The customer is a cabinet-level U.S. federal civilian agency with over 100,000 employees operating out of 14,000 offices worldwide. If all public and private companies were compared equally, it would be the sixth largest employer in the country. Its telecom estate spanned 10,954 unique billing accounts, 692 vendors and 168,347 invoices received annually, along with 66,000 mobile lines across all wireless carriers. The agency has been a MetTel customer since 2012.

The agency manually keyed thousands of telecom bills each month from hundreds of vendors into a legacy, on-premise computing system. The process was labor-intensive and complicated, the system lacked sufficient functionality, and data imports were inconsistent. In total the agency handled 10,954 unique billing accounts, 692 vendors and 168,347 invoices a year across a complex hierarchy of cost centers.

The high human error rate in invoice processing had real costs. Erroneous fees and vendor charges were costing nearly $2 million annually. The agency often experienced billing errors and delinquencies and had no insight into unusual spending patterns or incorrect charges, such as paying for services at closed locations.

The agency needed an automated, transparent vendor management system to correct these shortcomings and save taxpayer dollars. The added controls would also have a major impact on its ability to comply with the government mandate for agencies to reduce telecommunications costs.

MetTel deployed its Bruin communication management platform to provide transparency into the agency's entire telecommunications system. The onboarding protocol included custom billing account set-up, the establishment of user hierarchies with related permissions, automated data import and full vendor integration. After a four-month implementation, 80 percent of the agency's accounts had migrated to Bruin, and the complete migration was accomplished within one year.

On the billing side, MetTel consolidated all telecom-related invoices from hundreds of vendors into a single view of all inventory and assets. Bruin provides complete transparency into locations and charges, billing errors, delinquencies, suspicious charges and unusual spending patterns. Ordering runs from a custom product catalog, with a hierarchy of locations, groups and roles that gives different users different views of the catalog.

The platform also covers help desk and trouble ticketing, with a dedicated customer service contact to answer questions; standard and custom reporting on variances, usage, spend and trouble ticket activity; an inventory and asset database controlled by user ID, password and role, from a high-level inventory view down to line level; mobile management for changing plans, upgrading devices or suspending unused services; and usage and cost analysis so the agency can proactively monitor all of its equipment and usage.

• Nearly $8 million in savings within the first two years
• 7,678 paper bills converted to digital format
• 19,500 service accounts consolidated
• 66,000 mobile lines classified across all wireless carriers
• 80 percent of accounts migrated to Bruin after a four-month implementation; complete migration within one year
• Clean inventory of all services and assets, role-based permissions and all data accessible online