Telecom Billing - System Interfaces

This is an introduction to billing system and its system interfaces. Following diagram shows a typical architecture of a Telecom Billing System.

                                         

CRM/OMOF System: This is the first system from where a customer order is captured and customer is created into the system. CRM stand for Customer Relationship Management and OMOF stands for Order Management and Order Fulfillment.

Provisioning System: This system takes commands either from the Billing System or CRM/OMOF System to activate, de-activate and suspend the services. Both the architectures are valid and depends how architect design the whole setup.

Network Inventory System (NIS): This system maintains all the network identifiers like phone numbers, MSISDN, IP addresses, email addresses etc and technically it is called Network Inventory System. Depending on the system architecture, either CRM/OMOF of Billing System contacts NIS to obtain a required network identifier and assign it to the customer at the time of order creation.

Billing System: Telecom Billing system is a process of collecting usage, aggregating it, applying required usage and rental charges and finally generating invoices for the customers.

Network Switches: Network switches are responsible to provide all the services to the end customers based on what services have been provisioned for the customer. These systems are responsible of controlling calls, data download, SMS transfer etc and finally generating Call Detail Records.

Mediation System: The Mediation System collects CDRs from different network elements in different formats. Various network elements generate CDRs in ASN.1 format and some network elements have their own proprietary format of CDRs.

Data Ware House (DWH) System: This is a downstream system for the Billing System and usually keeps tons of historical data related to the customers. Billing System dumps various customers’ information into the DWH system. This information includes service usage, invoices, payments, discounts and adjustments etc. All this information is used to generate various types of management reports and for business intelligence and forecast.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP): An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system provides modules to handle Financials, Human Resources, and Supply chain management etc. Billing System interface with this system is used to post all the financial transactions like invoices, payments, adjustments.

Payment Gateway: As such this is not necessarily be a complete system but it could be a kind of custom components which sits in between the Billing System and different payment channels like banks, credit card gateway, shops and retailers etc. All the payment channels use payment gateway to post payments to the billing system to settle down customer invoices.