Billing Transformation Programme – Part 2: Implementation Strategies
While embarking on billing transformation, business support for live customers needs to be continued with minimal disruptions. Also, it becomes essential to simultaneously provide support to on-going market promotions. Thus, transformation journeys for billing systems is a complex and daunting task for any CSP’s as discussed in my previous blog: “Billing Transformation Programme – Part 1: Key Challenges”.
Now let us look at the implementation strategies: Big Bang approach and Phased approach. Depending upon active customer base, market segments, product lines and business needs (continuity) on legacy stack – Big Bang or Phased/Iterative Migration Strategies can be decided. Each of them has its own pros & cons.
Before embarking on implementation strategy, following factors need to be evaluated:
§ What customer data and by when it needs to migrated
§ List of products, services and promotions offered for different customer markets
§ Volume and complexity of customer migration data
§ Extract Transform & Load Tools to be used
§ Data Cleanse Strategy – to remove customer data anomalies
§ Products rationalisation & withdrawals i.e. what products or services to be provided on new stack and what needs to be withdrawn during transformations
§ Planning parallel bills runs & trial test
§ Re-fitment of existing business processes
Big Bang Approach:
This kind of transformation approach has smaller rollout time periods as compared to phased approach and hence is most suitable for Tier 3 operators where customer base are less, products are much simplified & already rationalized on legacy stack. Customer, account and billing data can be extracted, transformed and loaded into new stack without segmenting customer data based on market segment or product lines or customer types. During migrations, parallel bill runs on old billing & new billing systems can be continued till trial bills from new stack are error free and good to go for customer.. You can switch-off billing in old stack for such accounts.
It is not suitable for large communication service providers who have complex customer & billing data to be migrated. Also its not suitable for service providers whose customers are spread across multiple geographies within or outside country each of them having distinct segmentation of service offerings, billing requirements, tax & regulatory requirements.
Phased/Iterative Approach:
Most widely and preferred approach for any kind of CRM or billing systems’ transformations programme by Tier 1 & Tier 2 Service providers. This will have longer transformation window.
Entire billing transformation journey is split into multiple waves of transformation programme with intermediate milestones.. Phased approach can be done along customer types, product lines and market segments and geographies. During phased approach, initially a new billing system can be set-up, configured, customized and integrated to meet basic customer requirements and simpler products & service offerings. After initial success, more complex functionalities can be built before embarking on next wave of transformation journey. This will be an iterative cycle for each transformation wave till the new billing system is fully built, configured & integrated to meet all business & customer requirements and all the transformation waves are completed. Within each wave we can have initially low volume migrations before embarking on mass migrations. During low volume migrations, live verification of customer data and test bills can be carried out e2e from customer order journey experience till billing and financial journals posting. This ensures that there is minimal impact on customer experience due to any transformation issues. Also parallel and trail bills runs required before moving to next wave.
Thus this approach will be most suitable for global rollouts and complex customer, market and product segmentation. This requires robust change and risk management’s mechanism to be put in place.
To summarize, Big Bang approach is suitable for smaller transformation programmes where there is no complexity involved in customer or product or market segments, while Phased/Iterative approach is best & widely adopted approach for medium/large service providers.
Right choice of New Billing solution & technology, ETL Tools and Migrations Strategies decides success Story for any Billing Transformation Programmes
