Telstra

Providing efficient, same day processing of all mailed payments from the entire country for one of Australia's largest utilities.

The Organisation

Telstra is Australia's first and largest telecommunications carrier. It has responsibility for all fixed-line communications across Australia, a country roughly the same size as the continental USA, as well as running Australia's major mobile phone network.

Telstra has approximately 7 million customers and receives about 12,000 mailed payments daily.

More about Telstra

The Challenge

Telstra ran six state-based processing centres, each with its own staffing and infrastructure, including from three to six large remittance processing workstations in each centre. From each regional office, processed data had to be consolidated to 8 major business systems at Telstra's head offices in Melbourne. Telstra wanted to consolidate the entire operations into a single national centre, to gain efficiencies of scale and overheads.

The Solution

In a partnership with NCR Corporation, Reculver configured and installed remittance processing software on two high-speed NCR 7780 imaging cheque transports, together with image reject/re-entry facilities on 16 PC workstations.

An image archive facility was installed to allow any of Telstra’s accounts staff to view cheque and remittance details on demand at their own PC, with no physical paper searching. A full suite of post-processing software was also developed to apply and report on the application of data to Telstra's back-end business systems.

Benefits Delivered

  • optimal cash flow by banking all payments the same day, regardless of numbers
  • major reduction in keying through more than 85% read rate of hand-written amounts on cheques ("Courtesy and Legal Amount Recognition").
  • opportunity to further streamline ancillary operations.
  • rigorous reporting and balancing prior to update of back-end systems.

Testimonial

"The new remittance processing systems have been extremely reliable and effective, in terms of both hardware and software. We've achieved the efficiencies we wanted."
Charlie Livanopoulos, Manager Accounts Receivable Business Services, Telstra