Telco’s B/OSS Architecture
Level - 2 Descriptions:
The traditional operator systems
architecture consists of four layers,
Business
Support System (BSS) layer: with focus toward customers and business
partners, Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information.
Operations
Support System (OSS) layer: built
around product, service, and resource inventories.
Networks
layer: consists of Network elements
and 3rd Party Systems.
Integration
Layer: to maximize application
communication and overall solution flexibility.
The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture
are as follows:
1.
Customer
Relationship Management:
CRM encompasses the end-to-end
lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering,
and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross
sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.
CRM also includes the collection
of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and
integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify
opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.
The key functionalities related
to Customer Relationship Management are
- Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer
request for products.
- Create and manage customer profiles.
- Manage all interactions with customers –
inquiries, requests, and responses.
- Provide updates to Billing and other south bound
systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation,
deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit
limits through Middle-ware.
- Work with Order Management System, Product, and
Service Management components within CRM.
- Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the
customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and
field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile
device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.)
- Support single interface for customer contact
details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill
details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.
CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points
like portals, point-of sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc.
The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing
system for ordering processing.
2.
Billing and
Revenue Management
Billing and Revenue Management
handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely
and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to
customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment
collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides
billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to
the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also
supports prepayment for services.
The key functionalities provided
by these applications are
- To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and
invoices delivered appropriately to customers.
- To manage customers’ billing accounts, process
their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the
account balance.
- To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment
of all customer bill inquiries and complaints
- Collect the usage records from mediation and
ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing.
- Support revenue sharing; split charging where
usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer.
- Support prepaid and post-paid rating.
- Send notification on approach / exceeding the
usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the
customer.
- Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where
some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and
conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa.
- Support different billing function requirements
like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off,
account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning,
account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract
violation penalty, etc.
- Initiate direct debit to collect payment against
an invoice outstanding.
- Send notification to Middleware on different
events; for example, payment receipt, pre- suspension, threshold exceed, etc.
Billing systems
typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They
get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM
systems.
Convergent and
real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.
3.
Mediation
Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data
Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating
purposes.
The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed
by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.
- Collect Usage Data Records from different data
sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and
interfaces.
- Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will
process Usage Data Records as per the source format.
- Validate Usage Data Records from each source.
- Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each
source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application.
- Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the
aggregation rule if any from different sources.
- Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from
each source
- Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to
different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc.
- Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data
Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of
mediation process.
- Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files
for a given time window
4.
Fulfillment
This area is responsible for
providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct
manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution
that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's
portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase
order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted
customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders.
They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order
issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order
activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and
provisioning applications fall into this category.
The key functionalities provided
by these applications are
- Issuing new customer orders, modifying open
customer orders, or canceling open customer orders
- Verifying whether specific non-standard
offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable
- Checking the credit worthiness of customers as
part of the customer order process
- Testing the completed offering to ensure it is
working correctly
- Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to
reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or
cancelled
- Assigning and tracking customer provisioning
activities
- Managing customer provisioning jeopardy
conditions
- Reporting progress on customer orders and other
processes to customer
These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They
interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.
5.
Enterprise
Management
This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide
activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole.
They encompass all business management processes that
- Are necessary to support the whole of the
enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management,
regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc
- Are responsible for setting corporate policies,
strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the
whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas,
such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and
development of the business
- Occur throughout the enterprise, including
processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments,
etc
a.
Enterprise
Risk Management:
Enterprise Risk
Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value
and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to
minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be
physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the
enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes,
applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as
security threats/violations and fraud attempts.
Two key areas
covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are
- Revenue
Assurance: Revenue assurance
system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across
components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems.
The following lists the high-level roles and
responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end
solution.
- Identify all usage information dropped when
networks are being upgraded.
- Interconnect bill verification.
- Identify where services are routinely provisioned
but never billed.
- Identify poor sales policies that are
intensifying collections problems.
- Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket
and never billed for.
- Find leakage where field service, CRM, and
network build-out are not optimized.
