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.
