A recent examination of the BPM used for the Carphone Warehouse revealed some interesting findings.

“The Carphone Warehouse has already seen early benefits from its BPM implementations,” say official of Macehiter Ward-Dutton, who conducted the study. “Processes linking CRM and billing functionality are now in place and are able to be changed much more quickly than would have been the case using ‘traditional’ integration methods. In another project, a telecoms service activation process has been implemented centrally and made available to retail operations across Europe, bringing major time-to-market benefits for new products.”

The company’s fast growth, combined with the way it’s grown -- “blending organic growth with a very proactive approach to acquisition of businesses in order to enter new markets and territories” -- means it has a base of complicated applications. This is a big IT challenge, given all the legacy demands.

As a result, Carphone Warehouse decided to implement not just a new billing system, but a new CRM system as well. They chose Chordiant for the CRM part.

Read more here.

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The New Jersey Technology Council named Phone.com, a phone service for small businesses and professionals implementing a virtual office, the Communications Company of the Year.

Phone.com will be honored at the annual NJTC Awards Gala on November 17th. Yet another event to which this reporter was not invited. Funny enough we weren’t offered an all-expense paid trip by our employer either. No doubt an administrative oversight. Well, no matter, we don’t have a dinner jacket anyway.

“We are humbled and honored to be the recipients of the NJTC Communications Company of the Year Award for 2010,” said Ari Rabban, CEO and co-founder of Phone.com, in a press release. “We are very proud of our achievements and our growth in our three years in business and to be honored in the state were telecommunications was invented is incredible.”

Read more here.

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We suppose it would be fair to say VoIP has been a net plus for the telecommunications industry. As industry observer James Waldrop notes, “Consumers have used services such as Vonage and Skype to lower telephone bills and connect with loved ones around the world. Businesses have reaped far greater benefits from VoIP when they have installed IP-enabled telephone systems and hosted PBX services.”

Many have, in fact, “redesigned their operations around the use of VoIP reducing personnel,” as Waldrop says, extending it to reducing office space and overhead while improving customer service.

Not every VoIP implementation is a success story, though. We know, sorry to be the ones to break the news. VoIP does come with some problems such as dropped calls and garbled speech, voice quality problems that “can be the result of many factors including insufficient Internet speed, poor ISP service, wiring, viruses, improper voice packet prioritization and many more,” Waldrop says.

Read more here.

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Speedflow officials say they’re offering a chance to get a CallMax program license free of charge.

Their products for dealing with end users of VoIP services, offering high efficiency and opportunities, company officials say, adding that the installation, training and tech support are free -- “one click - and the program is in use.”

The CallMax system is designed to solve some VoIP retail tasks on routing and VoIP billing. It supports unlimited number of clients (client groups), subscriber authorization by ANI, IP address, login/password and generates an individual price list for every customer on request.

It also allows a client’s account top-up/refilling via IVR server or Web-interface, a complete report on all successful calls, a financial report and profitability monitoring on chosen periods and flexible filter system in reports to get the necessary information efficiently.

Read more here.