oracle billing and revenue management(brm)

Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

Billing And Revenue Management

Fundamental ApproachRaghwendra Vikram

BRM Consultant


Introduction BRM• Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM)

is the Telco's industry´s leading solution intended for communications service providers.

• BRM can bill and manage all communications services including wire line, wireless, broadband, cable, voice over IP, IPTV, music, and video.

• In 2006 Oracle acquired Portal Software and the solution was renamed Oracle BRM.

• Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM) empowers service providers to embrace innovation, significantly improve time to market of new products and services, build stronger brands and lower operational costs .


What BRM can do…!From Business Perspective:

• It supports full convergence-prepaid and postpaid for any service and business model

• Enables rapidly and easily managed and launched personalized offers, promotions, and discounts

• Includes partner management and revenue share for any model and relationship

• Helps maximize revenue and minimize loss associated with fraud and revenue leakage

• Rapidly supports new business models including cloud, M2M, and MVNOs


BRM Functional Overview/Revenue Management Cycle

Revenue Analysis

Collect Customer usages and customer data

Revenue GenerationSet Up services Register and manages customersSubscription management

Revenue CaptureAuthenticate and authorize Customer loginsRate service usages

Revenue CollectionBill customers and collect paymentsFinancial Management

BRM database

Price list dataAccount dataEvent data


• BRM revenue generation enables you to deliver services with optimal pricing to your customers.

• The following business processes and capabilities are included in the solution:

Pricing Management:-

Customer Management:-

Service Enablement:-


Registering Customers

• When you register a customer, you create a customer account in the BRM database.

• (PCM_OP_CUST_COMMIT_CUSTOMER- Opcode)

Ways to Register Customers:-• Have CSRs create accounts by using Customer Center• Web-based registration


BRM Pricing

• Charging customers for Services:- Defining/ creating a price list

Products Discounts Deals Plans Plan Lists

Billable Events

Ratings the events

An Event is an action recognized and recorded by BRM

The process that determines the balance impact of an event to a customer’s account


• BRM revenue capture enables to rate service usage with a high level of control and responsiveness. The following business processes and capabilities are included withinBRM:

Service Authorization:- Event Collection:- Rating and Discounting:- Balance Management:-


Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting

• Authentication provides a way for you to identify customers (for example, by requiring a login name and a password).

• Authorization provides a way to control what customers can do with their services. For example, you can restrict access based on products owned or credit limits.

• Accounting tracks the resources used by the customer and enables you to rate usage.


Rating the events• Rating process:- Rating is the process of measuring customer activity,

determining how much to charge for it.(Real time +Batch rating)

EventsRating Engine

Charge

Discount

Database

Event Creation with Balance Impact

2 min call

Account ID

Pricing Info


• BRM revenue collectionThe following business processes and capabilities are included within Billing and Revenue Management:

Billing:-

Financial Management:-

Payment and Collections:-

Revenue Sharing and Settlements:-


BRM Billing

Accounting and Billing Cycle

Accounting Cycle duration is always one monthBilling Cycle is multiple of Accounting Cycle

BRM Performs monthly accounting

BRM


BRM Billing

• Billing Customers


• Managing Payments:-

• By default BRM is configured to accept different methods of payments.(credit card,

direct debit, cash, and check)

• You can configure your business policies to handle overpayments and underpayments.

• Managing Accounts Receivable:-• A/R includes all money owed to your business by customers who have

bought your goods or services.• Typical A/R tasks include:

Displaying a customer’s balance. Applying a credit or debit to a customer’s balance Managing billing disputes. Adjusting the tax on a bill.


How BRM Processes a Typical Billable Event

Customer Logs In for Any Service

BRM database

ServicesEmailVoiceGPRS

External Application Collects login and password

Authentication Check/Granted

BRM record the start/Stop of session event

BRM rate the event/ Any discounts

Customer A/c balances add up


• BRM revenue analysis enables you to audit processes for revenue leakage, generate business intelligence reports.

