A fundamental approach to know about Billing and revenue management and its business significance for companies who are in telecom communication/media business.

1. Billing And Revenue
Management
Fundamental Approach
Raghwendra Vikram
BRM Consultant
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

2. Introduction BRM
• Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM)
is the Telco's industry´s leading solution intended for communications
service providers.
• BRM can bill and manage all communications services including wire line,
wireless, broadband, cable, voice over IP, IPTV, music, and video.
• In 2006 Oracle acquired Portal Software and the solution was renamed
Oracle BRM.
• Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM)
empowers service providers to embrace innovation, significantly improve
time to market of new products and services, build stronger brands and
lower operational costs .
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3. What BRM can do…!
From Business Perspective:
• It supports full convergence-prepaid and postpaid for any service and
business model
• Enables rapidly and easily managed and launched personalized offers,
promotions, and discounts
• Includes partner management and revenue share for any model and
relationship
• Helps maximize revenue and minimize loss associated with fraud and
revenue leakage
• Rapidly supports new business models including cloud, M2M, and MVNOs
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4. BRM Functional Overview/Revenue Management Cycle
Revenue Analysis
Collect Customer
usages and
customer data
Revenue Generation
Set Up services
Register and manages
customers
Subscription management
Revenue Capture
Authenticate and
authorize Customer
logins
Rate service usages
BRM database
Price list data
Account data
Event data
Revenue Collection
Bill customers and collect
payments
Financial Management
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

5. • BRM revenue generation enables you to deliver services with optimal
pricing to your customers.
• The following business processes and capabilities are included in the
solution:
 Pricing Management:-
 Customer Management:-
 Service Enablement:-
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6. Registering Customers
• When you register a customer, you create a customer account in the BRM
database.
• (PCM_OP_CUST_COMMIT_CUSTOMER- Opcode)
Ways to Register Customers:-
• Have CSRs create accounts by using Customer Center
• Web-based registration
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7. BRM Pricing
• Charging customers for Services:-
 Defining/ creating a price list
 Products
 Discounts
 Deals
 Plans
 Plan Lists
 Billable Events
An Event is an action recognized and recorded by BRM
 Ratings the events
The process that determines the balance impact of an event to a customer’s
account
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8. • BRM revenue capture enables to rate service usage with a high level of
control and responsiveness.
The following business processes and capabilities are included within
BRM:
 Service Authorization:-
 Event Collection:-
 Rating and Discounting:-
 Balance Management:-
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

9. Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting
• Authentication provides a way for you to identify customers (for example,
by requiring a login name and a password).
• Authorization provides a way to control what customers can do with their
services. For example, you can restrict access based on products owned or
credit limits.
• Accounting tracks the resources used by the customer and enables you to
rate usage.
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10. Rating the events
• Rating process:- Rating is the process of measuring customer activity,
determining how much to charge for it.(Real time +Batch rating)
Events
Rating
Engine
Charge
Discount
Database
Event Creation with
Balance Impact
2 min call
Account ID
Pricing Info
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11. • BRM revenue collection
The following business processes and capabilities are included within
Billing and Revenue Management:
 Billing:-
 Financial Management:-
 Payment and Collections:-
 Revenue Sharing and Settlements:-
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

12. BRM Billing
Accounting and
Billing Cycle
• Accounting Cycle
duration is always
one month
• Billing Cycle is
multiple of
Accounting Cycle
BRM Performs
monthly
accounting
BRM
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

13. BRM Billing
• Billing Customers
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14. • Managing Payments:-
• By default BRM is configured to accept different methods of payments.(credit card,
direct debit, cash, and check)
• You can configure your business policies to handle overpayments and underpayments.
• Managing Accounts Receivable:-
• A/R includes all money owed to your business by customers who have
bought your goods or services.
• Typical A/R tasks include:
 Displaying a customer’s balance.
 Applying a credit or debit to a customer’s balance
 Managing billing disputes.
 Adjusting the tax on a bill.
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15. How BRM Processes a Typical Billable Event
Customer
Logs In for
Any
Service
BRM
database
External Application Collects login and password
Services
Email
Voice
GPRS
Authentication
Check/Granted
BRM record the
start/Stop of
session event
BRM rate the
event/ Any
discounts
Customer
A/c
balances
add up
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16. • BRM revenue analysis enables you to audit processes for revenue
leakage, generate business intelligence reports.
• The following business processes and capabilities are included within
BRM:
 Revenue Assurance:-
 Reporting & Reconciliation:-
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17. Reports Formats of Oracle BRM
• We can run the reports from any Windows 2000 or Windows XP computer that has
access to BRM database.
• We can display and print report results in tabular text format, a chart, or both. We
can also save reports to disk, convert reports to Portable Document Format (PDF)
or Rich Text Format (RTF), and display reports on HTML Web pages.
• We can export G/L reports into XML files and it can be loaded into external G/L
systems.BRM database contains invoices data in XML formats. Then SQL query is
used to retrieve data from BRM database. Then it delivers reports to subscriber
based on configurations.
• Most of the billing system generates structured ASCII text containing the content
of the bill.
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

