Effectively Connect ServiceNow and SAP with Subscription Billing and Service Contract Billing Automation?

 Many prominent service providers have chosen ServiceNow as their backbone system for service management and SAP as their ERP/financial system.

There is an easy way to to tie ServiceNow and SAP with subscription billing and service contract billing automation.

What is the state of manual billing processes?

Service providers often miss up to 10% of revenue before applying intelligent service billing automation.

The reasons for leaked revenue can be categorized into two main sources:

1. There are often no systems for gathering and pricing usage based service data, and therefore these processes are handled more or less manually.

Costs, chargebacks and billing data is often gathered in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or some homegrown databases and priced manually. There are often gaps in the managing contractual pricing, pricing and billing exceptions, consolidating and validating usage/activity data and in managing required changes.

2. Most operational service delivery systems cannot apply time series over usage status and usage rates, which are needed for subscription and usage-based service billing.

Current billing data handling processes are mostly based on a monthly snapshot taken at a certain date from ServiceNow and other operational service delivery systems instead of recording accurate usage data throughout the billing cycle. Service contracts can often command higher revenue billing than unautomated systems and processes can provide for.

Manual billing requires excess labor and causes slow cash flow.

Is the need for intelligent billing automation growing?

The need for subscription and usage-based billing automation is growing as more and more cloud, capacity, availability and outcome based service business models are introduced.

The growing number of devices and systems in the Internet of Things means more recurring service business models.

Accelerated transactional volume calls for scalability, which necessitates intelligent subscription billing and service contract billing automation.

Why are manual service billing processes still the norm?

How is it possible that manual service billing processes are still the norm when there is high revenue leakage, unreliable manual labor processes, and a problem that is growing each day?

1. Until lately, development has concentrated on the technological and operational methods of providing services more easily and more efficiently.
2. Secondly, service providers are putting up with manual usage data gathering and pricing because there is no knowledge of alternatives, which wouldn’t necessarily require massive process or infrastructure changes.

Why is best in class important?  

ServiceNow and SAP systems are high performers in their own areas of expertise. There is no need to replace them to gain the benefits of intelligent billing automation. Service providers can, instead, complement ServiceNow and SAP!

Good Sign has deep experience in complex service provider business environments and has stepped in to replace manual billing processes and manual chargeback execution.

Good Sign for Service Providers

This picture shows how Good Sign’s solution applies intelligent billing automation in a ServiceNow and SAP based architecture.

Good Sign’s solution gathers, mediates, consolidates and validates usage data sequence from ServiceNow and other operational service delivery system.

Good Sign’s solution applies intelligent rules. The rules engine makes Good Sign extremely powerful in mediating billing data and executing various specific pricing rules for however many service products. It also creates the flexibility needed to allow for demanding customer contract specific pricing models.

Once the data is processed with intelligent automation, Good Sign’s solutions feeds SAP with billing data, chargebacks and cost allocations. ServiceNow can also be updated with invoicing information.

Future proof of concept for new service business models

Good Sign’s capability in introducing extensively flexible rule based pricing enables fast and innovative launches of new XaaS service business models. New pricing models can be based on flexible and changing configurations and enable usage-, capacity-, transaction-, event- and value based elements.

Good Sign Solutions is enabling service providers a clear move “from manual complexity into digitalized flexibility”.

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