This document provides sample requirements for a data warehousing project at a telecommunications company. It includes examples of business, data, query, and interface requirements. The business requirements sample outlines requirements for collecting and analyzing customer, organization, and individual data. The data requirements sample defines dimensions for party (customer) data and hierarchies. The performance measures sample defines a measure for vanilla rated call revenue amount.

1. Data Management & Warehousing
SAMPLE
Requirements Examples
DAVID M WALKER
Version: 0.1
Date: 01/01/2006
Data Management & Warehousing
138 Finchampstead Road, Wokingham, Berkshire, RG41 2NU, United Kingdom
http://www.datamgmt.com

2. Sample - Requirements Examples
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... 2
Synopsis .................................................................................................................................... 3
Intended Audience .................................................................................................................... 3
About Data Management & Warehousing ................................................................................. 3
Business Requirements ............................................................................................................ 4
Data Requirements ................................................................................................................... 9
Dimensions ........................................................................................................................... 9
Performance Measures ....................................................................................................... 11
Query Requirements ............................................................................................................... 15
Interface Requirements ........................................................................................................... 16
Copyright ................................................................................................................................. 17
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3. Sample - Requirements Examples
Synopsis
This document has a number of samples of completed sections from the four sets of
requirements (Business, Data, Query and Interface) to aid analysts in completing their own
templates. The requirements are a merger of actual requirements taken from Telcos around
the world. They are not consistent nor should anything be read into any requirements as
coming from any particular operator. There are no examples from the Technical
Requirements as they do not have the same form of template table.
Intended Audience
Reader Recommended Reading
Executive Synopsis through to Background
Business Users Synopsis through to Background
IT Management Entire Document
IT Strategy Entire Document
IT Project Management Entire Document
IT Developers Entire Document
About Data Management & Warehousing
Data Management & Warehousing is a specialist consultancy in data warehousing, based in
Wokingham, Berkshire in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1995 by David M Walker, our
consultants have worked for major corporations around the world including the US, Europe,
Africa and the Middle East. Our clients are invariably large organisations with a pressing need
for business intelligence. We have worked in many industry sectors but have specialists in
Telco’s, manufacturing, retail, financial and transport as well as technical expertise in many of
the leading technologies.
For further information visit our website at: http://www.datamgmt.com
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4. Sample - Requirements Examples
Business Requirements
BUSINESS REQUIREMENT
Business Requirement Number 1
Business Requirement Name Organisations & Individuals (Customers)
Priority High
Currently available in the Data Warehouse Yes
Description
There is a requirement to hold details and build a history of customers’ activities with Telco,
tracking them through their Telco relationship ‘life cycle’, from initial marketing prospect,
through sales, service provisioning, billing, etc.
Organisations and individuals include customers and prospects for Telco products and
services and all others for which information can be obtained. Organisations may also be
OLO (Other Licensed Operators) network customers, third-party dealers, the customers of
third-party dealers, and other organisations such as Telco own business units, OFTEL,
contractors, suppliers, etc.
Note: prospects details are only required for prospects that have become customers or
prospects that form part of the Target Account List.
The information held for organisations and individuals must include name, address,
postcode, etc. and a standardised version the customer name into a common search
format.
For organisations, other details should include:
• Basic company information - business and trading names, company registration
number.
• A detail of all organisations sites e.g. addresses and service locations of installed
equipment.
• Parent company, subsidiaries, international ownership and partners
• An indication of serviced customer or third party customer.
The relationships between organisations and individuals must be maintained, e.g. multiple
contacts for customer organisations. This should include the individual’s full contact details
and what they do, such as influencers, decision makers, finance/procurement contact, IT
director or contact, telephony contact, billing contact, data network contact, marketing
contact, etc.
These is also a need to hold enhanced profile information about organisations such as:
• Turnover, numbers of sites and number of employees per site.
• Telecomm profile - Comms spend (not just with Telco), telecomm products/services
used, equipment used, other suppliers used (and products), PBX supplier.
• OFTEL information on licensed operators.
