Note 26: Service Provisioning / Activation

Posted: 24 March 2007

Due to the diversity of possible networks, these notes will focus on the billing impact of different provisioning approaches, rather than the networks themselves.

Customer Orders

Customers and the biller themselves will wish to establish, change and eventually end their billing relationship. This processing will be done by means of orders or requests that will establish and change the billing arrangements, and these orders will differ in ways such as:

Granularity: Customer orders may change discrete pieces of the billing relationship one aspect at a time, modifying areas such as the speed of a data / broadband line, or the bundle that applies to a telephone service. These changes can build on one another, updating network and billing related system at the same time. Alternatively, a collection of changes may be aggregated into a single order and processed together once all changes have been captured from the customer.
Batch versus real-time: Once taken orders may be processed immediately, or be collected together with other orders and be processed later in batch. This choice has implications in the infrastructure required, its availability and cost, and the elapsed time until the customer's order impacts their billing relationship.
Complexity: The more updates included in a customer order, the higher its complexity and the higher the chance that an incorrect request will be made. Larger orders are more likely to be executed in batch rather than interactively online. If multiple requests are performed interactively, then errors can be addressed as they occur, and consequential impacts can be minimised.

Details of the changes made to billing arrangements should be captured / logged to form an audit trail of how and when changes were made and who initiated them. This log can be useful when system problems are investigated, or a customer complaint or dispute is raised.

In raising an order against an existing billing arrangement, key identifiers such as the network services (e.g. telephone numbers, meter numbers) or billing account details are required to associated the order's changes to the correct network and billing arrangements.

Network Processing

The network provisioning and maintenance process of all types of network connections is driven by customers' (and the biller's) orders, and is reduced to the common tasks of: activation, modification and cancellation of network (service) connections. Each network type (e.g. electricity, tollway, telephone) will have its own network-specific features, which will be modified differently depending on the network technologies employed. The provisioning and billing processes required by a biller can be quite complex as a result.

Some billers also require two specialised tasks: 'churns' and 'network ports'. These tasks are not available or meaningful for all network types, industries or locations. These tasks are usually implemented as part of an industry-wide initiative driven by the government, or government regulator, to increase the level of 'competition' for customers between retail billers. Competition is increased by enabling the easy movement of customers between retail providers. The ease of this processing is evaluated usually from the customer's perspective rather than the billers.

Non-network Processing

Customer orders can also perform non-network provisioning. A customer can modify their demographic information (e.g. postal address), change their billing hierarchy (e.g. move responsibility for a district office between business divisions), or apply new pricing plans. Orders can reflect penalties, rebates and non-network charges (e.g. application fees, equipment purchases, time and material priced installations).

Order Management

A customer's order, once finalised, must be provisioned in the network (if applicable), reflected in the customer's billing arrangements, and confirmed as complete to the originating 'order application'. The solution developed by the biller will be influenced by:

Existing IT and network infrastructure: These elements support the biller's existing capabilities and represent a minimum level that must be maintained.
Current business requirements: These requirements describe the biller's current business environment, and are supported by the existing infrastructure. Manual processes may be used in conjunction with IT systems to support the biller's current business requirements.
Future business requirements: These define the future business capabilities the biller would like to operate with. Additional development (or manual processes) will be required when the existing infrastructure cannot support these new requirements.
Strategic policies: The IT, ordering, billing and network strategies combine to describe the biller's future operating environment. These policy directions can describe the consolidation of existing systems (i.e. existing capabilities delivered by a less complex operating environment), automation of manual processing (e.g. for speed, accuracy and scalability), and new development addressing capability gaps (i.e. in support of future business requirements).

Where a biller introduces a new network that must integrate with and reuse the biller's existing ordering infrastructure, the new network's ordering solution will be influenced by existing processes since it must operate sociably with the existing infrastructure. Where a biller deploys a new network in an operational environment built from scratch, the chosen solution can break with established practice.

Tags: Billing, Activation, Provisioning, Service order, Customer, Batch, Real-time