There’s a growing concern that AT&T’s State Contracts will suffer if those that support it fall under AT&T’s chopping block. For those not familiar with it, AT&T does multi-year contracts with US states to consolidate government-related entities’ billing under special rates. This includes government facilities, schools, infrastructure and things like that. It adds up to around $60 million a month. And it’s held together by around 25 uniquely skilled people in 4 groups that do it on a shoestring budget.
The first thing to understand is that what AT&T calls the "Billing Consolidator"… the system that pulls all the different types of State-Contract billing together and mashes it into single cohesive bill… is actually 2 unique systems running incompatible databases that can’t directly talk to each other.
CIS is the first system. It collects invoice data from many various billing systems and pulls it all together into a common structure. A lot of the time, the other billing systems are so incompatible that invoices must actually be manually manipulated or even typed in by hand.
The second system is called ACUS. That team helps with getting the invoices into CIS that need manual intervention and makes sure source bills are paid to shore up the books. They also check daily for billing integrity issues. While some issues happen all the time and must be continually fixed, each month is different and unique with its problems. ACUS has 2 groups… the Billing team that coordinates with CIS to make sure billing is accurate, and the Invoicing team that stitches everything together into an acceptable end-customer invoice.
In addition to CIS and ACUS, there’s also the LCM/Support teams. They’re the ones that coordinate with Customer Care people handling calls from customers. They arrange credits. They also work with the ACUS team to set up the hierarchy so billing data goes onto the right invoices. The LCM/Support staff can consist of as little as 1 person per contract that really knows the ins & outs of the people they support. These people are valuable and do a lot with a little.
These 4 groups (CIS, ACUS Billing, ACUS Invoicing and LCM/Support) hold the State Contracts together. Adding all the CIS & ACUS groups together, you have maybe 25 core people that do most of the work and actually understand how it all functions after years of experience that can’t really be documented.
Now, I’m not naïve. I know everyone can be replaced. But I also know from experience that the CIS/ACUS people can’t be replaced easily or quickly. It takes about 6 months just to learn the standard monthly duties adequately. And about a year to learn how to handle all the weird and unique problems that pop up. And even longer than that to gain the instinct to proactively find issues BEFORE it impacts customers.
None of the teams I’ve mentioned are listed as “safe” from outsourcing. If they’re let go without (at least) six months to train people with the bare minimum to handle known issues, the future of AT&T State Contracts is probably in jeopardy.