Verizon Business Continues Push for eBonding and EDI

Highly coveted commercial enterprise customers want more than just network upgrades. They want consistency and visibility among all their products and services. That has been difficult because of a lack of investment in the enterprise space, which has led to considerable swivel-chair management and wading through prodigious amounts of paper to make decisions about remittances, mark-ups and discounts.

Verizon Business wants to change all of that through an aggressive campaign to revolutionize enterprise customer care. It might be on to something. As of the third quarter last year, the company realized a 28 percent increase in customer sales for strategic services.

As the demand for IP, Ethernet and managed services grows, so too is the expectation by enterprises for automation and self care. The traditional focus on “network” will no longer be enough.

In the case of Verizon Business, its network currently consists of 485,000 route miles serving more than 2,700 cities in 150 countries. “The network is crucial, but we know it won’t be enough going forward,” according to Mark Chodoronek, executive director of customer enablement product marketing for Verizon Business.

Enterprises want to do eBonding, as their IT managers are now comfortable using the XML industry standards for creating interfaces between internal CRM and BSS to their communications providers’ provisioning systems. Whether eBonding through Web portals, or direct machine-to-machine links via EDI, enterprise customers want to execute and follow repair orders, circuit testing and inventory changes in an automated, real-time fashion.

To push the momentum along, Verizon Business last month announced a new application for automating management of inventory, usage, taxation and fraud. With BillManager 4.0, the goal is sophisticated network management that will foster a new age of enterprise customer self-care in managing ordering and repairs.

How It Works

By downloading the BillManager 4.0 application from the Verizon Business Customer Center (VBCC) via an FTP site, enterprise customers connect directly to Verizon Business’ ordering and repair environments. Through the online portal, BillManager becomes a subset tool within the billing or invoice tabs of the portal. Customers can then download billing detail and push it to BillManager4.0, where they access dozens of standard reports and configurations. Customers have the flexibility within BillManager to switch between eBonding and EDI within different order and fault management capabilities. In cases involving enormous amounts of data, EDI is usually preferred.

After the BillManager 4.0 application is downloaded to desktops or local SQL servers, customers go to the VBCC to download their raw billing data. The software overlays the data and gives customers the ability to monitor changes and disconnects, as well as inventory across all products and services.

There are three distinct views through which data is viewed: “performance,” which looks at how products and services are doing in adhering to SLAs; “fault management,” where fault alarms are monitored and maintenance conducted; and “configuration management,” where customers change network components and view inventory and pending orders.