Telco’s B/OSS Architecture Level - 2 Descriptions

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 3^rd 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.

1. Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded.
2. Interconnect bill verification.
3. Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed.
4. Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems.
5. Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for.
6. 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:

1. 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.
2. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. 
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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 3^rd 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.