Background and Challenge
A distributor of prepaid products and transactional services, this entity of Blue Label Telecoms is represented in over 150,000 distribution points across South Africa, in the formal, independent and informal markets. Being structured as a conglomerate, the business was experiencing legacy and inherited process / system issues and required a deep dive into the business processes. Fraud, governance and risk management were identified as priorities for closing gaps across disparate systems.
What We Did
PPT embarked on a business mapping project to document as-is processes across various business units, in three functional areas:
- Operational planning – Supplier agreements & onboarding, management of hardware and physical stock, management of virtual stock
- Merchant lifecycle – Journey for a new merchant sign up, configuration, hardware and virtual stock assignment, transaction configuration, support, offboarding and asset
management / rental management - Transactional – Full journey of system transactions, payment processes and reconciliation, stock replenishment
A register of activities across these areas was built out for workshopping with the broader management team in order to identify which areas should be prioritised based on fraud
risk in the various products. These specific processes were analysed in great detail for both manual operator tasks as well as system functionality and configuration.
Results to Date
- Identified gaps were moved into a project register to kick-off individually tracked tasks for the internal team to implement changes and improve SOPs
- Gaps in system functionality were highlighted and moved into projects for the technology team to assist with improvements in functionality
A few months after the engagement ended, an internal investigation resulted in the uncovering of major fraud in the business, that was reported with some large figures in the
press.