As part of its telecoms transformation project, BPCE Infogerance & Technologies (BPCE-IT), the economic interest group dedicated to Groupe BPCE’s IT production, entrusted Lucernys with a cost control mission in 2020. The aim is to consolidate technical and pricing guidelines to simplify invoice control;

BPCE-IT’s Telecom Expense Management (TEM) contract with Lucernys comes to an end in 2020; Initiated as part of a project to transform telecom access points (deployment of a 50 WAN solution), the collaboration with BPCE-IT arose from the growing need to better control telecom expenses for Groupe BPCE, whose branch network extends over several thousand sites; “Lucernys’ mission took place in two stages, explains Philippe Pierre, in charge of telecom infrastructure deployment on BPCE-IT’s retail network, with an initial phase of awareness-raising and analysis of our billing, which quickly led us to integrate a TEM tool”. The second phase of the project, which began in 2022 and will be completed by the end of 2023, involves implementing the MyTem 360 tool developed by Lucernys and its partner Saaswedo, and then rolling it out to the branch network; Today, the project is entering the production phase, at the end of a process that will have lasted around three years;

Centralized invoicing

The context ? By the end of 2020, BPCE-IT had initiated a major telecom transformation project for all the Group’s retail sites, leading to a review of the organization and an overhaul of contracts; This major change has had its own effect on telecom billing, with the centralization of invoices previously sent to customers by operators, directly at BPCE-IT. It is up to the entity to reprocess the analysis and ensure payment of these invoices. “The whole point of this operation was to re-invoice access services with a share of deployment costs, explains Philippe Pierre. This made it possible to smooth out all costs into a single unit of work and invoice it to our plants as a fixed price over the project period”. Une étape qui a nécessité le concours de la direction financière, jusqu’alors peu sollicitée dans la gestion des assets télécoms. “From then on, our role consisted of controlling invoicing, taking into account, with operational management, the negotiated rates, explains Frédéric Salagnac, accountant at BPCE-IT, and to check, for example, that sites were not being billed incorrectly, or that there were no billing duplicates”.

The technical project, involving 6,000 physical sites, represented a volume of over 70,000 billing lines to be processed, mainly from Orange but also from SFR, Bouygues and Linkt. “It’s important to understand that we were in the midst of a transformation project, with a legacy billing model and pricing structure; continues Philippe PierreBut as we had to integrate other types of access -Internet, L TE-, there was a risk of billing overlap between old and new telecom accesses”.

Sharing the vision

All these changes obviously required us to achieve a level of reliability recognized and accepted by all those involved in the project, including operational management; “Even if it may seem insignificant, the tour de force is to have succeeded in developing processes and responsibilities in terms of control”, explains Philippe Pierre. Today, on the finance side, invoices are validated automatically; The only control is the anomaly report produced by Lucernys; Responsibilities and control steps are now shared between DFI and the technical team, whose roles have been clearly defined. “Each was willing to try to understand the other’s world”, he continues.

Lucernys’ involvement is now limited to half-yearly project follow-up meetings, and bimonthly invoice integration meetings; Ongoing adaptation work on technical and pricing reference systems is carried out throughout the year to ensure the reliability of the reports provided by Lucernys. “The Lucernys team was very involved in the construction of the project, the editing of reports, the integration of requested modifications, explains Frédéric Salagnac. We had points every two weeks; Today, the follow-up is obviously lighter”. A mission which, according to BPCE-IT, has achieved its objectives, even if the team hopes to go even further in exploiting billing data to optimize both costs and the quality of the services implemented;