Whether you’re a traditional wireline telco, a wireless provider, a cable operator or all of the above, chances are high that in the near term you’ll need to upgrade or replace your billing system. This could be due to mergers and acquisitions, consolidation, getting into new lines of business or simply to replace an outdated system that can’t handle today’s lean and transformed business models.
It’s no secret that success or failure rides heavily on the request for proposal that a service provider sends to potential vendors. Without a strong RFP, vendors will not have a solid grasp of your company’s requirements, project scope or other details.
Because a billing system is at the heart of a provider’s back office, submitting a strong RFP is that much more critical to ensuring the success of a deployment. And with a less than rosy global financial outlook, providers must balance all-important cost-cutting without skimping on core systems such as their billing platforms.
To shed light on what service providers should be looking for in a next-generation billing system, we turned to five consultants who follow the billing market closely: Experts from Accenture, BearingPoint, Capgemini, Deloitte and MarketPOWER LLC. They also offered their billing market outlooks for an unpredictable 2009.
Robert Purks, Partner at Accenture
Top RFP Considerations
- System Flexibility
- Integration between Billing Platform Modules
- Real-Time Rating
- Revenue Assurance
- Integration into the Current Architecture
- Converged Services
Describing next-generation billing as a “moving target,” Robert Purks, partner at Accenture, says it’s key to understand the true capabilities of the architecture a provider is considering and making sure they quantify and qualify the functionality.
For him, flexibility of the system is one of the top considerations. “This is a tough thing to nail down in an RFP, but it’s absolutely necessary to know how complex your system is and what are the limitations associated with it,” he said. Flexibility becomes even more important as carriers must roll out new products and services in weeks rather than months.
Also high on his list is how complete the integration is between modules within a billing system. “This is important because often when customers look for a solution, they don’t necessarily want just a billing system,” he said. “It’s a BSS system that may include billing, a customer experience layer and management capabilities.”
A lot of vendors have acquired what are essentially end-to-end capabilities over the years, but Purks cautions that not all of the integration between the piece parts is complete. “In a lot of cases it hasn’t been [completed], so it’s really about seeing what’s there, what’s closed, and what’s going to take a lot of work.”
Another key area is real-time rating, Purks said. “In North America, I don’t think I’ve seen a good example of combining prepaid and postpaid capabilities where customers can have a single account for everything,” he said. “We’re slowly starting to see it emerge, but as I look at solutions that clients want today, it’s not been at the top of the priority list.”
