Deployment of Comarch Convergent Billing Solution

The Approach

The old system lacked key billing functions (rating/billing/discounting), which were developed outside the system. To address the problem of compounding technical debt, we decided to decrease the complexity of the legacy ICMS used previously by Síminn, increase system configuration flexibility, and shorten time to market. Síminn highlighted some of the key factors that contributed to their choice of our offer:

Price, including purchase licenses and implementation cost
Estimated TCO
Compliance with 100% of requirements in the RFP
The system’s good fit with the telecom IT landscape

The project requirements called for a complex tariff plan configuration – many types of services, a long history of contracts with several contacts unmodified for many years, more than 2 000 products, 500 types of discounts, thresholds, ceilings and charge splits.

The contract between Comarch and Síminn was signed on 30 September 2013, with the initial launch taking place on 30 April 2015 and finalization in September 2016. During the course of the project, Síminn expressed further interest in the Comarch Managed Services solution, which resulted in a new contract being signed in October 2016.

The Business Need

In today’s telecom landscape, voice and SMS represent only a fraction of the total time customers use their phones. Operators are constantly expanding their service offers with video and music streaming, navigation, more diversified tariff plans and new pricing models. This expansion of data services requires an improvement in the capabilities of the BSS platform, as it must be able to distinguish between the different types of services and the amount of data that the customer uses. To keep up with customer expectations and heavy competition, telecom operators need to look closely at their BSS platforms to determine when major overhauls need to be made.

As a consequence, Síminn needed to modernize its existing billing system (ICMS from Comvers in its 2003 version), which was no longer being developed and did not meet the company’s operational requirements:

Certain processes were being resolved outside of the system (for example, in the mediation module)
The system was expensive and complex in daily operations, maintenance and in cases of integration with surrounding systems
It was not possible to separate wholesale and retail sales – required by internal regulations

The Implemented Products

In order to meet Síminn’s expectations, we needed to replace and integrate with the existing billing ICMS system.
The solution we implemented is constructed on the basis of two Comarch products:

Comarch Application Integration Framework – a solution that automates B2B (business to business) and A2A (application to application) integration for the proposed new billing system solution and Síminn IT ecosystem.

Comarch Convergent Billing System – a complete billing system for post-paid and pre-paid convergence, installed with its post-paid modules only, in line with the customer’s request.

The implementation of the billing system consisted of three stages:

Television over Internet protocol networks (IPTV) services
Mobile services
Other (fixed line telephony, fixed line Internet, TV, DDI number ranges, and corporate Internet)

Overall, Comarch’s solution streamlined billing services for more than 300 000 clients and 600 000 subscriptions.

The Results

The implementation of Comarch Convergent Billing System and Comarch Application Integration Framework resulted in a general reduction in the number of systems that our customer is required to manage, increased automation, and resulted in a significant decrease in the total bill run time. Additionally, our solution obtained the following results:

Easier and faster verification of invoicing process with new CBS features (for example, the introduction of re-rating capabilities, rollback and re-invoicing), not available in the legacy ICMS
The whole billing functionality that had been implemented outside ICMS was configured in CBS
A clear separation between wholesale and retail, achieved by supporting multiple billing providers
Time to market was shortened and complexity was reduced

Why Comarch?

"We really appreciate Comarch's flexibility and strong ability to execute projects professionally. The implementation of Managed Services will enable us to achieve the desired OPEX reduction and, as a consequence, will impact positively on Síminn's financial outcome. Months of preparation make us confident that Comarch is the right partner to execute the time-consuming and routine activities related to the area of IT."

"Following a thorough selection process, we chose Comarch as BSS vendor to replace our existing billing system as the solution proposed by the company was the best fit to our requirements. It has to support not only contemporary but also future business models and market trends, with a strong focus being on customer experience. In addition, we were impressed by Comarch’s technical expertise and dedicated approach. We place great value on long-term relationships with our business partners, and we see Comarch as an agile organization that has a lot to offer for telecoms, especially in today’s digital services era."

Eric Figueras, Vice-President and CTO
Síminn

Siminn Case Study