Despite having millions of consumers and various service offerings across different markets and segments, one of the largest Northern European service providers has transformed their invoicing process from rather manual to a fully automated process utilizing ServiceNow. 

The high number of customers and the many different service offerings, such as capacity service, end user service, and help desk services, makes the invoicing process complex and time-consuming. Previously, the service managers handled the invoicing data manually in Excel, which was inefficient and resulted in lost revenue, as some customers were not being invoiced for all the services and capacity they were using. Therefore, the company decided to automate the entire invoicing process, increasing efficiency, reducing the number of manual tasks, and eliminating the risk of human errors.

To build a fully automated invoicing process, several steps were required. First, the Service Manager’s needed to have a clear overview of which services and how much capacity their different customers were using, which required an up-to-date CMDB. Then the data from the CMDB should be transformed into an invoice automatically sent to customers. Therefore, to help build this process, the Northern European Service Provider entered a cooperation with The Cloud People.

Increased data quality with an up-to-date CMDB 

The CMBD is the foundation for the invoicing process and should contain all the relevant data. Due to the complex service offering, this task was divided into several phases. The first phase was identifying and registering all the servers and all the virtual capacity related to these servers in the CMDB. The next phase was identifying and registering all the services the company offered to their end-users, such as laptops and workstations. The third  phase ensured the system automatically generated the correct Windows licenses for customers. This was especially important due to the complexity of Microsoft licenses. In combination, these phases resulted in an up to date CMDB and increased data quality. Today, all this data is automatically registered and updated in the CMDB, which means the company knows precisely how much capacity and which services all their different customers are using at any given time.

Custom invoicing application in ServiceNow

To automatically build the invoicing process, The Cloud People developed a custom application in ServiceNow – based on App Engine, that uses the data from the CMDB to automatically generate invoices for the company’s customers.  Today, all the invoices are generated automatically based on the data from the CMDB. The only thing the Service Managers need to do is to approve them.

The increased data quality and automated invoicing process has eliminated the risk of human errors and increased revenue and resulted in higher customer satisfaction among the company’s customers and consumers.