Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog: Leveraging ‘Billing’ in the multi-party multi-service context

In the current competitive environment, it has become imperative for service providers to offer creative/ innovative blend of services. Large Organizations have dedicated teams for creating such offerings with a combination of in-house and third party services. The main challenge in achieving success in this process is to achieve the shortest ‘Time-to-market’ from conceiving the idea to making it available for customers.

The key areas to focus would include rapid integration of third party service platforms with the home network OSS environment (where necessary), changing the customer acquisition and order management modules, changing the mediation system(s) to process the new / revised usage records, setting-up the service offerings and charging elements in the Billing systems, changing the bill templates/ formats, setting-up the revenue sharing models and data sharing interfaces, Data security and access control when sharing info with the third parties, establishing agreed processes for reconciliation and revised MIS reporting. While the Business and Marketing teams would want the ‘Time-to-Market’ to be the shortest, typically the IT team requires a long lead time to ensure all the above changes are made, systems are tested, staff are trained for overall readiness.

In view of the above, the Billing Managers are always striving to achieve the agility/ nimbleness within the Organization by establishing/refining the procedures and processes. Having a skilled / dependable IT team with a combination of in-house and Supplier(s)/ partner(s), planning ahead, prudent decisions on automation with cost-benefit analysis, staff training, right level of communication and information sharing with the in-house & third parties are important for fulfilling the expectations of the Business, the customers and the third parties. Besides that, having a feature rich, modularized, flexible/adaptable Billing system and leveraging its capabilities will go a long way in helping with meeting the above challenges.

Leveraging the Billing system would involve, answering several key questions. These would be - How are the products / services to be modeled and set-up in the existing Billing system? How to make the new products available to the target customers (new and existing)? How to mass migrate current live customers from their existing service bundles to new ones? How the new bills are to look like? Whether or not (and how )to indicate the third party service items on the bills distinct from on-house services? How do we track the home network revenue distinct from third party revenue?.How to fulfill the data sharing needs, while ensuring the Data security and access control? And many more.

Being aware of the features, capabilities and limitations(if any) of the existing billing environment would be quite important in answering these questions. So, the task is to have and maintain expertise on the Billing system, evolving good quality repeatable / re-usable best practices, standardizing on procedures for incorporating changes in various modules and interfaces with a view to simplify the task of meeting future requirements, ensuring quality testing activities, periodic in-house/ third party reporting and reconciliation besides house-keeping activities to maintain a clean and healthy environment.