There is a need to maintain a history of the relationship between a customer and other
associated information. This information includes contracts, orders, products and services,
accounts, usage, non-usage, billing, payments, contacts, faults, sites, telephone numbers,
sales channels, sales account manager, market segmentation, etc.
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5. Sample - Requirements Examples
It is required to be able to record and analyse organisations by a number of different
organisational hierarchies. These hierarchies will change over time and customers may
also be in multiple hierarchies at any one time. For example :
• Customer defined hierarchies e.g. business and trading names of an organisation
and all its subsidiaries and parent companies. This is how the customer sees
himself or herself - this might be for revenue reporting purposes.
• Legal hierarchies, e.g. as the government or tax authorities see a customer
organisation - i.e. the official company structure.
• Dun and Bradstreet method of customer hierarchies.
• Wholesale customers may be made up of intermediary organisations that actually
deal with Telco end user customers - where possible details of these levels should
be held, i.e. from wholesaler to end user.
• Telco defined hierarchies or groupings, such as:
o Holding Company, Group Customer, Customer Account, Customer Site
and Customer Line Identity.
o Sales channel related hierarchies, i.e. how sales view their customers.
o ‘Forced hierarchies’, e.g. car dealerships with different names.
o Limited grouping of customers by customer name.
o Marketing sectors, segments, geography.
Over time, as history information is accumulated, these hierarchies will allow detailed
analysis of behaviour to be performed by relating the revenue, product, account, orders etc.
together for an organisational structure.
There is a requirement to have the ability to monitor and analyse -
• Customer profitability. Initially this will only include interconnect in-payments / out-
payments against products and services delivered. When available, sources of
actual cost information should be included.
• Product mix by revenue within customer.
• Customer details, e.g. monthly numbers and revenue, by customer life cycle status,
customer hierarchy level, SOV (Sales Order Value), product, price package,
discount plan, actual and potential comms spend, installed equipment, geography,
campaign response or marketing activity, market segment, sector.
• Customer churn by product, reason, location, market segment, sector, sales
channel, campaign code, etc. This will enable the proactive identification of revenue
drop and provide customer churn KPI.
• Number and names of customers lost, their worth and billing trends.
• Other patterns in the customer base, e.g. customer lifecycle, customer historic
trends, customer buying cycle, customer revenue, cost profiles, profitable/non-
profitable, customer site moves, etc.
• The dealer and reseller relationship, including revenue and payments, by call type,
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6. Sample - Requirements Examples
national, mobile, international, etc. Also, aggregate third party customers into their
respective dealers / suppliers.
• Existing resellers and dealers to identify potential reseller and dealer companies.
• OLO customer revenue (in-payments and out-payments) and usage patterns and
trends, by routes/points of interconnect, tail costs, time of day, inbound, outbound,
etc.
Definition of Key Terms
• Customer: An organisation or individual of interest to Telco in the provision of Telco
products and services. Multiple views of a customer hierarchy may exist e.g. the
customer own view of their organisation, Telco sales view, the billing systems view
etc.
• Prospect: A prospect is a customer that Telco intends to attempt to sell Telco
products and services to. ‘Prospect’ is usually treated as a status of the customer
as a whole, or of the customer for particular products, services or campaigns.
• Organisation: An organisation is a grouping of one or more individuals, or of one or
more companies, or other business activities, or for some other reason are required
to be known about. An organisation may be a legal entity or just some recognised
group. Examples of organisations include customers and prospects of Telco
products and services, network customers, third-party dealers, the customers of
third-party dealers, OLO (Other Licensed Operators), competitors, contractors,
suppliers, government bodies, Telco own business units, etc.
• Individual: An individual is a person for which information can be obtained. An
individual may be associated with an organisation, for example as a contact for an
organisation (e.g. influencers, decision makers, finance/procurement contact, IT
director or contact, telephony contact, billing contact, data network contact,
marketing contact, etc.). An individual may also be a customer or prospect for Telco
products and services or the customer of a third-party dealer.
