World Wide Technology

Company

World Wide Technology (WWT) is a technology solution provider with more than $11 billion in annual revenue that provides digital strategy, innovative technology and supply chain solutions to large public and private organizations around the globe. WWT employs more than 5,000 people and operates over 2 million square feet of warehousing, distribution and integration space in more than 20 facilities throughout the world. WWT has invested in next-generation platforms, such as RecVue Agile Monetization Platform (RAMP360), to complete their digital transformation journey to a services-based solution provider adaptable to all digital business models available today.

Challenge

The team at WWT recognized in the ongoing shift to a digital economy, a more scalable, modern, cloud-based internal solution was needed to handle any digital business model necessary. The days of managing order-to-cash processes through a customized ERP solution just to handle traditional business models would no longer cut it. Partners including Equinix, Cisco and more were shifting to digital business models, a significant challenge for WWT under the legacy solution. Even in its makeshift form, ERP solutions, as WWT learned, are ill equipped to handle the dynamic pricing scenarios and prolific transaction volumes the company faced. In addition, long internal processing delays had become a no-longer-acceptable norm. WWT team members had to manually review contract documents to determine the appropriate prices and other terms to apply to the billable transactions since there was no contract management system. WWT relies on partners to deliver and manage some of their services, but partner payments were also delayed because of the manual processes. Lastly, WWT could not forecast revenue nor could the firm determine the profitability of any contracts. Ultimately, all of these issues had a negative impact on cash flow, customer satisfaction, and partner relationships.

Solutions

Following a quite thorough evaluation process, WWT implemented RAMP360 to be that much-needed scalable and agile solution through which the company now operationalizes all different types of recurring revenue business models. The monetization platform delivers the capabilities for WWT to run today’s new age digital business models and has become the hub through which the company automates contracts, collects and mediates usage data, deploys agile billing, and calculates payments to their partners. With RecVue’s data mediation capabilities, WWT eliminated manual processes to collect and transform customer usage data to prepare it for billing. WWT now captures all contract terms, pricing, and amendments in the RecVue platform, so once billable transactions are available, the billing engine automatically calculates accurate invoice amounts based on the active terms and conditions of each contract. Since RecVue delivers all monetization capabilities on a single platform, WWT also now has visibility into all usage transactions and billing information, so they can analyze usage patterns and forecast revenue with a high degree of accuracy in a timely manner. Now, customer invoices are on time, as are payments to the partners that WWT relies on to deliver their services.

Benefits

Hitting the gas pedal toward a true digital transformation with the capability to accommodate any digital business model is clearly paying dividends. In the 3+ years since implementing RAMP360, revenue under management at WWT has grown by 20%. Additionally, WWT has overcome its challenges with billing and invoices and has realized great results. The billing team now produces invoices within 1-3 days, rather than 120 days, which is a 94% improvement. Now processing billable transactions and invoices requires only one person, eliminating the dependence on five additional people from other teams. Since the people in other teams, such as sales, customer service, and accounts receivable, are no longer involved in the billing process, they can focus on growing the business. The existing billing team can also now scale to that growth, rather than hiring at least five more people in the billing department alone to achieve this efficiency. Partner relationships have improved since they are paid on time. Finally, with RecVue, WWT now conducts month-to-month forecasting and understands the profitability of all contracts they are managing.

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