Case Study: Billing Software Managed Services

About ARO

ARO are a Technology Performance Partner.  They wrap world-class cloud technologies in first-class service to provide sustainable competitive advantages to their clients.  Impressively, ARO look after: 

• 8,000 customers 
• 100,000 mobiles 
• 60,000 seats of hosted telecoms 
• Connectivity for 4,500 companies  
• 600,000 end users with Cyber Security. 

As a valued partner of Giacom Billing since 2010, both businesses have seen many changes, acquisitions and mergers, however, the heart of both have remained the same. The people within ARO and Giacom Billing have maintained a strong and mutually beneficial relationship by working together on many successful projects, supporting changing requirements due to business growth. 

The Challenge

ARO have been on a strategic journey of expansion through a series of targeted acquisitions.  This level of growth in a short space of time left their IT infrastructure struggling to cope and consequently the Giacom Billing software unable to operate at optimal levels.  

Users were regularly experiencing performance problems, negatively impacting their ability to perform their day-to-day activities.  Their bill run was becoming unmanageable with significant delays creeping into their bill run processes and timelines. 

The Solution

ARO and Giacom Billing embarked on a collaborative professional service project tackling system performance and storage capacity.   

The project began with a consultation with ARO.  This was an opportunity to get ARO’s perspective on where they felt they had challenges and understand the details about the IT and billing issues they regularly faced. 

Following this, a thorough performance analysis was conducted across ARO’s system.  Profilers were run across key business processes at different times during the working day and at different times of the month.  This helped to isolate bottlenecks and highlight problem areas.   

Following an extensive deep dive into the day-to-day performance, Giacom Billing presented ARO’s IT team with best practice advice and gave them processes and tools to keep the system running at peak performance.  Wherever possible, automated processes were implemented to keep on top of problem areas and regularly archive data. 

Ongoing support was given to ARO’s IT team to ensure their billing system continued to operate at maximum optimisation and they saw tangible results. 

The Outcome

This project was a positive story for ARO to tell their users, demonstrating their concerns had been proactively addressed.  At the end of the process, the users saw the benefits materialise in a faster, more efficient system enabling them to complete their day-to-day activities unhindered.   

Throughout the process, both ARO and Giacom agreed that they enjoyed working so closely and collaboratively, and they appreciated the commitment levels shown by both businesses.   

Due to the significant benefits ARO has gained from this project and the successful implementation, this will now be replicated with other self-managed billing partners. 

As a long-standing partner of Giacom Billing, we value the close collaboration we’ve developed, and this partnership was pivotal to the project’s success.  Giacom’s performance enhancements and best practice guidance combined with our expert team yielded a positive impact on our operations.

Will Harris, Chief Data Officer