Organizations that look to efficiently manage their revenue lifecycle are often found grappling with the complexity of extracting information from the transactional data in their Pricing and Billing Systems. In the absence of a robust reporting and analytical system in place, it becomes extremely difficult to integrate data from different sources, unearth insights, or create real-time reports.
Let us take a look at the common pricing and billing challenges that impact companies, and how RIA helps in meeting them with speed, ease, and financial viability.
The reporting challenges that plague companies
For companies in the financial, healthcare, utilities, and public sectors, the problems that impact everyday decision-making due to the lack of centralized reporting are many:
- Timely availability of accurate data: When it comes to having access to the right data at the right time and the right place, the absence of timely and accurate data hampers the decision-making process. Since different people in the organization have different information needs, ensuring every decision-maker has easy access to updated information becomes a challenge.
- High turnaround time: Organizations that use traditional reporting mechanisms often find themselves struggling with driving maximum value from their reports. Any changes that have to be made to existing reports or data structures require them to spend large efforts in manually making those changes. This not only adds to the turnaround time but also increases the likelihood of human errors.
- Close monitoring of clients and products: In today’s world, product usage and client behaviors are constantly changing. What clients want today or how they use the product today is very different from what they wanted yesterday or what they want tomorrow. Yet, organizations often struggle with close monitoring of clients and products, which makes it difficult for them to take corrective actions in time, if needed.
- Reporting needs to run near-real-time: The dynamic nature of billing workflows adds to the decision-making challenge. Maintaining flexible, intelligent, and robust workflows are central to pricing and billing. But given how quickly organizational data changes, organizations find it challenging to run reporting in near-real-time, multiple times a day for the most accurate results.
- Reporting data is not fully hosted on ORMB: Although many organizations use ORMB to simplify and streamline their Pricing and Billing processes, reporting data is not fully hosted on the system. This brings about the challenge of integrating reporting with multiple sources – which is extremely time-consuming. Also, the fact that ORMB is an OLTP database (400+ tables), running reporting on its normalized database is inefficient.
How RIA Reporting and Data Analytics overcomes these challenges
RIA’s proprietary Reporting & Data Analytics solution is designed to normalize the complicated data structures in your existing pricing and billing system.
Offering standard views, persona-based reports, and insights for key business functions, the solution can easily be plugged into your existing data lake and offers the ability to integrate data from other sources like Salesforce, CRM system, etc. What’s more, the solution also delivers unmatched e2e reporting, insights, and monitoring.
Here’s are some of the top features of RIA Reporting and Data Analytics and how it helps in overcoming everyday Pricing and Billing challenges:
- 30+ out-of-the-box reports and dashboards: The efficiency of any reporting tool lies in its ability to generate reports as well as customize them according to the needs of different teams or departments. RIA Reporting and Data Analytics solution comes with multiple out-of-the-box reports and dashboards built on multiple reporting tools such as Qlik Sense, BI Publisher, and Cognos. These ready to use reports can be implemented right from day one and cover most of the generic functions and data points that users in an organization use.
- Pre-built subject areas: When it comes to effective reporting, modern organizations often have varied requirements depending on the different needs of different departments. RIA Reporting and Data Analytics solution offers a range of pre-built subject areas across accounts, contract, membership, policy, customer, price, and division – making it easy for organizations to build accurate reports based on their unique needs.
- Near-real-time reporting: RIA Reporting and Data Analytics’ persona-based reports are what modern organizations need to achieve their near-real-time reporting needs. Since the solution continuously sources data from ORMB using an in-built mini batch mechanism, organizations can be sure to always have their hands on the latest and most updated reports for effective decision-making.
- Self-service options: Given the different reporting needs of different users, teams, departments, and business units, the RIA Reporting and Data Analytics solution paves the way for seamless self-service reporting. The architecture allows for new characteristic type addition, removal, and changes as well as third-party data amalgamation – without any code changes – enabling users to generate business function-wise standard dashboards comprising trends, variances, etc. targeting specific areas. The solution’s easily adaptable business models make it extremely straightforward to generate point-in-time reports in a jiffy.
- Drill across features: In the modern business landscape, it is common for reports to span multiple subject areas; for instance, finance-related reports might require data from sales, purchasing, accounting, and invoicing departments. RIA’s Data Mart is built on a flexible architecture with common keys to drill across multiple tables. It allows users to add additional measures and attributes to existing Fact and Dimension Tables and eliminate the need for joining multiple fact tables – thus improving reporting accuracy and speed.
For organizations struggling with traditional pricing and billing approaches, RIA Reporting and Data Analytics sets the foundation of a faster, more accurate reporting mechanism. By integrating data from different sources, it generates a single source of truth, improving traceability while reducing customization cost and time.
