Business Stream: Pricing Application
Client Ambition
With the opening of the non-domestic water market in Scotland to competition on 1st April, 2008, Business Stream required a new ability to convert existing customers onto water and waste water supply agreements, better securing long term revenue.
Pre-market opening, business customer pricing was developed with a manual set of business rules. With the water market opening to competition, Business Stream required a more robust and scalable pricing solution to allow key account managers and the telesales team to simultaneously access and be able to consistently quote for water supply across Scotland, without differentiating against customers in similar classifications – one of their license conditions.
Enter VISION
VISION were selected to build a new web based pricing application, that would incorporate both existing and new business rules, to accurately and consistently price water supply to non-domestic customers across Scotland.
VISION worked closely with Business Stream's own pricing experts, to understand and document the complex rules involved in customer classification and accurately pricing water contracts. This detailed analysis phase proved vital in identifying gaps in existing pricing business rules and ensuring new rules were defined to allow the development of a robust pricing engine.
As development work began on the pricing engine, further analysis workshops with the target business users identified the key application requirements:
- Secure web access for internal and external users
- Intuitive user interface, with logical and clear screen flow
- Presentation of customer usage summaries
- Selection of applicable discount options, with associated savings
- Generation of completed customer contract documents as PDFs
- Ability to update the pricing engine's data, using extracts from the central billing system
- Flexibility to configure the pricing and discount values, and customise contract document templates.
In preparation for the User Acceptance Testing phase of the project, VISION took responsibility for deploying the application to the nominated hosting environment, and ensuring the necessary security measures were in place to prevent unauthorised access to the application.
Following successful completion of UAT, VISION helped Business Stream prepare for mobilisation by producing comprehensive user guides to support the application, and by providing training sessions, tailored for the different user roles across the business.
In order to ensure the system continues to provide the level of service demanded by the business, VISION were also selected by Business Stream to provide application support and maintenance under a separate contract.
Value Delivered
As competition in the new water market develops, the ability of Business Stream to manage the process of easily and accurately producing customer contracts, will be ever more critical.
The pricing application delivered by VISION positions Business Stream to meet the competitive pricing challenge with an efficient and consistent pricing solution that ensures the best possible deal for the customer.
Business Stream received an accessible and easy to use application that provides:
- The ability to consistently price quotations for all types of Business Stream customer using a rich web-based solution.
- The ability for users to:
- Search for existing customers
- View the customer's usage history
- Create a tailored quotation, taking into account the customer's commitment to meet key contractual obligations
- Generate quotation documents with a choice of appendices for printing and offline storage.
- The ability for administrators to:
- Manage customer and billing data
- Maintain various elements of the pricing engine
- Tailor the format and content of the quotation documents
- Manage user accounts.
Client satisfaction
Ensuring that we maintain operational integrity is critical to our business moving forward.We want to ensure that the best deal is available to our customers and that we adhere to customer classifications rule. VISION worked with us to understand our business requirements and helped to deliver a cost effective solution.
—Tony McHardy, Head of Sales and Marketing, Business Stream