Embarq’s 12-Month Billing Transformation

Hand-in-hand with its spin-off from Sprint, Embarq Corp. was faced with a monumental task: separating its local billing systems from its parent and standing up its own long-distance billing operations under a strict 12-month deadline.

To find out how the project went, Billing & OSS World spoke with one of the project's team leaders, Julie Sehrt, service delivery manager for Embarq. What follows in an edited transcript of that conversation. To hear more about this case study, join Sehrt at the Billing & OSS World 2009 Conference & Expo, April 14-16, in Las Vegas, where she will share the "Realities of Billing Transformation" in a session of the same name.

Please explain the scope of the project.

Embarq was originally the local billing leg basically of Sprint. In 2005 when Sprint and Nextel joined, one piece of that was also the separation of the local division of Sprint [the following year]. [Embarq] became a completely separate company. As of September of 2006, that officially got blessed and we started the process of separating the company in all capacities. We separated everything from HR to call centers to IT infrastructure to all of the systems that were supported by Sprint. In some cases, we took what was there because it was strictly dedicated to local billing. In other cases, we had to — within two year’s time from a contractual perspective — determine how we were going to support it ourselves and stand up the new platform and convert it out of Sprint. Long-distance was one of those areas that we had to figure out how we were going to support on our own, develop that strategy and ultimately build it from scratch in order to be able to continue with that service.

Because the decisions, of course, for standing up a new company are massive, we didn’t get to the point where we were able to actually finalize what we are going to do for LD and what needed to be done to do it until that last 12 months of that separation period. So, we had 12 months to stand up an entire LD billing platform, integrate it with our existing legacy applications, develop all the customer care processes and convert our roughly 3.5 million customers out of the Sprint systems and into this new platform. ... We had from May of '07 to May of '08 to complete the LD portion. That was hard date. We could not move that May of '08 date.

Why not?

From a transition services agreement between Embarq and Sprint-Nextel, we had to complete it as part of that separation agreement from a legal perspective. We had to be two separate companies within two years without either moving to a commercial services agreement or having penalties associated with not getting off of those transition agreements.

As part of our separation, we retained the long-distance products that our local customers had. The way the long-distance was supported by Sprint was they basically did all of our order-to-cash for long-distance. When we were one company, it was done in Sprint’s systems. Until we stood up our own, they managed the customer care calls, the billing, order entry — those pieces were in their systems. With this effort, we moved all of that so that we could be self-sufficient. So we were handling all the order entry and care, the marketing and sales, so all of those pieces had to be stood up from scratch.