Order-To-Cash and Revenue Management is an extremely broad business process that starts from contract initiation for your services to Closing the books for external reporting and auditing. Finding a solution is not easy for such a large and complex business process. Start with these common queries:
- What are the needs of your business now and what will be the needs in the future as you grow?
- If you are a larger customer, then you question whether you will be able to adapt to a solution for your B2C Vs.B2B needs
- Do you go with the big-name players or should you trust the new products/solutions on the horizon?
Here are the top 12 concern areas, related to the Order-To-Cash and Revenue Management products/solutions that you might be able to relate toor should be able to use when assessing other products/solutions..
- Legacy product – If yours is a legacy product, do you find it harder to certify or add new functionality to, manage new service or geography rollouts, to successfully complete your M&A activity?
- On premise Vs Cloud – Is the solution an on-premises deployment, resulting in Data Centre Management and overall high Total-Cost-Of-Ownership?
- Expensive 3rd party solution – Is the solution too pricey for your business with a long list of EULA, 3rd party licenses and more?
- Costly integrations – Does the solution require extensive integrations among a range of applications resulting in an extremely high Time-To-Market for launching new services?
- Limited functionality – Is subscription billing enough for you. It may have been when you started. Is it still true as your business has grown? Do you feel it is harder to adapt to your B2B needs? Does it sit well with your complex business requirements? Do you have to compromise significantly or invest additionally on meeting your requirements?
- Scalability – Does the solution require an exceptionally large footprint and does it make it extremely harder to scale.?
- Technology stack – Is the solution architected, designed for the next gen, is it truly a cloud architecture, does it provide the right micro services architecture, the right level of de-coupling and optimal scalability. Does the technology stack require you to write hundreds and thousands of lines of code to meet your needs and increased Total-Cost-Of-Ownership?
- Security – Does the current solution provide the right level of Security or are you concerned about the security of the new Cloud solution?
- Data Insights – Does the solution provide you and your customers the right level of engagement. Does it cover your flexible reporting needs, does it provide customer, revenue and operational insights with dashboards? Are your customers self-engaged with timely Correspondence and Self-care capabilities?
- Flexibility – Does the current solution provide you with the right level of flexibility to adapt to your business needs?
- Revenue Management – Does the solution bridge the gap with all the pricing needs on one hand and Revenue management and Revenue accounting needs on the other hand?
- Operations Management – Does the solution require an extensive Operations management team to run various jobs each day, month, quarter. Does it provide the right level of UI/UIX capabilities or are you forced to work around those needs?
The technology landscape is changing amazingly fast. Competition is razor sharp if not now it is only until someone comes to disrupt. The need of the hour is to focus on two factors: ‘Time-To-Market’ and ‘Total-Cost-Of-Ownership’. If you keep those two parameters as the guiding principles in addressing your concerns, more than likely you will come out on the right side of the equation with the right production/solution. This in turn will provide you with much improved Operating Margins and confidence.
Any product/solution that you choose should enable you to do what you do best “Grow the business”. You should be comfortably able to let the product/solution manage the ‘Run the business’ side of your house.