OSS/BSS: 7 Traits of Effective Billing Systems

Blling has been recognized as a strategy and not a back-end tool, but ever
wondered how are we will develop the systems that can help operators in using it
as a strategic tool?

Customer care and billing have become significant as telcos try to create
service differentiation to generate revenue and reduce churn. The margins of
traditional services offered by cellular service providers (CSPs) are being
threatened by declining prices, competition, and the prevalence of conventional
pricing. To overcome such a scenario, telcos must evolve to become a retailer of
content services, not just a bearer service. Customer relationship becomes the
most important factor when CSPs play the role of retailers. The question that
emerges here is how are the service providers going to price their various
services.

To
answer this question we have to consider the three most important parameters
that can determine the price of a service: content, context, and time
sensitivity. Based on the different combinations of their parameters the
customers should be given the choice of selecting the service they want. For
example, a stock quote at a crucial time will be priced higher than a normal
quote. Pricing should be such that, the revenue is generated on volumes and not
by high value for a service. To take a step further, SLAs can be specified for
different services to protect the interest of the customers.

Today service providers world over have big-time investment plans in OSS/BSS
products to help them reduce the operational cost and deliver better quality of
service. Certain key features that will enable the billing systems to achieve
that are listed below.

1 Configurability

The mantra of success for any billing system is configurability. The
requirement is for a rule-based system that can be configured easily.

The
ability to handle multiple services effectively is best supported by
an element-based approach rather than hard coding for a specific service. New
service offerings can be rapidly made available in the system by
simply assembling the basic elements necessary for the service bundle,
based on the business rules. Since the basic elements are not service
specific, the time to support a new service in the system would be
considerably reduced.

This helps the system to adapt to changing market conditions and create
services without affecting existing offerings, entry screens, workflows, and
business rules.

The system should be designed so that no additional pieces of code are
required, instead the objective should be achieved by simple configuration.

2 Component-based Approach

OSS/BSS
are high investment products. Hence service providers maylook for most essential
components only, and may not look for end-to-end solutions. Thus, vendors have
to follow a components-based approach where each module can work independently
and also integrated easily with others to provide an end-to-end solution. This
model provides a strategic edge to service providers since they can plan their
investments according to their requirements. Vendors must respond to market
demands with a framework that allows service providers to select the pieces of
the OSS/BSS jigsaw that best fit their needs today and in the future.

3 Flexibility

Flexibility
is the most important capability in: staying competitive and enabling new
features, dealing with increasing complications of technology and government
rulings, and the capability to prototype new services and measure their
acceptance before committing large expenditures. With frequently changing
tariffs launch of new services, the need is for a system that can cope with
multiple pricing and bundling strategies across different services. For offering
such requirements, flexibility has to be incorporated in the architecture
itself.

The demand is increasing with industry moving towards IP-based services.
Billing systems must allow carriers to react quickly to market demands. The
system should be designed to allow addition of new services without changing the
system or adding codes.

4 Scalability

Rapidly growing service providers must pay special attention to scalability
when evaluating billing systems. Scalability is the ability to expand the number
of users or increase the capability of the billing system without making major
changes to the system or application software and without impacting the system
performance.

Vendors
must make every module equally scalable, i.e., billing, rating, and customer
care modules should be independently scalable.

The key points that vendors need to consider are how well the system performs
when the number of users is increases, how well a database withstands growing
numbers of queries, or how well a system performs with different classes of
hardware.

5 Intractability

Typically,
a telecom scenario will involve different systems to provide services such as
CRM, billing, fraud management, etc. A telecom service provider may not go for a
solution to cater to all these requirements and instead will invest in a
solution that can be upgraded. For example, it may invest in a billing system
that can support different tariffs ; however the CRM and other systems may not
be changed. 

The most effective way of doing this is to have a system that
follows an open architecture and has dynamic application program interfaces
(APIs) to interface with other systems. This also has the advantage that any
external system can communicate with the billing system through APIs, thus
preventing the risk of damage to the billing system. It also reduces the
implementation time.

6 Reliability

Billing
systems are business-critical systems that must be capable of performing
operations without failures. The systems must be designed to be highly reliable
with almost zero down time. Reliability can be improved by the deployment
methodologies such as clustering, distributed processing, or providing disaster
recovery. Clustering eliminates the risk of single-point failure. Distributed
processing allows for maximum flexibility and optimal load distribution when
configuring a billing system. This offers higher reliability and cost
effectiveness of localized systems and distributed network like control of
host-based system. Another effective way of improving reliability is by
providing disaster recovery that will provide the system or application ability
to be restored to a point of integrity.

7 Convergent

The
future of billing points is the convergence of various services and the
integration of prepaid and postpaid. The existing billing systems will have to
undergo transformation and migrate towards a complete Web-based convergent
billing system. Furthermore, interconnect billing will open revenue streams for
both incumbent and new operators. The revenue generating potential for
interconnect billing will go up even higher with the advent of 2.5G and 3G
networks. Convergence can be seen in the all types of bills. 

A customer may have
one or many subscriptions to a service however the billing system should be
capable to produce a single convergent bill for the customer irrespective of the
number of subscriptions. Hence, vendors need to design systems that are
convergence compatible.

In today's CSP market, operators' main priorities are basic revenue and
profit. Hence producing accurate bills lies at the heart of operators'
activities, in both generating revenue and serving customers effectively.
Understanding these requirements, billing vendors must gear up to design systems
that will help service providers achieve their goals.

Deepak Nayar of SunTec