• OLO (Other Licensed Operators): An organisation that is licensed by OFTEL to
provide telecomm network services.
• Customer Churn: Customer Churn is defined as the number of customers leaving
Telco from a given level of the customer hierarchy as a proportion of the total
customer base at that level (presented either as a number or a percentage and
calculated at monthly, quarterly and yearly intervals) - churn is also calculated by
the value of the customer leaving Telco as a proportion of overall revenue.
• Dealer: A dealer is a third party organisation that has an existing business base
through which it can sell standard Telco Branded Products. Telco owns the
customer and consequently the Customer benefits from 24hr customer care and
management reports etc. In return for acquiring customers on Telco’s behalf the
dealer receives an ongoing 'revenue share’ this is a proportion the customers
billing.
• Reseller: The Reseller purchases Telco products at wholesale rates and 'resells'
them under their own brand. The contractual relationship is between the reseller
and the customer, not Telco. The reseller sets his own retail pricing, bills the
customer, arranges premise routing and provides customer care. Telco will provide
the reseller with a monthly wholesale bill and provide customer care for bill queries
and network faults to the reseller only, contact is not made between Telco and the
reseller's customer.
The reseller can be further subdivided into two groups: those who aggregate carrier
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7. Sample - Requirements Examples
minutes (an Aggregator) and those who merely resell (Direct Reseller) from one or
two carriers.
• Aggregator: By using 'smart' MLU technology e.g. black box or via sophisticated
PBX software, customer premise routing is made over a number of carriers
according to price.
Aggregators are able to maximise their buying power to secure the best possible
rate for each route. Aggregators approach customers as an independent telecomm
provider. The offer is to remove the purchase and pricing decision from the
customer by pooling rates from all carriers and therefore always offering the best
possible combination of rates. Effectively they will manage a customer’s telephony
needs.
Description of limitations of current data warehouse
• The solution should not support lead tracking, contact management - Not all the
information that the sales force will require is likely to be held in the warehouse as
this will not be a suitable repository.
• Prospect and Customer hierarchies - will need to be given as manual or automated
input details of group customer s and holding companies.
• Customer profitability - Initially this will only include interconnect payments/out-
payments against products and services delivered. Sources of actual cost
information to be investigated and reported on when available.
• No payment information will be available until increment 4
Data Overview
Performance Measures Dimensionality / Ordered By / Described By
• Turnover • Customer (organisation, individual,
• Number of sites TAL customer, OLO, supplier,
• Number of employees dealers, resellers, aggregators etc.)
• Telco spend (actual and potential) • Customer ‘life cycle’ status
• Account measures • Organisation structure/hierarchy level
• Revenue • Geography
• Payment amount • Contract
• Term • Orders
• Number of accounts • Product
• Customer measures • Account (status, date, etc.)
• Profitability • Billing
• Worth • Payment
• Churn • Fault
• Number of customers • Telephone number
• SOV (Sales order value) • Call Distance
• Network event measures (usage) • Network
• Network tail cost • Sales channel hierarchy
• Price, charge, discount (usage, • Market segment and sector
non-usage) • Installed equipment
• Campaign (response, activity)
• Churn reason
• Time
Technical Assessment
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8. Sample - Requirements Examples
Data Retention Requirements
Other Comments
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9. Sample - Requirements Examples
Data Requirements
Dimensions
DIMENSION
Dimension Number 1
Dimension Name Party
Description
The Party dimension represents individuals, their parent organisations and the higher-level organisation
structure.
Hierarchy Structure
Holding
Company
Customer Reporting Customer
Hierarchy Group
Customer
Account
Customer
Site
Customer
Line Identity
Additional Descriptive Information
This dimension is intended to represent individuals and organisations of interest to Telco – so,
for instance, this may represent organisations with which Telco have a customer, supplier or
interconnect relationship.
The diagram above depicts one of the specific hierarchies that is required – the customer
reporting hierarchy.
Other requirements for the representation of organisation hierarchies may include :
• Business and trading names of an organisation and all its subsidiaries and parent
companies.
