Note 3: Billing within the Business: Ordering and Provisioning

Posted: 15 September 2005

Business functions normally view their own activities as central to the entire business. While this viewpoint is always exaggerated, business functions are interdependent, and often, the failure of any one function can cripple an otherwise sound business. This is certainly true for billing, which interacts with nearly every business function. Yet, billing can do more than collect cash. Properly structured, it can provide support to forecasting, marketing, and sales efforts. Thus, it is entirely appropriate to treat billing as a central business function, the approach taken here.

Operationally, billing businesses are complex combinations of staff and information technology. In these notes, business and billing 'functions' will describe 'what' is performed, 'systems' will be the collective combination of the manual and automated processes that support 'how' functions are performed, and 'applications' will be specific deployments of information technology.

An application may participate in one or more functions, be part of one or more processes, and can range in size from a large, comprehensive software package to a small, specific processing step. A business process supports one function and may utilise one or more applications as well as including manual steps. These notes are a general discussion that includes talk of functions and systems, and discusses applications when the specifics of how to perform a task are important.

The functional landscape around billing

No two business networks are identical. Thus, the implementation of no two billing systems will be the same. This holds true even within a given industry where the choices made by individual businesses will result in different billing arrangements.

Business functions that interact with billing include:

Ordering: Captures the details of a customer's purchase
Provisioning: Implements the customer's order in the network and/or billing
Service Assurance: Network monitoring and problem resolution to ensure maximum service availability and customer satisfaction
Data analysis: An internally focused business examination of customer data
Fraud Detection: Identifying suspicious or fraudulent activities taking place upon the network
Marketing Support: Supporting the search for sales opportunities from new and existing customers
Other billing systems: Where multiple billing systems exists within a business, each billing system is likely to interact with the others to share customer, reference or transaction information.

Billers can use separate or consolidated applications to interact with each of these functions. Provisioning and service assurance, the functions that form the touchpoints between the IT infrastructure and the network infrastructure, will encounter the greatest variation in their processing. Each industry's network will require different processes to support these functions, and the required applications will vary as a result.

Ordering

Each customer's purchase is captured by an order. An order is the customer's response to a biller's offerings, and refines them to a specific sub-set for that customer with specific details (and potentially customised pricing).

The customer's order can take several forms: by phone with the biller's staff, by regular mail using a paper purchase order, electronically through the use of an agreed B2B interface, or perhaps executed by the customer themselves via an internet-based self-service portal. Orders can be generated internally by the biller (e.g. in credit management - disconnection of the customer for an unpaid invoice, by service assurance - credit rebates when the biller does not maintain contracted service levels).

Each order is unique and must be differentiated from similar orders from the same customer for the same products. Similar orders must have unique identifiers reflecting the different phone numbers, meter or internet connections against which they are to be applied. In subsequent processing, one of the order's key validations is to confirm that the same order has not already been processed. Thus, it is essential that each order have, or be assigned, at the outset, a unique order number.

Orders may be simple and standardised, or exceedingly complex, customised requests. An order's complexity is limited only by the ordering system's ability to capture its details, and the biller's other systems' ability to process them. The likely complexity of an order will vary depending on the complexity of the network receiving the order. An order for a new tollway transponder is likely to be simpler than an order for modifications to an international telecommunications link.

Complex orders can take several days to define, and may require the biller to have or acquire detailed information on a customer's preferences, specialised knowledge of the biller's network, and service identifiers (e.g. phone or meter numbers) to ensure the billing and network arrangements are applied correctly.

To ensure that a biller can fill a customer's order, new network connections may need to be pre-tested (qualified). This pre-testing may involve evaluation of the order's details against a customer's existing product sets and the network itself. For example, evaluation tests may include product eligibility based on the customer's market segment, availability of network equipment at the customer's location, and technical compatibility (sociability) between the intended and existing network configurations.

When a customer orders a new product or service, or modifies an existing one, she has an expectation that its bill details will align with what it ordered. The price, description and date range of services provided must not vary, without an explanation, from what the customer ordered. Hidden from view, the network response supporting the customer's order may be implemented in a variety of ways, but it must achieve the desired external effect. Absent such alignment the biller will, at a minimum, incur additional costs through responding to the customer's inquiries and complaints. Optimally, the biller provides what was ordered without requiring the customer to understand how it was delivered.

Once an order's details have been captured and validated, it is sent onward (as appropriate) to the network for provisioning, and then on to billing. An order that varies only a customer's billing arrangements (e.g. billing address, pricing plan) is unlikely to require processing by the network. Any network change, however, should be passed to billing since it may change a customer's billing arrangements or the basis upon which it is charged. e.g. a change in the speed of a communications line, or configuring 'call waiting' on a phone line.

A specialised form of ordering is referred to as churn. It is the process whereby a customer can move (often in an automated way) between retail network providers whilst retaining their existing service details. e.g. a customer may change phone providers and retain her existing phone number, or change electricity retailers whilst remaining connected to and continuing to use the same meter.

Provisioning

Provisioning describes the range of network interfacing actions that add new network connections (e.g. connect a new phone), modify an existing network connection (e.g. change the allowed programs in a subscriber's premium cable TV package), and disconnect connections (e.g. change a meter's status as part of its final meter reading).

This function isolates the network's intricacies from the central business functions and their IT applications. The specific technical details required for configuring, reading and otherwise communicating with a network can be effected within the provisioning function. This function is especially important where the network is a heterogeneous collection of vendors and equipment, and each has its own approach to performing common tasks. Ideally, provisioning interactions within a network are highly automated. This is especially important when network connections are numbered in the millions.

Complex orders, especially for high-end telecommunications, may require an expert design step that reserves equipment, implements and then tests the proposed solution. Standard, simple orders using existing infrastructure (e.g. water or phone connections) are unlikely to require a design step unless the customer's premises had not previously been connected to the network (e.g. new housing) necessitating manual intervention. Otherwise the existing equipment would be (re)configured to reflect the order.

Complex installations or network modification may require 'time and materials' charges be applied. These charges, on an original or a subsequent order, are directed to billing for subsequent inclusion on the customer's invoice. They may be reflected in the initial invoice, or held for inclusion on a subsequent invoice.

Order validation should be performed before processing to ensure that the network is not impacted by inappropriate requests. Validation will cause some orders to error and manual intervention will be required. Errored orders may be rejected outright, or modified to correct the problem and resubmitted.

Contractual or regulatory provisions may require orders to be filled within a certain time period (i.e. service level agreements (SLA)). To meet these requirements, the provisioning process should be actively monitored (jeopardy management) to identify those orders in danger of breaching their mandated service levels. Automated or human judgment can then be applied on whether they should have their priority raised to meet their SLAs.

Where shared infrastructure is used for different retail providers, churn may require provisioning alter network settings. The network settings can indicate which retail provider currently 'owns' the retail relationship, and provide data security to prevent unauthorised access to the network settings by a competing retail provider's staff.

Tags: Billing, Ordering, Provisioning, Business, Network