Facts and More: the B4E Newsletter

Since long the billing industry is dealing with the same buzz words: Billing Process Quality, Flexibility, Configuration, Revenue Assurance, Convergence ... you name them.

The mess here is not only that these words are most of the times absolutely misused (e.g. convergence and flexibility). Some others (like quality, assured revenue) should be a must for a system being in productive use since years in a very sensitive area of great business importance: Billing. The true mess is that there are many factors and influences come together when we talk about quality of the billing process or of a specific system.

One particular quality improvement in the long run will be to reduce the number of billing systems. We still know service providers with more than 5 rating and billing systems in production. And we see the hassle to implement any change - be it another marketing campaign, be it a change originated by the use of certain technology.
Another improvement may be to look for rating and billing systems being able to completely cover the process from IN, Service Node, or Charging Gateway thru to bill production, thus avoiding complex interfaces, multiple data capturing and manifold manual interactions for the same business action (such as describing a tariff plan in a so-called convergent billing system and in the IN-based rating system).

One reliable, however costly way to prove quality of a billing system in terms of software quality and with regard to stability in use and in production is benchmarking the software and the process. When improving the billing landscape, this seems the only secure way to have a trustworthy base for the purchasing decision. Unfortunately, these benchmarks are all different and have not been done for all the many rating and billing systems on the market.

More or less by accident, B4E has an ongoing and long-term quality "benchmark" in production. At a specific customer installation B-oo-levard^® is rating and billing the same subscriber usage data in parallel to another billing system, which is one of the most deployed in the global market. So, every deviation in the two bills for the same customer is being investigated and reported. Now we have over 2 years of productive quality check and usability check on hand!
The result is astomishing: since months now B-oo-levard^® is running at 0,0000% faults! Of course, assuming that identical results in the bill are correct results.

This is a great confirmation for

(1) the quality assurance work in our development area and
(2) the easiness products and price plans can be implemented.