Business Processes involved in a Prepaid System.

Prepaid System of the Telecom world has most of the components same as in the Postpaid one except for few modifications. They have the Product Catalog, the Universal Resource Management, Voucher Management, the Customer Management, Acquisition and Formating, Rater and Replenishment Module.
Once again, the processes involved in URM, CM, A&F and Rater are the same as in the Postpaid system. The Customer gets his SIM, IMSI and MSISDN from the URM that controls its status and his records related to name, address, status, offers/price plan selected are stored in the Customer Management module.
Various types of vouchers for are maintained for charging/recharging the account for the purpose of making calls. These vouchers and thier status are maintained in the Voucher Management module.
Now we have the Replenishment Module here which is quite similar to the Accounts Receivable module in the Postpaid System. The job of the Replenishment Module is to keep a track of amount charged for a call, calculated by the rating process, to deduct it from the current balance in the account. Thus, when the amount becomes nil in the account, the customer can no longer make a call and has to buy the voucher to recharge his account.
These are the business processes involved in a Telecom domain.
I hope this was helpful for those who want to enter the Telecom world for a job/earning.

End to End Business of a Cellular Postpaid System.

The end to end business of a postpaid system includes components like universal resource management, customer management, acquisition and formatting, rater, billing, bill formatter, accounts receivable and collections. At the very base stands the black box called product catalog.

Universal resource management is a module where all the information regarding the basic entities that contitutes a cellular phone is stored. By basic entities, I mean the MSISDN, the IMSI and the SIM numbers. It stores the information regarding their current status like whether it is in Reserved, Active, Suspended,Cancelled, Aging mode. Each entity has its own life cycle. For example an MSISDN which is actually the cellular phone number can be initially 'reserved' at the time of manufacturing. Once sold, its status becomes 'active' as the subscriber can make calls. In case the subscriber fails to pay the bill for a certain time period, the number can be suspended and resumed once he clears all his bills. If the subscriber does not pay his bills even after the number has been suspended, the number can be cancelled as it goes into collection and after a certain time, it goes into aging mode in which the number cannot be given to any cellular phone for few months. Later, the number once again enters the 'active' pool. There are various processes involved in changing the status from reserved to active then to suspended or to cancelled and then later aging.

Customer Management, as the name suggests, is a module where the list of customers and thier current status are maintained. The mandatory elements like name, billing address and offers/price plans are stored and managed. The customers can approach the customer service representatives to lodge any complain or to inform the change of address or to change offers. The various status of customers related to active, suspended, cancelled are maintained in the database. Process of suspension and cancellation is dependent on the payment of bills on time. A Customer can buy one account and can have several subscribers under it. The payment of all the bills are done through this account via various payment modes like Cheque, Direct Debit, Credit Card, Cash etc. So, whether the customer is in credit or under debit is dependent on his account status. The billing address submitted by the customer is the address where all his bills/invoices are sent.

Once a customer has a connection, he can start making calls. The EDRs and CDRs are generated at the switch level in the network, for each call. The calls can be within the same network or across the different ones. Calls can have roaming facility enabled or disabled. The processes involved in Acquisition and Formatting module takes these files and formats it is a way acceptable by the Rater. The file includes the subscriber number and his corresponding offer.

The job of the Rater is to accept or reject the file from Acquisition and Fomatting. These EDRs and CDRs are processed by rater and the corresponding rates are fetched from the given offer and the call is rated on the basis of the same. The total charge calculated is passed on to the Billing/Invoicing system.

The processes involved in the Billing system stores all the charges of all accounts in the system and calculates the total charge pending for each at the time of generating the end of cycle bills for the customer.Bill formatter module can help to decide the format in which the bill is to be produced for each Customer. Billing system takes into consideration all the One time charges, Recurring charges, charges from the Rater, charges from the Customer management in case any penalty was charged or any credit was given by it and it checks the current balance in the Customer's account and adjusts the final charge with it accordingly to produce the total charge pending for him.

The customer has the option of paying his bill via the mode he had selected earlier at the time of subscription. The Accounts Receivable deals with the process of receiving the payment and adjusting the final amount in the account, resulting in either credit or debit. If the account is in credit and there is amount is not cleared for a certain period of time, the account goes into suspension status and the Collection module starts the process of following up with the customer and collecting the money. In case, it is unable to recover the due amount after several attempts, the account is cancelled.

Product Catalog is one of the major module the impacts the Business of Telecom industry. It contains all the offers and price plans pre-decided by the business to be offered to the customers for the purpose of rating the calls.

This was a simplified overview of how things work in a Telecom postpaid world.

Testing - Some Concepts

Here are some facts about testing. There are two kinds of testing- white box testing and black box testing. Also, there is the automated testing and the manual testing. In white box testing, the correctness of the complete source code is tested whereas the black box testing is not concerned with the written code but just with the inputs to be provided and seeing that the output meets the given requirement. Manual testing is performed manually by starting the applications and clicking on various tabs and feeding the inputs and manually checking the output. Automated testing is done by means of tools like winrunner and loadrunner. Using winrunner, one needs to record the activities that needs to be performed repeatedly and then run the ready recorded script each time one needs to test the same thing. The kind of data to be input can be changed manually in the script each time. There can be need for debugging and correcting winrunner scripts, too, at times.
Testing can also be categorized under Unit testing, Integration testing, System testing, User Acceptance testing(UAT). Unit testing are generally performed by the developers. Integration and System testing are what is done by the Testers. Integration testing involves the integrating of different applications and testing them. System Testing is the testing of the complete end to end System of a Business to see if the complete Business Requirement are being met. UAT is done for the Client to check if it meets the Clients requirements and is ready to be accepted by them.
One of the most important role of a Tester is to understand the Requirements and design Test Cases to test all the scenarios in order to catch as many errors/failures as possible. In case of System Testing, creation of an end to end Calendar that meets the Business Requirement might be needed. Tools like Quality Center and Calendar Application makes it possible to organize Test Cases and Calendars at one place and also provided facilities for raising defects and following up on it. The Calendar can be executed manually or using winrunner. Manual work can be slow and automated will be fast and accurate provided the Tester knows how to debug the script in case it gets stuck due to some errors.
Testers should be usually familiar with the Operating System like Unix, Databases like Oracle, Application Server like Weblogic, the Applications to be tested and the business knowledge behind it. He should be comfortable using tools like Exceed, Putty, Toad, Test Director, Calendar Application, Winrunner, Loadrunner and the relevant web-applications.
Testing jobs may not be very highly paid but one just cannot do without implementing this stage of Software production.