When a legendary media and entertainment company launched a new streaming service, it faced several challenges: how to best support management of significant growth expectations, how to best connect with global payment providers across different countries, how to best connect to various partner echo systems, and how to best support the subscription service from subscriber sign-ups through to revenue allocation on a global level.
Seeking answers, this media company looked to SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management with the SAP Convergent Mediation solution by DigitalRoute for a single, pre-integrated solution with the business scalability to support growth for the company’s new and existing streaming services.
After an impressive project launch and only seven months to market – aided by the tremendous flexibility, rich out-of-the-box functionality, and configuration-driven deployment of SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management and SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute – this company was reaping a host of benefits, starting with automated revenue management via eliminating ad hoc tools and manual processes, improved back-end revenue management, and faster financial reporting. Benefits also included auditability and traceability across the organization and elimination of revenue loss and incorrect reporting, all while improving overall margins. Finally, the company emerged with a greatly increased ability to expand across different regions and global financial institutions.
While this media company’s scale is impressive, the challenges it faced and the opportunities it seized are not unique. In this digital era, data volume is increasing exponentially and organizations of every size and stripe are adapting to the new reality.
Businesses that shift from a product to a subscription model and from indirect to direct sales will encounter a dramatic increase in the number of consumer transactions they must track – from the thousands into the hundreds of millions, even billions, of transactions. In addition to producing incredible data volume, these transactions can occur on multiple commerce platforms, requiring that data from various sources be integrated into one accounting system.
All businesses face increasingly complex billing and mediation requirements, and there are myriad solutions available. But as businesses grow, they can end up with a complex, unwieldy ecosystem of billing and mediation software that leads to its own set of challenges, from the inability of legacy platforms to keep pace with usage data growth to labor-intensive, error-prone manual processes to the technical limitations inherent in disparate systems.
SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, in conjunction with SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute, helps eliminate the inefficiencies inherent in sprawling, fragmented commerce, sales, and billing landscapes and helps ensure streamlined, agile, error-free billing and revenue management.
SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management is a comprehensive, modular solution for the high-volume consumption businesses typical in the media and entertainment space. Designed to optimize the business life cycle processes of design, sales, delivery, and billing, SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management enables various flexible consumption models and uses highly automated and optimized processes to help tackle huge volumes of data with limited manual intervention while maintaining full financial transparency.
First developed for the telecommunications industry, where complex data management and demanding performance capabilities are a must, SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management now helps diverse organizations all over the world, including many of the major media streaming companies, to monetize their digital journeys as they create innovative new offerings, seamlessly blending the content acquired and created with subscription and usage-based services.
SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute collects data from any stream or source and can provide unified control and visibility of revenue stream processes across an enterprise. Together with SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, it can enable SAP customers to:
- Process large volumes of raw data quickly and accurately, eliminating cumbersome manual processes and errors
- Bring multiple data sources together to simplify, secure, and automate data processing for billing and revenue management.
Automated, secure, accurate billing processes are a must for today’s media companies. Learn more about how SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management and SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute can help your organization thrive in today’s landscape and be ready to grow into whatever tomorrow brings.
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Richard Whittington is global head of Media at SAP.