- Fraud
Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to
identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription
patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of
resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.
The key roles and responsibilities of the system component
are as follows:
- Fraud management system will capture and monitor
high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number
of calls for each subscriber.
- The threshold for each subscriber is decided by
the system and fixed automatically.
- Fraud management will be able to detect the
unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may
have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise
the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls
which are not billed.
- The solution will be to have an alarm management
system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a
fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs.
- The Fraud Management system will be capable of
interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems.
b.
Knowledge
Management:
This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research
within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.
Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to
- Maintain
knowledge base: Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis.
- Search
knowledge base: Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse.
- Maintain metadata:
Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and
search.
- Run
report generator
- Provide
content: Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational
manual, etc.
c.
Document
Management
It focuses on maintaining
a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant
to the enterprise using a system.
d.
Data
Management
It manages data
as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical
areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business
Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality,
and database management.
Key
responsibilities of Data Management are
- Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing,
web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data,
customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and
measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse.
- Management of data traceability with source,
data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data
reconciliation, competitors’ data – storage for all the enterprise data
(customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.)
- Get online update through night time replication
or physical backup process at regular frequency.
- Provide the data access to business intelligence
and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.
e.
Business
Intelligence
It uses the
Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain
prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers
due to the offers, and SLAs.
It will
generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ones for the customers.
The following
lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business
Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:
- It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem.
- It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis,
data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns
on offers, products, service and revenue
generation against services and customer segments.
- It will do Performance (business, system, and
forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis.
- It will support for online and offline analysis
and report drill down capability
- It will collect, store, and report various SLA
data.
- It will provide the necessary intelligence for
marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and
predictions.
- It will advise on customer promotions with
additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer
- It will Interface with Enterprise Data
Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface
with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.
f.
Stakeholder
and External Relations Management
It manages the
enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders
include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include
regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this
grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and
Public Relations.
g.
Enterprise
Resource Planning
It is used to
manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial
resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the
flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the
enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems
consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system
environment.
The key roles and
responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:
- It will handle responsibilities such as core
accounting, financial, and management reporting.
- It will interface with CRM for capturing
customer account and details.
- It will interface with billing to capture the
billing revenue and other financial data.
- It will be responsible for executing the dunning
process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning.
- It will interface with the CRM and Billing
through batch interfaces
Enterprise
management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically
interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with
CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.
6.
External
Interfaces/Touch Points
The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners,
employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to
a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms,
including
- Exchange of emails or faxes
- Call Centers
- Web Portals
- Business-to-Business (B2B) automated
transactions
These applications provide an
internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety
of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or
partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.
Typical characteristics of these touch points are
- Pre-integrated self-service system, including
stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine
- Self services layer exposing atomic web
services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural
environment.
These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests,
inquiries, and responses.
7.
Middle-Ware
The component will be primarily
responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common
platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service
Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications.
The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed
by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.
- As an integration framework, covering to and fro
interfaces
- Provide a web service framework with service
registry.
- Support SOA framework with SOA service registry.
- Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to
other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of
data points.
- Receive data from the caller / activate and/or
forward the data to the recipient system in XML format.
- Use standard XML for data exchange.
- Provide the response back to the service/call
initiator.
- Provide a tracking until the response
completion.
- Keep a store transitional data against each
call/transaction.
- Interface through Middleware to get any
information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to
enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc.
- Provide the data in a common unified format to
the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive.
- Provide an audit trail for all transactions
being handled by the component.
8.
Network
Elements
The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the
provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features,
functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or
equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and
information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission,
routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.
Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register
(HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center
(SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk
(PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.
Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom
devices for any kind of usage.
These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream
systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also
integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.
9.
3rd Party
Applications
3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment
gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the
Government.
Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd
party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM,
provisioning, and billing will be done.
10. Service Delivery Platform
A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the
rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value
added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered
architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in
network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to
aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs
typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application
development, and network abstraction.
