Customer Billing

Introduction

Maintainer: regardt_jacobs@bmc.com

Control-M enables the automation and orchestration of the entire customer billing process. This includes data extraction, transformation, billing calculations, invoice generation, and delivery. By automating these processes, telcos can ensure timely and accurate billing, reducing manual errors and operational delays.

Use Case Overview

Control-M is instrumental for telco companies seeking to optimize their monthly customer billing processes. With numerous moving parts such as collecting consumption data, calculating charges, and generating bills, Control-M ensures these processes are executed seamlessly and timely every month. Telco companies often face challenges integrating multiple systems to move and process these records accurately. Strong integration capabilities of Control-M guarantee that all records, like those generated by network switches, are correctly received and processed, even as the number of records explodes with the advent of 5G. Inaccurate data collection or processing can lead to billing issues or affect decision-making. Control-M not only enables accurate invoice generation and dispatch to individual customers but also ensures relevant customer data files are transferred to teams or processes for further analysis. Additionally, maintaining billing accuracy and providing a comprehensive view of billing per region, service types like data bundles, and call billing trends are crucial. By leveraging Control-M, telcos stay in control of their billing processes, adhere to strict SLAs, and ensure timely, accurate billing for their customers every time.

The Consensus Recording for this use case can be found here: Watch this video!

Use Case Technical Explanation

The zzz-telco-billing use case exemplifies a telco customer billing process categorized into 3 sections; the Pre-Billing Processing (demonstrated by the Pre-Billing-Processing subfolder), the Billing Processing (demonstrated by the Billing-Processing subfolder), and the Post-Billing Processing (demonstrated by the Post-Billing-Processing subfolder).

The Pre-Billing-Processing subfolder and jobs within are designed to show a Call Detail Records (CDR) collection from various streams of data and colocating this data into a Mediation platform for consolidation, validation, and transformation. The different streams of data are outlined below:

Loyalty programs - the zzz-loyalty-program records job is designed to demonstrate the file transfers of loyalty program data from various sources such as retail transactions, online purchases, and customer interactions ensuring imely and accurate data retrieval without manual effort
Business Relationship Management (BRM) records - the zzz-unload-BRM-records job is designed to demonstrate the trigger of an Inforamtica BRM data workflow to ensure real-time availability of BRM data, making it accessible for analysis, reporting, and decision-making processes
CDR - the zzz-unload-CDR-records job is designed to demonstrate the trigger of a Hadoop Spark process that extracts CDR data from various sources such as network switches, telcom equipment, and other data collection points
Customer Relationship Managmenet (CRM) records - the zzz-unload-CRM-records job is designed to demonstrate the trigger of a Snowflake query which automates the aggregation of CRM data from customr interactions, marketing campagins, sales transactions, and external data feeds

After the data has been retrieved from the sources above, the zzz-sync-pre-billing-data and zzz-sync-invoice-table-data jobs are designed to demonstrate Database queries for data validation and cleansing to ensure data is accurate prior to the billing cycles.

The Billing-Processing subfolder and jobs within are deisgned to show the orchestration of billing processes, ensuring that all billing activities are logged and traceable, supporting compliance with regulatoring requirements and facilitating internal audits. The zzz-corporate-billing job is designed to demonstate the trigger of a Hadoop HDFS command to stage data, and the zzz-pin-info-to-pin-invoice job is designed to demonstrate a Azure Batch Account process to extract Personal Identification Number (PIN) data from authentication systems, user databases, and transaction records. The last job in this folder is the zzz-process-billing-chain job which is designed to demonstrate triggering an AWS Data Pipeline that includes batch jobs to calculate billing amounts based on usage data, pricing plans, discounts, and other billing rules.

Lastly, the Post-Billing-Processing subfolder contains jobs orchestrating the post-billing activites that often include updating customer account balances and statuses. The zzz-billing-failure-analysis job within this subfolder is designed to demonstrate a Qlik Cloud dataset update to ensure analytics and reports are based on the most current data. The zzz-billing-summary-E-channels job within this subfolder is designed to demonstrate a Tableau dataset refresh enabling efficient and reliable management of electronic communication channels such as email, SMS, social media, web portals, and mobile apps.

For telco billing processing managing SLAs (Service Level Agreements) is crucial to ensure compliance and efficiency in delivering critical billing and operational data. The zzz-telco-billing-SLA job was desinged to demonstrate this capability. Using Control-M for telco billing SLA management ensures that all tasks are automated, monitored, and compliant with regulatory requirements by maintaining high performance, timely report generation, and adherence to critical service levels.

To view the demo flow code-base, and all artifacts, please navigate to the Customer Billing Git Repository

Job Types Included

Control-M Managed File Transfer
Control-M for Informatica
Control-M for Hadoop
Control-M for Snowflake
Control-M Databases
Control-M OS
Control-M for Azure Batch Accounts
Control-M for AWS Data Pipeline
Control-M for Qlik Cloud
Control-M for Tableau
Control-M SLA Management

Demo Environment Information

Environment	Status	Folder
Helix Production	Available	zzz-telco-billing
Helix Pre-Production	Available	zzz-telco-billing
VSE CTM PROD	Available	zzz-telco-billing
VSE CTM QA	Available	zzz-telco-billing