Functional overview

The Billiant application is logically divided into 11 subsystems as shown in the figure below. The application communicates heavily with surrounding systems and applications like network equipment and servers, ERP systems, A/R and printing systems.

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Customer Care

The Customer Care subsystem is designed to allow CSR's access to all functions necessary to handle customers, their subscriptions, balances, invoices, credits and other relevant customer information.

Order management

Some changes to subscription information is usually entered into the system to take immediate effect, while other changes are entered as orders at one point in time and scheduled to be executed, or take effect, at some later date. The latter form is handled in Billiant as subscription orders. The Order management subsystem handles all such orders and an order daemon keeps track of executing ordered changes on the scheduled date.

Service Management

The Service Management subsystem contains functions for setting up and configuring all aspects of services that the operator wants to offer its customers. This includes naming, bundling, network setup and a vast array of pricing options.

Reports

The reports subsystem is built to handle easy addition of customized reports which may be built in the native Billiant report engine which produces HTML-format reports. The Job Management subsystem can be used to schedule reports to run periodically or during off-peak hours.

Invoicing

Billiant is designed to excel in managing customer care and billing of complex services. It is also worth noting that Billiant is a pre-invoicing solution, designed to interact with external ERP systems, legacy billing systems or invoice-printing systems rather than including the same functionality. The system generates detailed invoicing data in XML format that may easily be delivered to any third-party software that the operator uses for handling economical transactions and invoice printing, like for instance an ERP system, a print house or a receivables management partner. Billiant can generate invoicing data on a daily basis to distribute the load on downstream A/R and printing functions. The Invoicing subsystem allows access to journals of invoicing data, credit notes, payments and general ledger transactions.

Inventory Management

The standard software supports a framework for controlling and managing inventory items of various types, such as A-numbers, SIM-cards, smartcards etc. New types can be handled by the same framework by adding type-specific plug-ins.

Provisioning

The Provisioning framework allows the operator to carry out automatic provisioning where appropriate and manual provisioning via work orders where necessary. The framework is designed for easy addition of plug-in modules that service specific network elements or interfaces with automatic provisioning.

Collection

Collection is the process of gathering usage information from elements in the operator's network. The Collection subsystem allows the operator to create and configure so called Collectors that collect different sets of data from various network elements depending on the underlying network technology or service delivery platform. The collected data is continuously priced by the rating process. Billiant's collection framework allows easy addition of new types of Collectors as plug-in modules.

Rating

Billiant is based on the concept of a scalable and distributable, real time rating engine that allows high flexibility in the rating and pricing of usage transactions for services.

System Administration

System functions not pertaining to any specific subsystem are collected in the System Administration subsystem. Here the system owner can specify basic configurations, administer system users and their access rights, handle customer categories, server tasks, taxes, logs and more.

Job Management

The Job Management subsystem manages configuration, scheduling, execution and history related to jobs. There are Billiant jobs for file imports/exports, FTP transfers, scheduled reports, credit limit checks, system maintenance tasks and more. Customized jobs may be created and added to the framework, allowing them to take advantage of these functions. The job management is an important tool for creating solutions with high levels of automation.

APIs

A set of APIs allow for integration possibilities with third party systems.