Mahesh Sharma | August 13, 2008
AFTER failing to achieve its target of migrating five million customers onto its new billing systems by July, Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo said the telco will fast track all seven million consumer customers onto the new system by December 31.
Sol Trujillo plans to fast track all Telstra's consumer customers onto a new billing system
Mr Trujillo confirmed the telco was behind in the Transformation Plan and only 3.3 million customers and 4.3 million services had moved onto the new billing platform by the end of July.
“We did not achieve our ambitious target of moving across five million customers before the end of June.
“We will migrate five million by the end of September… and we’ll be moving from five to seven million by the end of the year,” Mr Trujillo said.
It also missed the deadline to start shifting its business customers onto the new billing and customer support systems, dubbed Transformation Release 1 (TR1). Mr Trujillo said this would begin later this month.
However, Mr Trujillo refused to disclose the number of Telstra business customers.
“I can’t give you a number off the top of my head, because you’ll quote me on it and next year you’ll say ‘Sol you said there’d be this many’.”
“That process is going to begin in the month of August and will be part of both TR1 and TR2, as we think about the systems, the business side will continue into the next calendar year.”
The Australian revealed this week the telco had cut back the scope of TR2, its key operations support system, in order to meet the project’s long-term deadlines.
Mr Trujillo also revised the scale of the undertaking, saying there were upward of 1,500 legacy systems to be retired, about 300 more than the 1,200 previously stated.
“Some of us were brand new to the company and in October we did an inventory with people that had been here 20 to 30 years with Telstra and we identified we had 1250 systems.
“As we got into it, six, nine, twelve months later we found out we had 1,500 systems.”
The discovery could cause the project’s timeframe to blow out further, Mr Trujillo said.
“There’s a lot of complexity to this and the variability of plus or minus ten or twenty months that could be part of the story.
“They’re going to be close. Whether we’re off by five to ten to twenty here or there, I don’t know whether that’s going to be the case.”
Telstra said today it has decommissioned 1,016 OSS and BSS (operations support and billing support) systems.
The telco was dealt another blow by its troubled Transformation Plan, revealing IT labour costs had blown out by $580 million, or 34.9%.
Mr Trujillo said Telstra’s books would cop a similar hit next year.
“The second half of the year you’ll start seeing a bit of a diminution, but it’ll be close (to that figure).
“I’m not going to give you a number, the directional guidance we’ve given is essentially that.”