• The following business processes and capabilities are included within BRM:

Revenue Assurance:-

Reporting & Reconciliation:-


Reports Formats of Oracle BRM

• We can run the reports from any Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer that has access to BRM database.

• We can display and print report results in tabular text format, a chart, or both. We can also save reports to disk, convert reports to Portable Document Format (PDF) or Rich Text Format (RTF), and display reports on HTML Web pages.

• We can export G/L reports into XML files and it can be loaded into external G/L systems.BRM database contains invoices data in XML formats. Then SQL query is used to retrieve data from BRM database. Then it delivers reports to subscriber based on configurations.

• Most of the billing system generates structured ASCII text containing the content of the bill.


Capturing system

• A data collector in the network switch (MSC, GGSN, SSMS etc) captures the usage in the form of Call Detail Record (CDR)/Usage Detail Record (UDRs). These raw CDRs/UDRs are in turn converted by the mediation system into a format understandable by the Billing System.

MSCGGSNSSMS

WAP gate

Network Switches

Customer starts using services

Raw UDR/CDR

Formatted UDR/CDR

Mediation System

Billing 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.The Mediation System processes all the CDRs and converts them into a format compatible to the downstream system, which is usually a Billing System.


Rating Process

• Rating Engine receives the events in the form of data records called as Call Detail Records (CDRs) or Usage Detail Records (UDRs), which describe the use of a product/service.

Rating Engine is part of BRM


Function ..• Accepting CDRs from the Mediation System or other service providers or

roaming partners in case of roaming usage.• Validating the CDRs and eliminating any duplicate records. These duplicate

events are stored in a database table for later verification.• To determine the customer account that has to be charged for the event.

Here, Rate process picks up the event source (Mobile Number or IP Address, etc.) and checks the database to verify if this event source is associated with any account. This step is called Event Guiding.

• To store the rated event in the database for a billing purpose or send it to the external system for billing.


USAGES event rating

Pipeline Manager is used for rating and discounting events in batch and real-time


Scalability of BRM for large Telecom service provider

• Oracle recently completed an extensive performance and scalability benchmark exercise for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management that demonstrated its ability to support 100 million subscribers.

• Scalability of this magnitude is vital to meeting the needs of tier-one communications service providers and those looking to consolidate multiple billing applications into a convergent platform.


Performance Enhancements

Flexible Billing :-Support for billing cycles of any number of months through drop-down box functionality during customer account creation or modification

Trial Billing :-

Option to run trial billing without generating an invoice

Shared Friends and Family Lists :-Make each list eligible for different promotional rates/Creative promotional offers

Global Charge Sharing:-

Allow charging for a call, or a portion of a call, to the called number


Tailor-Made Plans :-Quickly tailor existing plans without having to create new product offerings

Security Enhancements :-Provide support for the payment card industry standards, including Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

Partner Integrations :-•Authentication support for Microsoft platform •Extend functionality for partner supported products


LimitationsLimitations for Entering Account Data BRM uses default limits for the number of characters allowed for each field of customer

data. For example, security codes can include up to 30 characters.

Calculating the Cycle Arrears FeeIf you modify the cycle start time or cycle end time for the product in the middle of a cycle calculates the cycle forward fee or cycle arrears fee for the product.

Plan Transitions in BRM• BRM imposes certain limitations on when accounts can transition to or from other plans.

It requires you to define plan transition rules for plan to-plan transition by manually configuring the transition rules in Pricing Center.


Bibliography

• http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16754_01/doc.75/e16711.pdf• http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16754_01/doc.75/e23300.pdf• https://blogs.oracle.com/.../entry/brm_patch_set_documentation• www.tridens.si/2011/11/oracle-has-released-obrm-7.5• www.tridens.si/2010/06/oracle-brm-billing-process/

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16754_01/doc.75/e16711.pdf

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16754_01/doc.75/e23300.pdf

https://blogs.oracle.com/.../entry/brm_patch_set_documentation




http://www.tridens.si/2011/11/oracle-has-released-obrm-7.5



http://www.tridens.si/2010/06/oracle-brm-billing-process/





oracle billing and revenue management(brm)

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