Custom Contracts

Problem

A large enterprise billing system handles standard contracts with millions of customers for consumer-market service packages. However, there is also a significant group of business and institutional clients purchasing services in large volumes — often outside of standard bundles. Due to the specific nature of these clients, negotiations are typically multi-stage and result in a custom contract, the structure and content of which differ substantially from standard templates — and may be subject to modification during the negotiation process. Each contract also refers to address-related data and service availability, both of which are maintained in the billing system. Moreover, once finalized, the contract information must be made available within the billing system as it directly impacts standard sales in the areas covered by the custom agreement.

While the natural solution would be to support custom contracts within the billing system itself, this legacy platform lacks the required functionality. Extending it would be prohibitively expensive and pose significant risk. As a result, business users were forced to rely on generic office tools such as word processors and spreadsheets — manually entering or copying data from available reports.

Solution

A dedicated extension system was designed and implemented to handle the entire lifecycle of a custom contract — from initial talks, through proposals and approvals, to final agreement signing. The application manages the current process status, all data and documents exchanged throughout, and enables contract generation using dynamically defined templates or text fragments — automatically populated with business data. It also manages customer relationships, aggregates information from multiple systems about the client’s current status, and coordinates activities among involved personnel. In addition, the software includes a broad range of features, provided through different user interfaces tailored to specific roles. It is continuously adapted to evolving business needs.

Facts

  • Manages contracts and relationships with over 100,000 clients

  • Used by over 8,000 internal and external users (via Internet access)

  • Includes over 400 data tables

  • Integrated with datasets covering more than 10 million customers

  • The system has been in continuous development for over nine years