A new beginning..

From today the journey begins again but this time on a more confident note on my own road :-) . Yes this is an independent platform for knowledgetemple. It has been an interesting experience in hosting the blog from this website from getting the domain to the learning experience in website customizations involving php. Did the theme customizations myself in order to tune the look of the website to my required needs and specifications.

Going ahead blogging would remain the mainstay of this website for quite some months to come. And then I would expand the website to include other activities as well which are very much in their incubation stages in the realm of thought.

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It’s All about Subscriptions

Well look around, Broadband internet – a fixed fee/month and unlimited usage, IP Telephony you pay a sum per month and that’s it , unlimited calls ,same for Cable TV. In some countries in prepaid Telco scenarios again for a subscription fee, you get to make and receive unlimited calls and even if not for all types of calls ,certain types of calls like local calls would definitely be unlimited.
Is this because competition on usage rating is not feasible anymore ? For example you can come with .001 units of currency theoretically saying 10 calls for .01 unit of currency but then there is no competition space left out in such cases between multiple players.
In India with the advent of new carries the bill boards are overflowing these days with who can give you everything in paisa and not a rupee but kind of when you weigh them side by side there is’nt much differentiation.
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Recent Updates

Stepped into the world of consulting on Billing and other areas of BSS. Expert competency on Oracle BRM with past exposure on earlier versions of BSCS.
Dealing with Billing and Revenue management software solution and implementations in Telecom, Media & Entertainment and IP based industries.
Meeting new people, discussing system requirements, technical assistance to various management functions of organizations is keeping me occupied.

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Integrating CRM and Billing Systems

This would be one of the integral links in any enterprise level BSS Project chunk in a larger BSS/OSS implementation .Actually if you look at this topic from different angles you might see the picture differently depending upon the role you are playing in this integration. The roles can be the enterprise business analysts ,disparate vendors providing the CRM and Billing solutions in the form of off the shelve packages, IT backoffice team defining the IT backbone for the enterprise operations flow, Financial and Auditing teams, Executive management teams and several other teams who if not involved in giving shape to the integration output ,build their expectations of better business turnover in their silos based on the success of this integration.

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Multiple Invoices for Mutliple Services of a Subscriber account.- Final Part

Multiple Invoices for Multiple ServicesGot a little bit late in following this up.  Actually in the first part itself should have shared a diagram below which would have helped in giving a general feel as to why and how we have a multiple service – multiple Invoice scenario.

Well I thought instead of trying to summarize let me link up to the Q & A directly. This will benefit readers in reading first hand the exchanges and points made by learned folks of the B/OSS area on linkedin.
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Operational Mistakes in B/OSS Systems – How can we get Better

No amount of training can unfortunately prevent this. Humans are prone to making mistakes. Spent 12 hours of my precious Saturday trying to come up with logic of recovery for corrupted data at customer site thousands of miles away. Well the last few words meant that this is a global phenomenon and you cannot fully stop this .

But there should be ways to minimize this .Learnings from mistakes have to incorporated in day-to-day policies guiding operational practices of Telco IT divisions or Other teams manning the Production Utilities and Systems of such an arena.
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Multiple Invoices for Mutliple Services of a Subscriber account. – Part 1

So currently I have created a question thread and getting feedback from different folks about this aspect. Through that thread I am trying to asses in a segregated manner the real usefulness of this phenomena and who is it really useful for?
On linkedin.com in Q&A section under the category Technology ->IT->telecommunications or Technology->wireless look the question “Payments on Service wise Invoices – Single or Multiple Payments?”. Not pasting the explicit link yet as would wait for other comments to pour in till the end of the open period.
So to summarize on that thread as till now the kind opinions expressed by the learned area exponents is of unanimous tone that you keep a single Invoice for more or less related services like voice,fax,sms but would probably think of having separate Invoices for converged services like Voice ,Broadband ,IPTV and the like .
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Learning Telecom Billing Concepts – How to make a Start?

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In a Telco billing system a person who is offering the Telco services can be the same guys who are providing the network backbone for supporting the provision of those services and hence they can be called Network Service Providers OR if they are just providing the Telco service they can just be called the Telco service operators.
The end customer meaning us using the services of the Telco service provider would be called the Subscriber.

On a rough and simplistic note,

1) First we should recognize the concepts of different intervals in which accounting tasks are done and also the popularly solemnized billing cycles at the end of which Invoices are sent to customers. Simple Googling on these terms will help you get familiarized with these terms.
2) Then you should focus on the rentals concept meaning the subscription fees of services that a typical subscriber in a billing system would be tied to.
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