Case Study

Amentra Automates Collections Process at Major Telecom Company

Service:
Content Management System, Portal Development, Business Process Management
Industry:
Telecom
Engagement:
Full Lifecycle Implementation
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Improved ROI by Streamlining Collections Process

Before Amentra

A Fortune 100 telecommunications company's wholesale division leases analog telephone lines to thousands of telecom companies throughout the United States. The company's collections processes were entirely manual and managed through spreadsheets and oral and written communications. These collections activities included collecting overdue payments, creating and managing payment plans and sending noncompliant customers into default. These processes were extremely labor-intensive, time-consuming and inefficient.

After Amentra

  • Automated collections system to provide immediate ROI by streamlining the collections process.
  • Collections Portal provides customized user interface and distinct functionality to different level of management and user groups.
  • Enterprise Content Management repository maintains audit trail of client communication for collections system.
  • Common business logic is encapsulated into generic portlets to provide reusable web components for future applications.

Evolution of business process

Automating the collection process allows the collections group to lower personnel costs, as well as collect overdue payments or take legal action earlier in the overall collections process. The business risk in continuing to follow the existing processes was minimized by providing a content management repository for information related to the collections activity and by making quality management reporting available. Security is obtained by providing role based access to portlets needed by multiple tiers of management who provide approvals and monitor the entire collections process.

Applied technologies and expertise

Amentra utilized WebLogic Portal, Documentum DB2 and J2EE technologies to successfully architect a robust, scalable component-based portal application for managing the telecom company's entire collections process. Custom business and integration tiers were designed using J2EE best practices and industry standard design patterns. WebLogic Portal was utilized to deliver a component-based presentation layer to expose role-based application features. Amentra utilized their signature mentoring model to quickly bring the client's developers up to speed in numerous new technologies in order to deliver a complex, robust and flexible solution in a very aggressive time frame.

Amentra configured distinct user profiles within WebLogic Portal for each user group to provide access only to the portlets (and therefore the functionality) that was required by each group. All user authentication and security was enforced via Netegrity Siteminder, which maintained a single company-wide registry of user accounts across all corporate enterprise web applications. Documentum Access Control Lists (ACLs) were utilized to provide security at the document level.

The creation of custom document types allowed Amentra to create, store, and retrieve legal correspondence from the Documentum repository. Following Amentra's content management methodology, the depth of these custom doctypes was kept shallow to improve performance and reduce complexity. The application exceeded performance requirements even during peak business hours by utilizing the single-sign on capabilities of WebLogic Portal and pooled Documentum sessions.

Technologies used

  • J2EE
  • BEA WebLogic Portal
  • Netegrity Siteminder
  • Documentum
  • DB2
  • JExcel