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Assure your business during BSS transformation | Mobileum

Written by Fernando E. Bastos | 19/07/2013
Prevent a modern and consolidated BSS from leading to revenue leakage

In response to innovative products and services, the communications industry depends on Business Support Systems (BSS) solutions (Order Management, CRM, Billing, Product Catalog, Customer Reference Data) that can fulfill requirements for time to market, flexibility, scalability, etc. However the current set of BSS solutions can make life more difficult and complex for service providers due to continuous configuration of new products, services, and processes. The time required to execute these solutions often leads to a lack of focus on marketing, sales, operations, and other business areas, causing service providers to struggle and lose competitiveness. 

When these struggles arise, providers must make strategic decisions to transform existing BSS solutions into solutions that are compliant with the current requirements from marketing, sales, operations, and other business areas.  Modernizing, consolidating, and transforming these solutions may present a considerable challenge for a service provider’s IT department. A project like this can take years to be completed successfully and will demand significant resources from the service provider in terms of CAPEX and OPEX.

In addition to the tasks to plan, design, implement, test, and execute the data migration, service providers must also recognize the importance of independent verification of the data mapping, transformation, and migration. It is easy to miss something in the complexity and quantity of scenarios to be mapped. This might lead to errors during the migration itself or even worse, problems and data inconsistencies after the customer has implemented the new solution.

Independent verification and audits would support the data migration process, and it can be executed through very simple steps:
  1. Extract data from the legacy system.
  2. Transform extracted data into the format expected for the new solution.
  3. Extract the data migrated from the new solution.
  4. Compare and conciliate the transformed data from Step 2 with the data extracted in Step 3.
  5. Generate alarms, reports and KPIs with all data inconsistencies found during execution of Step 4.
Despite of the simplicity of these steps, it is important to note that in step 2 there is independent replication of all data mapping and transformation executed by the BSS transformation program.  This is one of the most important outputs of such a project, the opportunity to audit and validate all work done by the data migration initiative.

Below is the list of business process (according to Business Process Framework) that should be verified at a minimum:
  1. Product Catalogue – verify that all products, services, campaigns, discounts, equipment, etc., are available to product, marketing, and business areas for immediate use.
  2. Fulfillment – verify that all relevant data is available into the new solution to support order management, service, and resource configuration (including customer provisioning).
  3. Customer Information – ensure that all necessary information from the customer perspective is available and ready to be used by each business areas (relationship management, assurance, financial, etc.)
  4. Billing Rules and Revenue Management – certify that all necessary information for the execution of mediation, rate plans, billing rules, collections rules, and process will be migrated accordingly.
This list is based on previous experience. There may be other processes that aren’t on the list. However the key is to think big, but start small. Define key priorities and focus on them. 

The major benefits and results of a successful audit execution include the following:
  • Seamless transition that does not impact the customer base.
  • Migration of all relevant information.
  • Identification of issues with the migration software that converted different types of data.
  • Prevention of downstream impact to larger migration cycles
  • Execution of verifications across the entire customer base
  • Improved customer experience and billing accuracy

Transforming BSS solutions is not a simple, easy task. It impacts the majority of a service provider’s business processes and requires large investments.  There are a lot of lessons learned, and extensive documentation and case studies on how to mitigate problems that arise. The utilization of independent audits and verifications of data migration is just one of them.