Billing and Rating
Consideration for the Replacement of a Billing System
The main reasons to replacing or upgrading a billing system are as follows:
Give the Organisation a competitive edge by providing billing options not available to its competitors.
Offer more flexible service and payment options. i.e. prepaid/ postpaid /combined/ subscription/pay as you use.
To advantage of newer technical developments in the billing environment.
Reduce cost,
Access new revenue streams,
Streamline business process and technical architecture
Improve reporting and revenue Assurance
Generally existing billing systems has served the Telco well and it has been integrated into various parts of the business and therefore replacing it requires a detailed understanding of the existing systems, processes, functionality and interfaces. The new billing system must meet these base requirements in order qualify to further evaluation. It must also ensure that proper controls are in place to ensure both service and revenue assurance. There should be no negative impact on the subscriber.
The new billing system must have a sound roadmap and support requirements such as Number Portability, Monitoring and Interception and IP based billing. It should support provisioning and billing of quad play services i.e. Voice, Data, Multimedia, and TV services.
Finally, a new billing system must enable the Telco to rollout new services and products quickly to enable it to capture market share and increase market share.