E-Plus: “BestOptionBilling” in Action
With currently (end of 2003) more than 8 million subscribers E-Plus Mobilfunk is the 3rd largest mobile operator in Germany. E-Plus has always been a very innovative and service oriented company prepared to go along unused or new ways. In many areas E-Plus is regarded as the forerunner in its business.

In late 2001 E-Plus started to evaluate the implementation of a “BestOptionBilling” product. The idea was in line with a major corporate strategy: to provide transparency to the customer – including transparency of the bill – thus to keep churn rates as low as possible. A second major goal was to lure away profitable customers from the competition in a saturated market. After an intensive market investigation the “Tarifautomatik” was launched in mid 2002 – based on B4E’s B-oo-levard®. From the beginning “Tarifautomatik” was offered to the market segments SOHO and small to medium Corporate Customers. First all so-called “Professional GSM” tariff plans were included, later various GPRS tariff plans were added. Today, B-oo-levard® calculates now for every “Tarifautomatik” customer 12 different mutations considering more than 300 discounting schemas on top in parallel to determine the “original” and the best price based on the call detail records of the passed month.

Technical Implementation
The top priorities for the implementation of the “Tarifautomatik”, i.e. of B-oo-levard®, were

• to implement in time and in budget

• with no faults – be it software faults or wrong configuration

However, the most important priority was: not to touch the existing billing infrastructure. After calculating the “BestOpionPlan” the data in the print shop files for the "Tarifautomatik"-customers are modified in such a way, that the customer does not only see the tariff plan with “Best Price” but also the price under the original tariff plan. For correct bookkeeping B-oo-levard® sends correction records for changed bill amounts to the existing billing system and the ERP system.

Start of Production was on time. As in this installation the existing billing system is still calculating the respective bill under the original tariff plan an excellent check procedure is provided. Until now, all deviations between the prices calculated by the existing billing system and by B-oo-levard® were due to faults and wrong configuration in the legacy billing system. So, B-oo-levard® is serving as a revenue assurance system as well.