ORACLE COMMUNICATIONS BILLING ANALYTICS CSPs worldwide are facing new challenges from all sides. New telecommunications companies are wooing customers away with attractive bundles as traditional competitors apply pressure by introducing their own products. Plus, it's harder and harder to launch new product and service initiatives due to lack of visibility into current customer demands and preferences. And there is considerable anxiety about changing business models, which require implementing new platforms and systems hefty investments in the short term plus ongoing maintenance costs. K E Y F E A T U R E S Pre-integrated with Oracle Communications Data Model, thereby supporting a model that is conformance certified with the TM Forum s Information Framework (SID) 13 Comprehensive set of billing revenue analytics dashboards with the ability to use together with OCDM sample dashboards and advanced predictive analytics Leverages data from BRM and NCC Adapters to enable even faster integration with these applications K E Y B E N E F I T S Faster time-to-market with the billing analytic solution reducing time, cost, and risks Enables a better understanding of billing and revenue flows across multiple dimensions Better understanding of the efficiency of a service provider's billing processes As competitive intensity builds, CSPs increasingly need to monitor and understand their revenue flows. The billing function, with all of its complex processes and corresponding applications, contains invaluable information that must be unlocked if revenue flows are to be truly understood. Oracle Communications Billing Analytics To help facilitate this understanding, Oracle has developed the Oracle Communications Billing Analytics application which is designed to further extend the analytic capabilities of the Oracle Communications Data Model (OCDM). The solution provides a set of comprehensive dashboards that enables CSPs to: Understand customers across all their products and services Understand key billing related metrics across the entire billing process (billed revenue, payments, collections, adjustments, and more) Understand key prepaid metrics and customer recharge patterns Understand efficiency of their billing operations Reduce time, cost, risk, and complexity of custom solutions Since Billing Analytics runs on the core OCDM platform, CSPs can also leverage all of the core capabilities available with OCDM, such as advanced analytic models for predicting customer churn, customer segmentation, and sentiment analysis. CSPs can combine Billing Analytics dashboards with OCDM sample dashboards because they all run on the same Oracle Business Intelligence platform. In addition, OCDM is conformance certified with the TM Forum Information Framework (SID) 13 and other international telecommunications standards.
Figure 1: Oracle Communications Billing Analytics supports fully informed decisionmaking. Billing Analytics Categories: Billing Analytics includes prebuilt reports and dashboards that cover the following five categories: Billed Revenue: Revenue related metrics such as total revenue, adjustments, and collections Billing Efficiency: Leverages standard TM Forum metrics that measure the operational efficiency of a CSP's billing processes Customer Metrics: Customer acquisition and churn metrics viewable across various parameters Prepaid Metrics: Prepaid specific metrics such as total, average recharges, and disturbed recharge cycles Usage Metrics: Usage-specific metrics such as total minutes of usage, number of calls, data, and top users (voice, data, SMS) Billed Revenue Within the Billed Revenue category, the Billing Analytics application provides answers to a number of key questions regarding revenue. Reports focus on different aspects of revenue including total revenue, ARPU, Payments, and Adjustments. These reports help answer questions such as: What is my total billed revenue across various dimensions including customer type, product type, plan type (prepaid vs. postpaid), and region (i.e., state)? Is revenue meeting specified targets? What are my top five and bottom five revenue producing plans? What is average revenue per user (ARPU) across various dimensions including customer type, product type, plan type (prepaid vs. postpaid), and region (i.e., state)? 2 ORACLE COMMUNICATIONS BILLING ANALYTICS
Figure 2: Billed Revenue dashboards allow for the comparison of actual revenue vs. targets. Billing Efficiency A key concern for many CSPs is making sure that their billing systems and processes are running efficiently. To aid in measuring these processes, the Billing Analytics application calculates a number of key measures, based upon TM Forum business metrics. With these dashboards, CSPs can better monitor revenue, including: What percent of revenue is going into collections? How much is being written off? How many adjustments and amounts are we doing? What percent of bills are electronic vs. paper vs. other? What percent of bills are inaccurate or need adjustments? Customer Metrics Understanding the customer from both acquisition and churn perspectives allows service providers to know when corrective action is needed either to improve customer retention or to offer incentives to attract new customers. The Billing Analytics application provides answers to key questions such as: What is the customer acquisition rate across various dimensions including, customer type, product type, plan type (prepaid vs. postpaid), and region (i.e., state)? What is the customer churn rate across these same dimensions? Prepaid Metrics Worldwide, the value of prepaid customers is increasingly important. Which is why the Billing Category focuses on analyzing prepaid customers both from a revenue perspective as well as from the all-important-recharge cycle. The application dashboards answer these key questions : 3 ORACLE COMMUNICATIONS BILLING ANALYTICS
What is the total number of recharges being made by prepaid customers? How often are prepaid customers recharging? What are their patterns? Which customers have disturbed recharge cycles (i.e., have not recharged as per their normal pattern)? Usage Metrics Understanding how customers use their products and services is key to deciding how to more carefully tailor plans to meet customers' needs. With the Billing Analytics application, CSPs will be able to better understand the following questions: What level of usage is coming from roaming vs. non-roaming? How much of my revenue comes from voice, data, or messaging usage? How much of my usage revenue comes from international vs. local? Figure 3: Usage Metrics dashboards break down Voice, Data and Messaging usage. Billing Efficiency A key concern for many CSPs is making sure that their billing systems and processes are running efficiently. To aid in measuring these processes, the Billing Analytics application calculates a number of key measures, based upon TM Forum business metrics. With these dashboards, CSPs can better monitor revenue, including: What percent of revenue is going into collections? How much is being written off? How many adjustments and amounts are we doing? What percent of bills are electronic vs. paper vs. other? What percent of bills are inaccurate or need adjustments? 4 ORACLE COMMUNICATIONS BILLING ANALYTICS
Conclusion As the telecommunications market rapidly migrates from voice-centric to data-centric, CSPs need to ensure their billing systems are integrated to their data warehouse or analytic environments so that they can better understand their customers, revenue, and billing operation efficiency. The analytic system needs to be built to provide a 360-degree view of the customer, enabling timely and cost effective use of the information to create new streams of value-added services revenue. C O N T A C T U S For more information about Oracle Communications Billing Analytics, visit oracle.com or call +1.800.ORACLE1 to speak to an Oracle representative. C O N N E C T W I T H U S blogs.oracle.com/oracle facebook.com/oracle twitter.com/oracle oracle.com Copyright 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. 1215 5 ORACLE COMMUNICATIONS BILLING ANALYTICS