Modernizing the Telecom Invoice Generation Process

US-based global telecom solutions expert providing customer experience and call center technology to mid-sized and large businesses. The company sells cloud-based and on-premises software, contact center applications, and omnichannel customer engagement solutions.

• Legacy Bottlenecks: The existing billing process took over 8 hours daily, delaying financial reporting and customer invoicing.
• Data Quality Issues: High volumes of raw data from multiple sources required rigorous auditing and validation to ensure billing accuracy.
• Complex Tax Integration: The need to calculate precise taxation across various jurisdictions required seamless integration with SureTax.
• Scale Requirements: The system needed to handle over 30 million records from 30,000+ files daily without performance degradation.

We delivered a solution that leverages the distributed computing power of Apache Spark running on Amazon EMR to create a unified information base for the client’s billing system.
 

• Dual-Stage Aggregation:
  • Daily Aggregation: Python scripts ingest CSV data into Amazon S3, where Spark applications perform validation, derivation, and enrichment before storing data in optimized Parquet format.
  • Monthly Aggregation: A secondary Spark process executes complex rating and taxation logic, saving finalized billed data into the production database.
• Data Audit Model: Implemented a custom audit layer within the ETL process to ensure data integrity and fix existing system errors during transit.
• Cloud-Native Scalability: Utilized Amazon EMR to dynamically scale compute resources, allowing the system to handle sudden spikes in call volume and data traffic.

• High-Performance Storage: Transitioned to Parquet format to enable faster data retrieval and significantly reduce storage costs.
• Automated Rating & Taxation: Integrated SureTax via APIs to automate tax-inclusive invoice generation.
• Standardized Formatting: Provided a unified data format across the mediation layer, improving compatibility with downstream financial systems.
• Fault-Tolerant Processing: Fixed long-standing issues in the legacy data flow through rigorous ETL testing and error-handling logic.

• 97% Faster Daily Billing: Reduced processing time from 8 hours to 14 minutes for 30 million records.
• Ultra-Fast Monthly Runs: Final monthly billing cycles now complete in just 2.2 minutes.
• 90% Process Efficiency: Dramatically improved the speed and accuracy of the entire invoice generation workflow.
• Improved Profit Margins: Achieved through significant cost savings in infrastructure, time, and manual effort.
• 25% Faster Data Retrieval: Standardized billing formats enabled rapid analysis and reporting for stakeholders.