Improving Revenue Projections and the Customer Experience with Oracle Subscription Management
Businesses today need a solution that can easily track the usage of after-sales services and repairs they provide to customers under contract. They also need a solution that provides flexibility when they are offering product warranties based on the agreement established during quoting. The industrial equipment manufacturing sector, for example, has unique requirements for offering different warranties to customers. Some customers need options for warranties based on actual shipping dates, while others may want them based on the installation or customer acceptance date. The Inspirage and Oracle subscription management solution helps businesses satisfy those requirements.
Managing replacement warranties
Businesses need to track the specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) associated with each Service Request they receive. Whenever a Service Request is created for a defective part, the Service Representative must verify and ensure that the defective parts, the SLAs, and the price discount are covered in an active contract. Service Representatives also need flexibility in choosing the level of service, such as urgent, regular, part exchange, repair, or a combination of these. Inspirage’s solution helps customers manage replacement warranties in such cases. (The Inspirage solution also caters to customers who do not have contracts and helps customers manage replacement warranties if needed.)
You may also need a consolidated contract to cover multiple assets which have numerous components and sub-assemblies. Because each sub-assembly has a specific price based on the type of service, you may also need an option to provide separate invoices for each asset — or a consolidated invoice for all assets — in each billing cycle. You also have specific requirements for contract renewals with markup pricing. And your customers need reminder notifications for the expiration of warranties and for renewing contracts.
In all these cases, Inspirage leverages Oracle’s Subscription Management solution to optimize your contract lifecycle and keep your stakeholders informed.
Disparate systems are out, better data is in
In the past, most businesses had disparate systems to manage supply chain operations and reverse logistics. This required manual updates and maintenance for contracts and warranties. The billing process was manual and laborious, and the finance team did not have any visibility. They performed reconciliation manually, which required multiple reports from different systems. The price matrix for different services was maintained outside those systems.
Incomplete or inaccurate data not only destroy the customer experience by creating customer service nightmares and renewal issues, but it can also lead to erroneous revenue recognition and financial reporting. As a result, all the assets in each contract need to be entered at the covered levels, and the correct coverage for the contract needs to be associated with the correct product. Oracle provides different options for invoicing rules (advanced/arrears billing), billing frequency (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.), billing start and end date, and accounting rules. Different combinations can be created based on your actual requirement.
With usage-based billing, for example, meters can be associated with specific assets, or you can opt to acquire usage data from third-party systems. A report can then be created based on service requests created during specific billing periods. Businesses often go through multiple iterations of the testing cycle to find out what works best for their requirements. This allows you to identify gaps in data and processes and helps in course correction.
Inspirage helps optimize a subscription-based business solution for clients by deploying our process expertise, product knowledge, and unique Oracle insights to integrate Service Requests, Installed Base, Subscription Management, and Billing.
Best practices to keep in mind for Subscription Management
While implementing Subscription Management Cloud, it is important to consider your operating model, enterprise structure, and volume of business transactions. This helps to understand the complexities of the business solution and can help in planning the data migration strategy.
A well-planned data migration strategy helps businesses scale up and allows flexibility to roll out newer subscription deals for end customers as a part of a customer retention strategy. Data migration in Subscription Management is a multi-step process. The multiple FBDI (File Based Data Import) worksheets require unique reference numbers/designators to connect the contract number to the product numbers; these product numbers are linked to covered assets data.
In general, standard operating procedures should be defined for the processes. Manual processes should be defined only for exceptional cases.
The Inspirage solution for Oracle Subscription Management integrates self-service customer portal applications with B2B Service Cloud, Installed Base Cloud, Field Service Cloud, and Financials Cloud. Inspirage’s integration provides an end-to-end comprehensive solution for the contracts and warranty management needs of the industrial equipment manufacturing and high-tech industries, among others.
Inspirage can help
As the Integrated Supply Chain Specialists, with recognition from Gartner, IDC, and winners of Oracle’s 2021 Game Changer Award for SCM Service Delivery Partner of the Year, Inspirage is uniquely qualified to be your success partner. Whether you are upgrading your on-prem system or have decided to move to the cloud where continuous improvement is built-in, our team is prepared to guide you on your transformational journey.