• Legal hierarchies, e.g. as the government or tax authorities see a customer
organisation - i.e. the official company structure.
• Dun and Bradstreet method of customer hierarchies.
• Wholesale customers may be made up of intermediary organisations that actually
deal with Telco end user customers - where possible details of these levels should be
held, i.e. from wholesaler to end user.
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10. Sample - Requirements Examples
• Telco defined hierarchies or groupings, such as:
o Sales channel related hierarchies, i.e. how sales view their customers.
o ‘Forced hierarchies’, e.g. car dealerships with different names.
o Marketing sectors, segments, geography.
o TAL method of grouping customers for a sales account manager.
o Customer hierarchies defined on an ad-hoc basis for Telco internal reporting.
Organisations also include third-party dealers, the customers of third-party dealers, OFTEL,
contractors and suppliers. No hierarchical structure within any of these is required.
Data Steward
Status Changes (Slowly Changing Dimensions)
The customer reporting hierarchy is likely to change at a rate between quarterly and annually.
The Telco sales organisation is likely to change at a rate between monthly for small changes
and annually for large changes.
Currently available in the Data Warehouse Yes
Limitations of current availability
Description of Known Data Quality Problems
Data Retention Requirements
This information would be required indefinitely.
Data Refresh Requirements
It is important that this information stays as up to date as possible for those organisations with which
Telco carries out transactions. For other organisations, such as prospects, the data refresh requirement
is more lenient.
Implementation Notes
Customers are the holders of (active or deactivated) billing system accounts.
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11. Sample - Requirements Examples
Performance Measures
PERFORMANCE MEASURE
Performance Measure Number 1
Performance Measure Name Vanilla Rated Call Revenue Amount
Measure Type Basic
Definition
The Vanilla Rated Call Revenue is the amount of revenue generated by a call, and is attached to
a Call Detail Record (CDR) by the first pass of the rating engine.
Additional Commentary
As such, this Vanilla Rated Call Revenue Amount is the basic revenue value attached
to the call record, and includes factors such as the time of day the call was made, the
day of the week, the message source code, the charge band and the specific rating
group.
It excludes any subsequent rating changes that are applied by the billing system, which
turn Vanilla Rated Call Revenue into the Re-Rated Call Revenue.
The Vanilla Rated Call Revenue Amount could also loosely be referred to as unbilled
usage revenue, and should therefore have a revenue status type of unbilled usage
revenue.
Data Steward
Dimensionality / Ordered By / Described By
• Party – Customer Organization
• Account
• Customer Site (Service Location)
• Product / Service
• Product / Service Instance (Product / Service + Customer Site)
• Message Source Code
• Time – charge time (at the individual charge level) and billed time.
• Telephone Number and its Geography (where applicable)
• Account Address and its Geography
• Sales Channel
• Market Segment
• Campaign
• Distance Band
• Time Band
• Revenue Status Type
• Scheme
• Volume Band
• Duration Band
Currently available in the Data Warehouse Yes
Limitations of current availability
For unbilled usage: Vanilla Rated Call Revenue Amount will be accumulated alongside
the Call Duration on a daily basis by telephone number per bill cycle, and will be zeroed
at the start of each bill production run for that telephone number. A later increment
may load individual unbilled usage revenue at the CDR level for both Vanilla Rated Call
Revenue and Call Duration.
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12. Sample - Requirements Examples
For billed usage: Vanilla Rated Call Revenue Amount will be stored at the individual
CDR level alongside the Call Duration and the Re-Rated Call Revenue Amount.
Description of Known Data Quality Problems
Data Retention Requirements
Individual Call Detail Records are required for a rolling three months, which therefore implies that
Vanilla Rated Call Revenue Amounts will be available for a rolling three months.
Data Refresh Requirements
See above comments in Limitations in Increment 1.
The cumulative unbilled usage (Vanilla Rated Call Revenue Amount and Call Duration)
by telephone number by bill cycle will be a daily feed into the system.
