Business Process &
Inventory Management

Equipment & Network Inventory Management System

Intuitive Management for Every Aspect of your Equipment for Service Delivery

CostGuard’s Equipment Inventory module has the tools you need to track the status of last mile equipment. It provides both summary and detail views that enable you to optimize your field assignments and maximize the return on your network investment.

Manage your network inventory intelligently:

• View detailed information about individual pieces of equipment
• Track the history of equipment assignments and tickets opened against equipment
• Track all elements of your last mile assignments – physical connects, carrier circuits, virtual connects and customer premise equipment
• Automatically identify customers that may be impacted when a ticket is opened against a specific piece of equipment

Retail Inventory Management

Because Every Item Counts in Telecom

Mismanagement of retail inventory results in errors and inconsistencies that can cause significant expenses. CostGuard’s telecom POS software solution helps you avoid such losses with detailed inventory, auditing and reporting capabilities.

CostGuard’s comprehensive solution facilitates inventory management transactions such as requests, transfers, purchase orders, adjustments and physical counts. It also gives you the ability to establish approval processes, alerts and user notifications for inventory transactions.

With audit reports, transaction audit capabilities and a dashboard for at-a-glance details on product quantities per status and per location, CostGuard makes retail inventory management easier.

Reduce expenses and improve your bottom line with tighter control of your retail inventory:

• Manage telecom-specific serialized and non-serialized retail products
• Leverage POS location management to maintain and track retail inventory per location
• Establish minimum and maximum inventory levels to automate orders
• Use permission settings to limit access to purchase orders, inventory counts and receiving

Point Of Sale Process Management

Streamline Telecom Retail Operations

CostGuard’s Point of Sale (POS) solution supports retail business processes for traditional brick-and-mortar stores, call centers and fulfillment warehouses – helping you bring consistency to your sales and support practices. Use CostGuard to perform sales, returns, equipment swaps, and exchanges involving service activations and retail inventory.

Configurable business rules give you greater control of the POS from opening the cash drawer to reconciliation. Quick sale transaction capabilities for accessory sales eliminate delays and improve the customer experience. Multiple levels of user permissions let you control discounting, manager overrides and system access.

A better experience for your salespeople and your customers:

• Create guided sales workflows that reduce user error, automate product promotions and improve the retail sales experience
• Integrate peripheral devices to capture signatures, swipe credit cards, scan bar codes and IDs, and print receipts and service agreements
• Monitor retail and customer care operations with CostGuard’s centralized reporting tool
• Define and configure POS locations that mirror existing distribution channels
• Complement the POS Front Office with Back Office functionality using CostGuard’s Retail Inventory Management solutions

Business Intelligence & Reporting

Reporting What Matters in Telecom

Things change quickly in the telecommunications industry, and you need the ability to monitor and manage key performance indicators. CostGuard comes with a full library of standard reports to help you manage operations at every level. From understanding overarching business needs to fine-tuning specific activities, CostGuard’s reporting capabilities support efforts to respond quickly to new opportunities and changes in the market. Reports can be exported into CSV, HTML or XML for added flexibility.

IDI can assist with custom report development, or you can use standard SQL and XML functions to create your own business-specific reports in the CostGuard system.

Intelligent reporting drives smart decisions:

• Over 300 standard reports in the core solution
• User-defined report scheduling
• Configurable permission-based access to reports
• “User Limit To” solution lets you generate reports with viewer-specific data

Bulk Data Import

Facilitates High Volume Data Updates in CostGuard Applications

The Bulk Data module gives you the ability to import and update data in CostGuard using a comma separated file (CSV). This may be useful when the amount of data involved would make manual updates in the GUI impractical, or you need to programmatically integrate a data feed from an external system. CSV files are a commonly supported export format for many software systems and can be easily created manually using readily available tools.

Supported Applications:

• Customer – Add and modify Customer Accounts
• Disassociate Devices from Services – Remove the link between a device and its associated service
• Equipment Inventory – Add Inventory items to Equipment Inventory
• Coverage Service Area – Update the Coverage Service Area Table
• Features – Add features to and modify features on an account or service
• Journals – Create journal item records
• Customer Alerts – Add customer alerts to an account