/files. This is a standard repeatable process that takes raw billing data and applies taxes, rates, exchange rates, allocates client charges and assigns these across the client hierarchical dimensions (financial/geographic). Vendors like to see their receivables paid in an orderly fashion and consumers of outsourcing services want to know exactly what they are paying for, sometimes in very great detail. Transparency and detail are beneficial to both sides. Monthly time frames to issue invoices are usually narrow. The billing engine will take thousands of transactions and process them in minutes or hours rather than days, if not weeks, using non-automated methods. In addition to rapid fire processing, the accuracy of the invoices expands, eliminating revenue leakage and other errors, while the number of staff required to produce the invoices and financial reports, shrinks. Processed data is summarized at various consumer and vendor, group by points, so that views of the data are already pre-populated when they are accessed through the billing portal. In addition to bill processing, the module also allows for allocation of transactions to various vendor revenue accounts. A number of financial reports are produced, that provide detail when tracking issues related to any billed items.
Data Center Asset Management
The Data Center Asset Management module maintains detailed, data center asset information, for clients and vendors. It also keeps financial, lease and warranty information on the asset. Integrated with the order-taking module, the asset module identifies the free pool of resources, so that redeployment on other client initiatives is achieved. When new assets are required the asset management module initiates purchasing requests through the purchasing module. Detailed logs of maintenance, and maintenance schedules, are also managed.
Transactional Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence
The Transactional Data warehouse is used to store and report detailed billing data. Each month billing data is loaded into the data warehouse directly from the billing module, or through external data feeds provided by external vendors. Data is summarized according to the client’s hierarchical requirements. Client and vendor staff have access to summarized and detailed billing data/invoices, through the internet billing portal. Client, portal, data access security, is maintained by assigning users to various levels of the client hierarchy. Vendor staff access data, in the portal, depending on the managed services they provide. The portal provides the facility to view summarized and detailed information, regarding any managed services, or products, purchased by the client, across all vendors. The data warehouse is integrated to various other modules, such as the Issues Log, and the Business Planning Module. Any detailed billing items, can be directly linked to the billing issues log, through the data warehouse. Historical data, in the data warehouse, is used to create the plan in the business planning module. This module includes a function to release the monthly transactions, to clients, via an ASCII feed, that can be used to integrate with the Client AP/GL, and the vendor’s AR/GL.
Billing Issues Log
The billing issues log allows users to record issues they have with any billing related items, using the internet portal. The module is an add-on, to either the bill processing portal, or the transactional data warehouse. Links on the portal are maintained between the billed items, and the issues log. This keeps the issues organized and focused. An audit trail of issues is maintained in the system. Vendors and customers can respond to issues related to items billed. Notifications of billing issues, are sent via email. The module can also escalate issues if they are not responded to in an appropriate period of time.
Business Planning
Business Planning is used to project an 18 month rolling plan. Data from the bill processing portal, or the data warehouse, is used to determine growth, establish the start point of the plan, and then project the values for each client’s departments. In addition to using current billed items, to generate the plan, considerations are made from future orders, and decommission activities. Once the initial projections are complete, the client and vendor have the opportunity to make changes to the plan. Client planning reports, and vendor capacity planning reports, are produced.
Revenue Recognition
The revenue recognition module, uses data from billing, the transactional data warehouse, and the asset management systems, to perform a financial analysis, and cost profit statement, against various vendors, and client portfolios. Any lags, waste, infrastructure costs, and resource inefficiencies, can be entered, to perform the final analysis. Financial performance reports are produced.
