Considerations for Your Next-Gen Billing RFP

Purks says one area that he sees viewed as more of an afterthought even today is revenue assurance. “Carriers are good about having revenue assurance folks participate during the RFP process, but what we often see is an effort to qualify what’s there, but not necessarily to make it a core set of the RFP,” he said. Carriers will need to know what tools are in place for reconciliation between bill transactions or mediation.

Another important element to include in an RFP is an assessment of the ease of integrating a new billing system into an existing architecture. “That requires articulating what your current architecture is to the vendors upfront,” Purks said.

Also on his RFP list is support for converged services. “This is the ability to bill and support multiple lines of business on a single system,” he said. “It’s a reality for some companies, while others are still moving in that direction.”

OUTLOOK: Looking at the billing market for 2009, Purks continues to see consistency on the part of providers. “The cable companies are focusing on triple play or quadplay. Wireless providers are pushing to evolve systems and reduce time-to-market. And in wireline we’re seeing a push to get digital content out and converged billing,” he said. “As far as predicting a change in strategy, I don’t see any significant change coming. From the investments being made, and the momentum within these industry segments, I think they are going to stay the course.”

Alok Ajmera, Senior Manager at BearingPoint

Top RFP Considerations

• Single View of the Customer
• Support for Microbilling
• Support for Converged Business Models (Prepaid/Postpaid)

In light of today’s financial picture, billing and related functions are fundamental to the business bottom line of an organization, says Alok Ajmera, senior manager at BearingPoint. “Whether it’s billing and collections, revenue assurance or accounting, all of this helps the CFO deliver good results to shareholders and other constituents within an organization,” he said.

Ajmera adds that basic functions of a billing system are fairly straightforward — depending on where a service provider client is in terms of service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption — but it’s important to know how the billing solution integrates with a master data management solution environment.

He says providers need to find out what billing platforms can do from a more horizontal standpoint. For example, being able to handle a lot of data moving between other areas such as revenue assurance and reporting. He adds that microbilling is a key area for providers to consider when looking at RFPs. “Telcos need to know how they can bill for individual services in a cost-effective manner,” he said. “People are downloading songs or ringtones or sending SMS messages, but it all flows to the biller, so you have to know how to handle one-off charges and integrate them rather than having separate streams.”

And with so much consolidation happening in all aspects of the communications industry, convergence of multiple platforms into a single billing environment is also important. “What they are finding is the different business models they are trying to integrate are creating a strain on the billing platform,” he said. “How do you bill in an integrated manner when you have provisioning systems that were previously all separate.” He says success will come down to the billing system’s ability to deal with varied sources of data and then create accurate invoices from that information.