Challenges for telecom billing migration projects
The key drivers for a communication service provider’s (CSP) billing transformation can be summarized as follows:
§ Mergers and Acquisitions to sustain growth
§ Legal requirements from a regulatory body to provide fair service to customers at a competitive price
§ Consolidation of Business Support Systems to improve operational efficiencies
§ Technical requirements in case of vendor support discontinuation for hardware/OS/DB
§ Product vendor releases newer versions of the product.
During this transformation phase, CSPs have to deal with data migration and process changes in their OSS/BSS systems, particularly billing systems which are mission critical since any issues during billing migration directly impact revenues. Today, we see that most of the transformation projects are either delayed or get into effort overrun, adversely impacting cost and quality. Let us see the key challenges that CSPs face in adhering to the time lines and budgets of a billing transformation project:
1. Complex and heterogeneous data: Over a period of time, the legacy systems and data might have undergone a lot of changes, making billing data very complex. For example, applying one time scripts or workarounds in production to correct data and introduce customer specific pricing plans/offers to attract customers, which otherwise requires major changes in the application. The standard migration tools may not be able to handle such complexities without heavy customization/tailoring.
2. Understanding the data: With data residing in multiple systems, forming a 360 degree view of the customer becomes difficult especially when there is lack of product hierarchy in the legacy system. For example, a customer might be allowed to order multiple quantities of a particular product in the legacy systems but the new system does not allow such lapses on account of product hierarchy capabilities.
3. Customer Experience: Migration programs are high risk programs as they involve migrating highly complex and historical data. Thus post migration, maintaining the same level of customer satisfaction if not better becomes a daunting task.
4. Changing requirements: Many a times CSPs maintain new billing system for new customers and legacy for the existing customers. In such a scenario, the changes recommended by business teams for the new billing system have to be considered by the team working on migration.
5. Level of customization: Upgrading the existing billing systems to newer versions involves complex data migration due to the high level of customizations involved.
6. Synchronization: Replacing only rating and billing engine, gives rise to data synchronization issues from legacy systems to the new billing system.
7. System downtime: Longer down time of rating and billing systems during migration can lead to delays in rating and bill generation processes which in turn affect the CSP’s revenue generation from its customers.
Comments
Ashok,
Very good summary of challenges. On the detailed level what are the non-functional challenges other than system downtime?
Posted by: Dayanand Kathapurkar | January 15, 2010 02:07 PM
Thanks for feedback. The other key non functional challenge include performance of the system post migration with respect to billing which is generic challenge for any system that is newly impleneted or custom developed.
Posted by: Ashok Reddy Nomula | January 21, 2010 09:18 AM