Folks,
I was out at training Mon – Wed of this week or I’d have sent these notes out earlier, my apologies.
The two attachments are white-board notes, and I’m summarizing it below. Despite light attendance because of Good Friday, we had enough of the right people to take on the matter of TNSC-style direct billing. Attending: Quentin Alexander, Mark Wiklund, Chris Gresham, Kelly Yu, Jana Tarasenko, Rob Smyser
Topic: Direct billing via TSNC, do we want to pursue it?
Conclusion: while direct billing is not a universal solution to all of CSS’ billing requirements, it is an important part of our toolkit for internal billing. Having a _database_ to hold product lists and pending transactions is a big win. Action Items:
· Jana, Chris, Mark, Rob to meet 4/9 at 10 to prototype their respective contents of a product list that might be offered in such a system. From the notes:
1.) Who might find it useful?
a. MDS – monthly billing of annual SLA contracts, if they choose to use it
b. DDM / MDS – one-time billing of On-Call SLAs
c. SW Repair – would work for HW/SW (two-GL) cases, as well as SW alone
d. VSLS – could use for certain kinds of licenses now charged through Internal Provider Reqs
e. Training – could use for individual class attendances
2.) Why is it useful?
a. Don’t have to queue up pending JV line items yourself; the system takes care of the $ transfer later without your involvement.
b. Many agents can book charges independently, rather relying on merging transactions into a single file moderated by one individual.
c. If you do it “in the moment” you are more likely to get it right and catch cost object errors, say, when you still have the customer’s attention.
d. Lightens the load on Quentin; allows us to do what Eileen Kenney now does for OIS.
3.) Process Questions
a. Will handle reversing of charges;
b. will catch expired or invalid cost objects;
c. will provide tie-backs to the transactional system (i.e, you can put an RT ticket # ina field that ends up in the DTR; custom text is available.
4.) Technical Questions and Other Issues
a. Loose dependencies on ICE-9 (where the itemized list of billables now lives);
b. Windows-only and Oracle-8-only required for the current Oracle Forms instance of the do-the-billing screens. Can live with Oracle-8 or isolate the billing screens in a vmware instance.
c. There are cases (in SW/HW Repair tickets) where the charge distributes across more than one _IS&T_ cost object. The billing system does not now easily accommodate multiple cost objects on our side in a single transaction.
d. This is a funds-transfer only solution, not receipt/invoice – there is nothing pretty to print here and send to the client.
e. The future of ICE-9 and the whole TNSC billing system is not known and has large dependencies on OIS. Reluctant to expend substantial time on a cross-platform web-based solution without more planning and support from across IS&T.
f. Jana says that CSS transactions can be filtered away from the TNSC report that Sean Nicholson gets, using some appropriate filter such as the “Type” code of our products. Should be no problem.
5.) Next Steps
a. Plan a structure of products and rates for the Service Center and for Training, as examples to test the concept.
b. Plan to try out a few prototype transactions to see how it flies.
c. Convene a small subgroup (Mark, Chris, Rob, Jana) to work on some of a.) and b.) on Friday 4/9 and report out.
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Rob Smyser, Sr Business Analyst
MIT Information Services & Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave #n42-240t, Cambridge MA 02139
617.253.1358 w
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