ANS Group Case: 80% of manual efforts eradicated through automation

ANS Group uses CloudBilling to automate its billing process for all its Microsoft and AWS based services and managed services.

Summary

Challenges: Presenting customers with accurate and concise billing for their public cloud usage. Reducing manual labor involved in the billing process.

Solutions: Billing platform, CSP Connector and AWS Connector

Use case: automation of the billing process, delivering an accurate, concise, and easy-to-understand invoice (e.g., XML, PDF, CSV), that shows both the public cloud usage and the ANS managed services

Benefits

• Increased efficiency and productivity through automation of public cloud metering and invoicing
• Reduced errors and higher accuracy of the invoice
• Increased trust of the customer of invoice
• Scalability

Company profile

Founded in 1996, ANS enable customers to make their digital transformation to the public cloud. ANS is a key partner to Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), with vast experience in the areas of public cloud, DevOps, applications and data expertise.

Recently ANS has completed a merger with another major Managed Service Provider in the UK. The billing process of the merged companies has been seamlessly integrated within the CloudBilling system.

Challenges 

The switch from a private cloud focus to a (hybrid) public cloud only strategy, requires a different mindset. One of the major stumbling blocks that ANS encountered early on in this transition, was how customers would pay for public cloud consumption. ANS had a lot of large-scale public sector customers who preferred to do a Capex purchase for infrastructure. Changing that mindset and moving them into an Opex model was a tough battle. This move to the public cloud meant that customers of ANS did not necessarily know, accurately, what they were going to spend monthly. This made budgeting and cost management a challenge.

One of the key areas that ANS struggled with, was presenting the customer with an accurate and concise bill for their public cloud usage. ANS employed several tools that would help them to resolve this issue. However, they found that they always had to manually manipulate data and combine it with ANS managed services fees, to create an accurate invoice. After a couple of years this process became too labor intensive and unmanageable for the finance team.

ANS started searching for a tool to automate the billing process and consolidate invoices into a single PDF invoice.

Solution

ANS is now able to send out automatically generated invoices that breakdown the public cloud consumption into clear components. On top of that, ANS can combine the public cloud spend of Azure and AWS with their own managed services. With CloudBilling ANS can keep offering flexible and complex managed services without having to worry about billing.

By providing a scalable platform CloudBilling helps ANS to keep growing and follow their strategy. 

“To be able to see all of the different various public cloud consumption figures, third party services and then be able to apply a flexible managed service fee on top, completely automated, is worlds apart from where we were.” - Jamie Sinclair – Transformation Director

To be able to see all of the different various public cloud consumption figures, third party services and then be able to apply a flexible managed service fee on top, completely automated, is worlds apart from where we were. - Jamie Sinclair, Transformation Director

Implementation

The implementation of CloudBilling and the integrated CloudBilling Azure and AWS connectors automate ANS' billing process. As a result, 80% of the manual effort spent by ANS was eradicated. CloudBilling ensures that no revenue is missed, and that everything is accounted for.

Results

Cost savings

With CloudBilling, ANS achieves cost savings by reducing manual labor, reducing errors, and lowering the number of customers questioning their invoices. By using CloudBilling, ANS gained access to years of billing and invoicing experience already accumulated by CloudBilling in the public cloud. Allowing ANS to focus on their core business instead of having to reinvent the wheel.

Flexibility and scalability in one

CloudBilling allows ANS to offer flexible agreements to their customers by combining standard prices and tailored agreements into accurate and standardised invoices. As a result, ANS can continue to differentiate itself in the market. By combining flexibility, standardisation and automation, CloudBilling ensures that the billing process of ANS is scalable and ready for future growth.

Service and Support 

With CloudBilling’s excellent support services, high level of expertise and personal touch, any issues that may arise are handled in a timely, proactive, and adequate manner. ANS and CloudBilling have entered a partnership where they can mutually benefit from each other’s knowledge and experience in the CSP market.

Future Plans

The billing hygiene of ANS is in order and the next step is to use the Billing data for BI analyses. Not only does ANS have a need for this itself, but the company also sees this demand becoming increasingly important for customers, who have an increasing need for overview and transparency in the complex and dynamic world of the cloud. These new steps allow ANS and CloudBilling to further strengthen cooperation and services in the coming years.

About CloudBilling

Cloudbilling is a fast-growing Dutch tech company that helps companies with complex billing and business intelligence issues. Back in 2009, CloudBilling pioneered by supporting the first SaaS companies in implementing innovative billing solutions. Since then, CloudBilling's services have expanded to other industries such as Managed Service Providers and Enterprises.

CloudBilling provides solutions for complex, high volume billing and in-depth data analysis based on billing data to identify commercial opportunities such as upsell opportunities, revenue growth and churn reduction.