Vodafone Group Plc is the world's leading mobile telecommunications company, providing a wide range of services including voice and data communications. Vodafone Fiji works closely with the Vodafone Group to provide support, solutions and services that are tailored for every customer’s request.

Challenge

The telecommunications industry is a highly competitive and fast moving sector. To remain at the forefront of this market, exceptional customer service must be delivered. Critical to exceptional service is rapid and accurate processing of customer accounts and bills. With customer service the fundamental element of Vodafone Fiji’s operations, it is crucial that business processes are streamlined and customers are provided with top level customer service.

Vodafone Fiji recently experienced rapid growth, taking on 238,000 new customers, in 12 months. While this was great news for the business, it meant account managers and teams were handling at least 5,000 invoices per day, using manual processes of entering 15 digit serial numbers into the system to invoice each stock item.

For customers, this meant delays with their invoices as the team and its systems struggled to cope with the volume, often taking more than an hour to process just 100 invoices. The flow on effect began to impact morale as staff worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to complete invoices. Human error also became a factor as staff found themselves managing an increasing volume of customer complaints about inaccurate bills and invoices.

To address these problems, Vodafone Fiji needed an ERP solution that was capable of scaling up the invoicing process to cope with large volumes of invoices while at the same time, automatically scanning and tracking serial numbers.

Solution

Vodafone Fiji, in partnership with Datec (Fiji) Ltd, worked together to customise its existing Accpac ERP system. The customisation included improvements to the invoicing process and enhancements to the serial number tracking capabilities of the product. “Our strong partnership with Datec and Sage provided us with the ability to customise the software to suit our specific invoicing needs. We were able to shorten the invoicing process and also the task of scanning serial numbers, which has significantly improved productivity” said Divik Deo at Vodafone.

“We found the ERP solution was easy to customise, and had the ability for features to be extended it meet Vodafone Fiji’s market’s specific requirements. Based on our 19 years of experience with Sage products in the Fiji market, we understand every business has different needs” said Umesh Nand at Datec.

Results

Vodafone Fiji and Datec’s customised solution was able to reduce the time spent invoicing by 1 1/2 hours. The task of scanning the serial numbers was completed in 5 minutes, 94% faster than traditional processes. For Vodafone Fiji, this meant staff could now focus on providing customers with better quality customer service and support, rather than spending their time on back-end processes such as invoicing.

 “Sage strives to establish strong relationships with stakeholders such as Vodafone Fiji and Datec, to enable a two-way partnership where customers can guide and influence our product development, to ensure our products grow with their business”, said John Tran, Product Manager for Sage Business Solutions.

“Vodafone Fiji is a company that strives for excellence and shares our passion for innovation, which clearly cascades to their customers and business partners. This partnership is a great synergy and we are pleased to have been able to work together to ensure our developments are meaningful and valuable enhancements to the business software.

“Thanks to the data and feedback Vodafone Fiji and Datec have provided, we expect future versions of Sage Accpac will draw on these enhancements to the benefit of other customers” , added Tran.