Livewire

1. Variance of Local Regulatory Requirements: Many Countries have strict data specific regulations, where in, the movement of Customer data out of that country or region is restricted, since such data is considered highly confidential and secure. If a Billing System or corresponding data centre is out of the Country’s jurisdiction, it might not be possible to have the customer data sent across in the same shape and format. There are various solutions to handle this problem. Business teams need to do a complete analysis of this issue taking help from the legal authorities and choose a right solution to resolve this. Infosys provides a highly flexible solution (tool) for data masking to effectively mask the data before sending it out of the specific regions.
2. Disparate Billing Systems and Lack of Documentation: Legacy Billing Systems could vary hugely across geographies. There could be a few regions where a small Microsoft Access based tool is used as a billing system. Such small tools would not have much of a documentation or at times, it becomes extremely difficult to pull out the business rules after analyzing the product. In our experience, there were instances where a huge product is deployed and run for years with loads of customizations and little documentation to support. Operational documents alone will be available but will not help the consolidation team much. Infosys has developed a proven, robust methodology to analyze an existing system and draw Business Requirements from it.
3. Data Cleansing, Migration and Consistency: Data Quality would be a huge issue if the billing system is poorly maintained over years. Migrating such a system to the new Strategic Billing System would be very critical in the entire implementation cycle. A complete analysis of all critical data entities has to be taken up, followed by some automated data cleansing. History could be preserved based on the importance in the target billing system. Migration activity should be started only after the complete cleansing of data to avoid integrity issues. Infosys has a well defined Data Migration Methodology and readily deployable Framework which defines a Seven Entity Approach for Data Migration.
4. Planning and Timelines: Maintaining a planned pace of implementation across regions, lines of businesses and countries is a difficult job. The Program Management Office has to track the various aspects in a streamlined fashion. Incase of parallel de-phasing of systems in various regions, it is always recommended to setup the PMO across the regions, tactically, to stay closer with the project teams and bring better perspective to the Steering Committee of the progress.
5. Choice of Right Package / Solution: Though the market leading billing products are all good fit for a consolidated billing scenario, it is very important for the Organizations to look at the amount of Customization being done on these packages to meet the needs. The most important parameters to be looked at are Scalability, Performance, Multi-Currency/Multi-Language Support, Centralized Data Support, Capability to Integrate with various systems and Percentage of Customization.

It is important that the Global Organizations run through all these challenges and strike the right balance between these issues and requirements during the business case preparation stage itself and then proceed with further planning of consolidating the billing systems.