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DigitalRoute vs. homegrown solutions for usage billing

Many companies will attempt to solve for usage-based billing with a homegrown solution, or a solution built by system integrators. While these solutions can solve the problem they were built for, they can also require excessive maintenance and a dedicated IT team to keep them running.

DigitalRoute Usage Engine, in contrast, is specifically designed to provide our customers with the information needed to monetize consumption, accurately bill for service usage, create new offerings, and aid revenue assurance, with the data generated from when services are used. This gives your business the flexibility to quickly launch new services and adapt to customer demand.

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Usage billing challenges

The advantages of selecting a commercially available solution to replace a home-built solution for the switch to usage-based revenues, can be found in the following areas:

Custom
development

Implementation
timeline

Continuous
improvement

Quality
assurance

Knowledge
transfer

Problem
resolution

Why do companies build their own solution for usage billing?

A homegrown solution is often seen as the easiest, fastest and most low-cost option to get started with usage-based billing.

  • This type of solution has the advantage of often being already in place, specifically tailored to the company’s needs and perceived as future-proof.
  • It is often built on open source or hyperscaler APIs, which enables developers to engage with the open-source community.
  • If you have a skilled team of developers, it can seem like a logical decision to pass this project over to them.

What goes wrong with homegrown solutions?

Homegrown systems typically demand development work for any change, limiting business agility and making it difficult to iterate quickly with new business models.

  • As your business grows, homegrown solutions often cannot cope with growing data volumes and data complexity. Accurately managing revenue-critical usage data for customers with multiple services and agreements against a growing portfolio of services fast becomes a headache. Worse, if poorly managed, it can lead to lost or inaccurately processed data, lost revenue, and increased billing disputes.
  • Since homegrown solutions are organically built, frequently without standardization, they can increase your level of risk of failed data management compliance. Though they are easier to implement in the beginning, homegrown solutions will increase your technical debt over time.
  • With the technology landscape evolving fast, keeping systems updated and functional is a major undertaking – especially if you are relying on a few select, expert employees who have been tasked with other more valuable projects.

Why companies choose DigitalRoute Usage Engine

DigitalRoute Usage Engine is purpose-built to tackle the data challenges associated with usage-based billing. This means that employee time can be spent on more strategic work that actively creates value for the business.

  • DigitalRoute Usage Engine captures, validates, aggregates and enriches usage data with high levels of automation. DigitalRoute can process any volume of data and deliver clean records to operational, business and finance systems, in real time.
  • With built-in error correction and an audit trail, DigitalRoute ensures that no data, and therefore no revenue, is lost. In addition to processing data, the solution can also send data back to devices and systems to ensure customers remain within their usage limits.
  • DigitalRoute is an ideal complement to enterprise-grade billing solutions where flexibility, scalability and full auditability are critical.

Here’s the bottom line

DigitalRoute vs. homegrown solutions

You can build a solution to process usage data for billing, but the ROI and total cost of ownership will generally be subpar. With DigitalRoute, you get a flexible, scalable solution that saves you time and resources.

If you already have a homegrown solution, or are considering building one, here are some key questions to consider.

Question #1

How often do you have to do massive corrections during billing runs due to duplicates or missing data?

For our customers, DigitalRoute Usage Engine has shortened billing lead times from weeks to days.

Question #2

Are you able to normalize, aggregate and structure complex data at high volumes and is the problem worsening?

DigitalRoute can collect and process data from any source, in any format, at scale.

Question #3

How often do you have billing or partner settlement disputes?

DigitalRoute’s error-correction capabilities and audit information provide full accuracy and transparency.

Question #4

What’s the return on investment for your homegrown solution?

A typical DigitalRoute customer sees a 174% ROI over three years.

Question #5

What percentage of your operating income is lost due to errors in data processing?

After implementing our solution, customers often find that their revenue leakage was as high at 10% of operating income with their home-grown solution.

The advantages of switching to DigitalRoute Usage Engine

Total cost of ownership

  • Minimized operating and support costs related to SaaS
  • Shared cost of development, infrastructure and support with customer community

Maintenance

  • Avoid migrations, upgrades and a dependence on limited support teams or individuals

Time to Market

  • Reduced time to market and cost due to service/process reuse e.g., auditing, aggregation

Risk avoidance

  • Confidence in a proven, market-tested solution
  • Mitigate with due diligence, compliance and audit bad outcomes
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The results of switching to DigitalRoute Usage Engine

Our customers have sped up invoicing by 80%, reduced IT maintenance activities by 65%, and detected revenue leakage amounting to 10% of operating income. Want to see what we can do for you?

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