18. Capturing system
• A data collector in the network switch (MSC, GGSN, SSMS etc) captures the usage in the form
of Call Detail Record (CDR)/Usage Detail Record (UDRs). These raw CDRs/UDRs are in turn
converted by the mediation system into a format understandable by the Billing System.
Network
Switches
MSC
GGSN
SSMS
WAP gate
Customer
starts using
services
Raw
UDR/CDR
Formatted
UDR/CDR
Mediation
System
Billing
System
The Mediation System collects CDRs from different network elements in different
formats. Various network elements generate CDRs in ASN.1 format and some
network elements have their own proprietary format of CDRs.
The Mediation System processes all the CDRs and converts them into a format
compatible to the downstream system, which is usually a Billing System.
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

19. Rating Process
• Rating Engine receives the events in the form of data records called as Call Detail
Records (CDRs) or Usage Detail Records (UDRs), which describe the use of a
product/service.
Rating
Engine is
part of BRM
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20. Function ..
• Accepting CDRs from the Mediation System or other service providers or
roaming partners in case of roaming usage.
• Validating the CDRs and eliminating any duplicate records. These duplicate
events are stored in a database table for later verification.
• To determine the customer account that has to be charged for the event.
Here, Rate process picks up the event source (Mobile Number or IP
Address, etc.) and checks the database to verify if this event source is
associated with any account. This step is called Event Guiding.
• To store the rated event in the database for a billing purpose or send it to
the external system for billing.
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

21. USAGES event rating
Pipeline Manager is used for rating and discounting events in batch and real-time
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22. Scalability of BRM for large Telecom service provider
• Oracle recently completed an extensive performance and scalability benchmark
exercise for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management that
demonstrated its ability to support 100 million subscribers.
• Scalability of this magnitude is vital to meeting the needs of tier-one
communications service providers and those looking to consolidate multiple billing
applications into a convergent platform.
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

23. Performance Enhancements
Flexible Billing :-
Support for billing cycles of any number of months through drop-down box functionality during
customer account creation or modification
Trial Billing :-
Option to run trial billing without generating an invoice
Shared Friends and Family Lists :-
Make each list eligible for different promotional rates/Creative promotional offers
Global Charge Sharing:-
Allow charging for a call, or a portion of a call, to the called number
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24. Tailor-Made Plans :-
Quickly tailor existing plans without having to create new product offerings
Security Enhancements :-
Provide support for the payment card industry standards, including Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
Partner Integrations :-
•Authentication support for Microsoft platform
•Extend functionality for partner supported products
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25. Limitations
Limitations for Entering Account Data
 BRM uses default limits for the number of characters allowed for each field of customer
data.
 For example, security codes can include up to 30 characters.
Calculating the Cycle Arrears Fee
If you modify the cycle start time or cycle end time for the product in the middle of a
cycle calculates the cycle forward fee or cycle arrears fee for the product.
Plan Transitions in BRM
• BRM imposes certain limitations on when accounts can transition to or from other plans.
It requires you to define plan transition rules for plan to-plan transition by manually
configuring the transition rules in Pricing Center.
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant

26. Bibliography
• http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16754_01/doc.75/e16711.pdf
• http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16754_01/doc.75/e23300.pdf
• https://blogs.oracle.com/.../entry/brm_patch_set_documentation
• www.tridens.si/2011/11/oracle-has-released-obrm-7.5
• www.tridens.si/2010/06/oracle-brm-billing-process/
Raghwendra Vikram_BRM_Consultant