Ending the Nightmare of Invoice Management with Multiple Vendors for a Nationwide Company

The Client

After nearly a century in business, this family-owned company serves approximately 1 million customers in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

The Predicament

Over the course of business, the client had built relationships with more than twenty vendors providing analog voice services, which made it difficult to manage a high volume of invoices. They turned to Avista for an audit of their analog services.

The Solution

With this client, Avista was not their only trusted advisor. We were hired for a particular engagement to solve a specific problem. Similar to clients who engage with our Navigator services, this client needed a custom solution, but they also needed a custom process to implement that solution, making them the perfect client for our Vantage advisory services.

Once we reviewed the audit, we discovered they had approximately 20 different carriers representing their 2,000 analog lines across the country. We designed a strategic solution to reduce the 20 carriers to five.

Any time a company switches vendors, it generates intense and time-consuming migration work. This migration project overlapped with the company’s peak sales season, which meant the team did not have time to migrate and follow up with all of the orders and review all of the bills. This timing led to an ongoing custom engagement, wherein we continue to manage the migration to the new platform, track all orders, and engage in bill reviews. In addition to the lack of time, their team also did not have extensive industry knowledge about the possible solutions. Their IT team’s expertise centers around their own business, and, by hiring us to go to work for them, they got to get back to that business.

While the initial issue was being resolved, the CIO approached us with concerns about a troubling pain point related to a financially significant billing issue caused by serious communication gaps between this company and a vendor. We went on to address that obstacle by collaborating with the director of IT and his team, including voice and data network engineers and billing analysts.

The Benefits of Avista’s Vantage Services

Clients who engage in our Vantage services receive a custom-designed solution and a tailored process. Through this process, we became an extension of this company’s team. The client naturally knows their business and their industry better than anyone, but they knew they needed to partner with someone just as knowledgeable and just as successful in the area of technology solutions. A partner who could design custom solutions for them as issues are identified and also provide an entirely custom engagement to manage those solutions.