Monday, February 14. 2011A Definitive 'Mile Stone' In Exetel's DevelopmentJohn Linton We will advise approximately 50% of our customers today that we are changing their billing date - from the 1st of each month to the 28th of each month. We will accomplish this by only billing that 50% of our customers for 27/31 of their March monthly costs on March 1st and then billing them again on 28th April for the period 28th April to 27th May. We have only had one billing day since we commenced business over seven years ago but despite upgrading the hardware used to run the billing processes many times and rewriting the code more than a few times the number of customers and the number of services has kept increasing and the billing run has now passed 10 hours to complete and is heading for 12 hours within a few months. So the business has defined itself as no longer a start up by the number of billing transactions that have to be processed each month. The danger of the growth in billing transactions required to be processed was that if the bill run failed to complete, for whatever reason when it had reached 12 hours it couldn't be re-run on that day and that would eventually cause some major reconciliation head aches. So, probably the last, or almost the last one, of the 'givens' that were part of the 'immutables' in our operation of Exetel will disappear in April. All companies change over time if they continue to grow and this change will truly mark the change from Exetel as a 'start up' company to the next phase of corporate life - whatever that may be. I'm not sure what sort of company Exetel has become since it began but I understand it is very different to what it initially was although I can't actually see where that has happened - beyond the obvious growth in people working both here and now Sri Lanka. From my perspective Exetel has retained its 'small company ethos' where its founders still work at the jobs they had on January 1st 2004 and still retain the desire and put in the hours to create a 'perfect company' - while being as far away from that goal as we were on day one. If anything the hours per week have increased in responding directly to customer complaints and suggestions via the fora, complaint email address and suggestion address. I know more customers by name now than I did seven years ago and 'talk' to more customers every day now than I have done in the past. So in those respects Exetel has not changed at all....the 'gap' between dealing with the first line employee and the directors of the company is still one email answered almost immediately. In terms of how Exetel relates to the various marketplaces in which it operates there have been many changes. The major change is that virtually none/none of the very small companies that existed when Exetel began business exist today and a huge number of start up companies that began business over the past seven years have also ceased to exist. Of the not so small companies that existed in 2004 a handful still exist and have grown much bigger either by acquisition or by sound management and, at least if you listen to their own self promotion, are significant influences in today's residential marketplaces - though in truth there is only one major influence. The unchanging fact though is that Testra Retail again dominates the residential marketplaces in ways that it didn't in January 2004 and the likelihood of that pernicious dominance controlling those marketplaces more completely than at any previous time is much greater....if Telstra's attitudes today existed in January 2004 then Exetel would never have started it's residential ADSL business. So a new week has begun with several important decisions to be made - having already made the decision to split the billing dates. Perhaps it's just the general toughness of the current market places and therefore competitive actions that occur more frequently but I can't remember a time, ever, in my business career where so many difficult decisions have had to be made in such a relatively short space of time. I wonder whether other communications companies of Exetel's size have the same or similar issues? I suppose we can be grateful that we don't have to 'plan' to fire 60 of our middle and senior management from our head office (a difficult thing for us to do as our 'head office' only has 11 people in it including me). Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011 Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
How are you choosing the 50%? By age? By Service Type?
I don't know for sure, but if there's a particular service type that has the highest processing overhead (like processing a capped mobile's CDRs for example) perhaps move those first? Cheers, Mike Comment (1)
We are moving the customers who have a single service to minimise the disruption.
Comments (3)
Just some thoughts of things that might catch Exetel out. Because you are not only moving the billing day, but adjusting the monthly boundary, there are two situations I can think of where Exetel might want to be careful.
Firstly, those on PAYG or with excess fees. Because any excess data charged expires at the end of the month, the shortening of march March causes data to expire early. Or in other words, there are less days to use the data. Secondly, you might want to be careful of people on contract. If someone on contract has their billing day moved, then a few days before their contract is up they will be billed. Because Exetel doesn't pro-rata on termination, their minimum payments for the contract period will actually be more than advertised. Comments (2)
I can see a situation where many people will be "caught out" by the payment date being moved ahead by a few days... whether it be because they don't receive the advice, or because they forgot, or because there are automatic payments or transfers in place which are scheduled for the 1st of the month.
Surely it would have been a more useful strategy to delay the 2nd payment run for a few days rather than moving it forward. That way, all of the payments and transfers that normally would be in place on the 1st of the month, would still occur and the funds would still be available, even if customers didn't receive the notice or forgot about it. Exetel doesn't seem to have any issues when the 1st of the month occurs on a weekend or holiday, and on those occasions, the payment run is delayed in any case. Comments (2)
You could well be right.
Within Exetel every person consulted had reasons why any date proposed would result in problems. By putting a notice on the March Invoice, by debiting less for the services than the previous month, by sending four email notices of change, by posting on the Exetel forum I would have thought enough notice to customers is being given. By extending the 'forgiveness' screen re-connect period from 3 days to 7 days in March/April I would have thought that no 'financial' scenario would result in loss of service. I am often wrong of course in underestimating the precariousness of people's financial situations. Comments (2)
We have done that more than once a year for seven years (as I thought I said).
It is not sensibly cost effective to buy a new level of hardware for a once a month process. There are a multitude of other reasons for splitting the month end dates which I did not bother to mention because the primary reason is the length of the bill run. Comments (3)
Another option is to use a second machine, normally test environment computer perhaps. Each computer is responsible for a fair split of the processing and then processing time can be greatly reduced without buying new hardware.
Changing billing cycles has all sorts of ramifications, probably best avoided if possible. Comments (2)
Absolutely. Make one machine bill even account numbers and the other odd numbers.
The other option is to make new customers bill on their anniversary date. Natural attrition will reduce that big run down over a year or so. Comments (2)
Blindly throwing more computing resources at a problem is not always the right way to solve a problem.
In terms of a billing run, there can be limitations imposed by external parties - every Australian bank has a maximum throughput they can sustain with regard to Capture operations and various limits with regard to their Direct Entry processing. The idea of sacrificing one's test environment to speed up production is really quite worrying, and a path to disaster in many unfortunate circumstances. Comment (1)
Hardly blindly throwing resources. From my limited knowledge of the Exetel systems, serially processing transactions that have little to no interdependence seems a little backwards. Horizontally scaling seems like the obvious path to pursue. That said, Exetel didn't get to where they are now with some brilliant minds working on these problems. I trust there are other issues at play.
As for the banking throughput issue, that is easily solved by using functions provided by a gateway interface. But you already know that... Comments (2)
It needn't sacrifice much, the test system could be fully operational for testing and a virtual machine added for extra processing. Extra VMs could be added to other 'idle' machines in much the same manner as needed. Then it just becomes a configuration item to see which machine processes which billing. There are many ways to better utilize machines to spread processing load.
Comments (2)
While there have clearly been advantages for Exetel to have one billing date, those advantages are clearly now overrun by the disadvantages of a huge billing run.
From a resources perspective, it would be clearly better to even out billing and using the billing machine more evenly. However billing on the connection date is a significant change for Exetel. I suspect at present they have the benefit of not needing to worry about billing problems for the latter half of a month. Having someone constantly handling billing problems would be inefficient use of a person (which is much more expensive). No doubt the two batch solution in close proximity is the balance of many issues. Comments (2)
It is simply the first step in planning for five billing days a month - 1,8,15,21,28.
This will be done, if at all, over a long period of time. Comments (3)
|
Calendar
QuicksearchArchivesCategoriesBlog AdministrationExternal PHP Application |