Challenges

TOKAI Communications provides AWS billing service as a part of its AWS solution service lineup to relieve its end clients from complex AWS account management, solve their technical problems on behalf of AWS, and pay the bills in the domestic currency. The billing process each month required the effort of 10 to 15 accounting personnel to calculate their end clients’ cloud usage and its corresponding costs. The accounting personnel will then need to double-check with each clients’ account manager before issuing the invoices. This process alone took an entire week every month.

The amount of time and human resource spent on the process were starting to become a problem. Due to the manual nature of the work, there was a high chance for miscalculations and omissions in the process. Since the billing process had zero tolerance for error, Yoko’s team had to pay careful attention while looking at the detailed usage report, which led to longer time taken to complete the billing process. Not only were the team members under pressure, the team also faced a problem where the know-how became tacit and limited within specific team members, as the knowledge transfer for a task of this nature was difficult.

“We were searching for a practical solution to manage these problems for two years before our counterpart at AWS introduced us to Alphaus”, says Yoko.

Solution Trial

TOKAI Communications started off with a free trial to understand how Alphaus Cloud’s billing solution worked and to verify its calculation accuracy as well as the compatibility with the billing process at the time for two billing cycles.

The billing amount varies from client to client, with many variables to consider, some of which includes discount rate, application of Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, other service or option fee charged together with cloud spend, and many more. Hence, Yoko’s team needed to verify if Alphaus Cloud computes the billing amount accurately while taking into account these variables before replacing the manual jobs with Alphaus Cloud.

The two-months trial period helped TOKAI Communications ensure that Alphaus Cloud would fit its billing process and solve its challenges.

“We were able to have a smooth trial period as Alphaus’ Customer Success team was always there to answer our questions and help us implement Alphaus Cloud to our invoicing workflow.”

Why Alphaus Cloud

TOKAI Communications team paid close attention during the trial to verify the method through which Alphaus Cloud would automate the billing process, whether it would reduce calculation errors, difficulties in knowledge sharing and transfer, as well as the cost.

“We chose Alphaus Cloud in the end because we found it could automate the former manual jobs through the solution trial and we were satisfied with the support from Alphaus’ Customer Success team. We hoped to solve all the problems we faced with the billing process by Alphaus Cloud, and we successfully did.”

With Alphaus Cloud

Monthly invoicing job that used to consume 15 people an entire week has been automated, and now TOKAI Communications executes it in less than a day.

TOKAI Communications also shares the detailed cloud cost data with its clients through Wave, an Alphaus Cloud component specialized in the cost analysis and report, resulting in a significant reduction in cost-related questions from both the account managers in the company and the clients.

“We count on the Customer Success team at Alphaus so much as the team is well versed with the knowledge of cloud cost and gives right answers to our questions. A new challenge for us would be further cloud cost reduction and optimization.”