This article discusses some of the requirements operators need to consider when investing in a state-of-the-art wholesale billing system in order to meet their vision of improved efficiency, margin management and process control.
1. Flexible Billing Architecture
As the telecoms market becomes increasingly complex, operators need to support a wider range of billing and settlement models in a single integrated platform, from simple voice and data traffic using international route-based tariffs (ITU), to new IP based traffic and complex revenue sharing agreements involving multimedia, content and commerce partners. There is a trend for multi-party settlement to be supported where a single event record can be used as the basis for revenue settlement with any number of partners, as well as the need for real-time, web-based partner access. In short, the wholesale billing system needs to be highly adaptable and support any type of settlement model.
2. Billing for New Revenue Streams
For operators to exploit the opportunities presented by content-driven business models, wholesale billing systems must be able to provide full support for processing data and varied content in addition to traditional voice traffic, for a variety of different scenarios including complex multi-step and multi-component rating rules. This requires the ability to account for non-usage events such as leased lines and facility rentals, as well as one-off charges for IP peering agreements. Furthermore, operators need to deploy sophisticated cross product and cross-partner discounting features for the modeling of intricate business to business content settlement agreements.
3. Rapid Time to Market
Systems that can improve an operator’s time to market for new and more complex services are essential. The sooner a service scenario can be supported the better, so that marketing departments can create and launch new products faster than their competitors. They require flexible discounting to support a variety of scenarios including financial, call count, usage, tiered and threshold discounts as well as penalty rates. By providing triggers the system should allow for certain types of traffic to be cross-discounted (e.g., if mobile is less than 5% of fixed traffic then a discount of 1.5% is given on all traffic). Also, operators require volume based settlement capabilities in order to negotiate or offer flexible agreements and defined rates based on traffic volumes, including committed volumes and a host of other user definable criteria.
4. Billing On-Time
High on the agenda for most operators are increased productivity, eliminating delays in revenue recognition and improving cash flow. One way they can achieve this is by removing repetitive administration processes associated with generating interconnect statements and invoices – making them more accurate, controlled and auditable. Invoice production can be streamlined by enabling the segregation of the billing period into revenue and expense elements so that revenue can be closed off and invoiced immediately without having to wait for outstanding rating information to be in place before the billing period can be closed. In addition, users need a flexible user interface that allows them to aggregate and filter invoice information and generate generic or operator specific invoice formats, as well as automate multiple levels of tax calculations (e.g. tax on tax), exchange rate conversion, payment tracking and supplementary invoice generation.
5. Advanced Carrier-Grade Rating
The ability to settle invoices swiftly and reconcile them accurately depends on a carrier-grade rating engine capable of handling a high number of EDRs per agreement. This can place a huge drain on existing legacy systems. Millions of EDRs must be analysed in a very short period of time by a series of criteria, and the introduction of content settlement expands the rating functionality further including time, event, messaging type and message size (e.g.: kilobyte or megabyte). By deploying an accurate carrier grade rating solution, operators are looking to speed-up the issuing of interconnect invoices, perform regular re-pricing against new partner offers, and obtain valuable business intelligence.
6. Synchronizing Billing and Traffic Routing
Interconnect operations have always been in search for better ways to trade traffic profitably and route it optimally while monitoring business performance. It is one thing for operators to monitor traffic and optimize network performance, but unless they are able to rate based on the actual route that is being configured they are likely to pay more for traffic services or lose revenue. It is essential for operators to synchronize traffic trading and interconnect management to accurately reflect routing decisions and rates in the billing system. This will also impact positively on partner relations with more efficient reconciliation and management of interconnect agreements.
7. Accurate Margin Analysis
The key to improving margins for interconnect business is accurate and effective margin analysis. This means having the insight to correlate and import billing information from multiple sources and ensure that all cost and revenue elements of calls are applied to enable full margin analysis on all products. A broad range of sophisticated reporting functionality enables accurate decisions to be made on up-to-date trusted information; extracting and making sense of the most popular entities, including billing and settlement reports, line details and EDR files.
8. Partner Management
For effective and active partner management and agreement optimisation, the approach is to offer real time, web based partner access so that partners can access an operator’s system securely over the Internet and query financial balances, agreements and set-up information. A single point of contact is essential to the efficient management of a growing number of partners and the introduction of new revenue-generating business models.
9. Low Cost of Ownership & Increased Productivity
The latest software applications use a range of techniques to lower the cost of IT ownership such as advanced data management, change management and compression features to reduce storage costs. Operators also often want to deploy additional rating engines running on low cost commodity hardware to achieve a readily scalable rating solution. Furthermore, applications must support enhanced productivity by speeding up the loading of data and management of agreement details. This work can typically be done by integrated bulk loaders as server-based components on powerful multi-CPU servers where data can be imported, tracked and controlled through a common set of validation components.
10. It Isn’t Going to Get Easier
One thing is certain; the telecoms value chain is becoming more complex and securing new revenue streams, whilst managing existing voice business, requires operators to become smarter and leaner. Increasingly, customers are demanding pre-integrated, multi-product solutions that enable them to rapidly and cost-effectively solve key wholesale business challenges. This means broadening their interconnect system architecture and creating a wholesale ‘eco-system’ to provides a more comprehensive set of functions, including; Contract Management, Routing, Network Performance, CDR/EDR analysis, Wholesale Billing, Financial Settlement, ITU, Partner Relationship Management and Automatic Reconciliation.
Conclusion
Contemporary wholesale billing is about responding fast to change, delivering accurate bills and handling a range of complex business parameters. To sustain this competitive advantage, operators require controlled, more efficient processes. The challenge is to do so without expensive and complex OSS/BSS infrastructure. Recent developments in wholesale billing technology present broader and more flexible process control solutions to manage interconnect relationships, streamline data and process management, obtain an accurate view of costs and revenues and ensure comprehensive quality controls.
Author: Simon Dadswell, Advanced Solutions Marketing Manager, Intec.