This should be replaced, in a later increment, by a daily feed of individual unbilled
usage CDR records.
At the billed usage level, this information should be loaded into the system once per bill
production run. That is, there are currently estimated to be six bill production runs per
month.
Implementation Notes
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13. Sample - Requirements Examples
PERFORMANCE MEASURE
Performance Measure Number 2
Performance Measure Name Number of Services
Measure Type Count
Definition
The Number of Services is an aggregated performance measure that is a simple count
of the number of occurrences of at least one instance of a product/service code at a
particular chosen level of interrogation
Additional Commentary
For example – we may wish to know the number of different service codes and their
descriptions by account number and service location, in order to explore service mix.
Data Steward
Dimensionality / Ordered By / Described By
• Party – Customer Organization
• Account
• Customer Site (Service Location)
• Product / Service
• Product / Service Instance (Product / Service + Customer Site)
• Account Address and its Geography
• Market Segment
• Scheme
Currently available in the Data Warehouse Yes
Limitations of current availability
Description of Known Data Quality Problems
Data Retention Requirements
Data Refresh Requirements
Implementation Notes
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PERFORMANCE MEASURE
Performance Measure Number 3
Performance Measure Name Bill Balance Brought Forward Amount
Measure Type Derived
Definition
The Bill Balance Brought Forward Amount is the balance brought forward from the
previous bill cycle's bill
Additional Commentary
The Bill Balance Brought Forward Amount should be the same as the previous bill
cycle’s Bill Balance Carried Forward Amount.
The Bill Balance Brought Forward Amount will be sourced directly from the source
billing systems.
Data Steward
Dimensionality / Ordered By / Described By
• Party – Customer Organization
• Account
• Account Address and its Geography
• Time – billed time
• Sales Channel
• Market Segment
• Campaign
Currently available in the Data Warehouse Yes
Limitations of current availability
The speed of response will depend on the available level of pre-calculated aggregates.
This information could be made available from the source systems should the Systems
Roadmap point to this being an area of high priority.
Description of Known Data Quality Problems
Data Retention Requirements
Data Refresh Requirements
Implementation Notes
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15. Sample - Requirements Examples
Query Requirements
Query Requirement
Query Requirement Number 1
Query Requirement Name Credit/aged report
Description
A report that show the outstanding debt by account and credit group
Definition of Key Terms
Currently available in data warehouse YES
Description of limitations within current implementation
Requested by
Data Overview
Debts by account and how long that debt has been outstanding
Performance Measures Dimensionality / Ordered By / Described By
• credit limit • credit class
• current balance • account number
• balance 30 days • bill cycle/run
• balance 60 days
• balance 90 days
• balance 120+ days
Technical Assessment
Data Retention Requirements
Other Comments
Frequency Weekly
Type Regular
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16. Sample - Requirements Examples
Interface Requirements
Interface
Interface Number 1
Interface Name Customer Segmentation Groups
Target System Name CRM System
Output Type File
Output Location /BI/ftp/outgoing/CRM
Output File Name csg.csv
Output File Type CSV
Output Format ASCII
Output Character Set US-ASCII
Output Frequency Daily
CSV Specifics
Field Separator Comma (,)
Record Separator Carriage Return – Line Feed
Quoting Character Double Quote (“)
Escaping Character Double Quote (“)
XML Specifics
Validation
Validation Location
Description/Purpose of File
This file is used to update the CRM system with the current market segment group and
score information
Data Definition
Field Name Source Field Name Mandatory?
Customer_id Customer.customer_id Yes
Market_Segment MarSeg.segment_name Yes
Segment_Score Custom_MarSeg_History.score Yes
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
Yes / No
Currently available from the Data Warehouse Yes
Limitations of current availability
Description of Known Data Quality Problems
Implementation Notes
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17. Sample - Requirements Examples
Copyright
© 2006 Data Management & Warehousing. All rights reserved. Reproduction not permitted
without written authorisation. References to other companies and their products use
trademarks owned by the respective companies and are for reference purposes only.
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