CUSTOMER FOCUS

Communications Billing Mediation
Choose IMES Eases Billing
ILOG-powered processing ensures customer service

As communications technology becomes increasingly complex, greater emphasis is being placed on the role of billing mediation. It is enabling service providers to surpass customer demand for quality through close network monitoring and accurate billing.

Choose Technologies has built a cutting-edge billing mediation solution with ILOG software components. Called IMES, the solution uses ILOG Server, ILOG Rules, ILOG Views and ILOG TGO to manage, configure and visualize the billing mediation process.

The new challenge
Billing mediation involves collecting call data records (CDRs) from various sources and correlating, aggregating and converting them into formats for processing by billing, quality control, planning and customer care systems. It also includes fraud detection, checking data to determine whether it originated from properly registered customers.

Further complicating billing mediation today is the variety of systems maintained. Each network system generates its own CDRs, usually requiring the network operator to have a separate CDR-processing solution for each system. With several processing solutions comes the need for a centralized system for correlating billing data to avoid significant losses -- estimated by some telcos to be as much as 3 percent of their income -- that result in reduced customer satisfaction.

Adding to this complexity is a highly competitive market driven by demand for greater customer care and new services. Billing mediation must be able to rapidly adopt changes and assume their strategic function. All this depends on the CDR, which contains all the information needed to measure quality, need for expansion and demand for services.

Flexible and powerful solution
The IMES billing mediation solution supports new services such as prepaid and hot-billing plans, and provides statistics to monitor network quality and expansion in evolving multinetwork environments.

IMES is a collection of CDR processors managed by ILOG Server. Several types of collecting processes deliver CDRs to IMES. The solution uses ILOG Rules to convert the incoming data into a standard format, validate the data and channel it to various systems, including those for billing, gathering statistics and backing up records.

ILOG Rules provides high flexibility, enabling business users to configure the solution with a rule builder and their own business rules, cope with heterogeneous networks and legacy systems, and configure new data for quality, demand and planning analysis.

High performance is obtained with ILOG Server-coordinated parallel processing of CDR files. IMES is able to handle 120 million CDRs per day, with peaks as high as 240,000 CDRs per minute.

The whole process is supervised with an ILOG Rules-based alarm filtering system, and monitored with a graphical user interface built with ILOG Server, ILOG Views and ILOG TGO.