Product Management process. R6 Product and Service Management for faster time-to-market with more flexibility. R6 Functional Overview

Transcription

1 R6 Functional Overview products customers orders billing finance Product Management process R6 Product and Service Management for faster time-to-market with more flexibility

2 Table of Contents 1. R6 Product and Service Management Service Management Product Management Wholesale and Retail Business Architecture Products and Offers The Wholesale Product The Wholesale Product Offer The Retail Product Offer or Base Offer Charge Components Tariff R6 Product Management 2

3 1. R6 Product and Service Management In a fast changing and competitive world it s fundamental for service providers to offer state-of-the-art products to their customers. But in the same way it s a major challenge to manage the offered products, services and bundles from its creation through to retirement. Therefore an effective product and service management is essential to create and deliver an extensive range of bundled services and products rapidly - a necessity for service providers to differentiate and enable further profit and future success. Many different steps are necessary to manage the broad range of activities performed to define and deliver products and services to be ready as offers in the market - ranging from developing new ideas for a product to ensure that the end-customer can purchase the product easily. R6 Product and Service Management is used to create and administrate Services, Wholesale products and Retail products. It allows easy definition of: services and service features, product offers, offer components (charges, discounts, deposits, contracts, allowances, etc.) and the pricing thereof service configuration within a product offer and the pricing of service features business rules associated with the product offer bundling of products and services management of the life cycle of products and services Resources linked to the product and service catalogs are also managed in R6, and include number management and inventory management. Centralized Product and Service information: Product and Service information is centralized and synchronized across the entire application, thus eliminating the need to define and maintain separate / multiple product catalog versions of new services. Additionally, product and service managers are given the power to control multiple aspects of service and product offerings, and to manage multiple products simultaneously. The product catalog is based on defined services and their features: Services define what the customer gets when he/she orders an offer Services are described by Service Specifications and their Characteristics that are made available by the OSS Services are combined to products and made available to the market as offers A product defines one or more services as a sell-able unit Offers define the charging and business rules of a product for a certain market, segment, channel or customer R6 Product Management 3

4 Figure 1 - Overview of Product and Service Management 1.1 Service Management Supplier and Service Management enables the platform administrator to easily define and manage suppliers (service providers), partners and their services. In the cross-industry 2.0 scenario, collaboration is the key to successful delivery of value-added services and retention of customers. Supplier and Service Management provides the capabilities to aggregate suppliers and their services on one platform which enables the services to be made available throughout the R6 business ecosystem. Supplier and Service Management involves: Management of Suppliers and Partners Service Definition Service Onboarding, including o o Assignment of business process events for the triggering of service provisioning via adaptors Definition of resource management workflows for service fulfillment Service Enablement allows an easy definition, integration and management of service providers and new services. It enables the platform administrator to: collect and manage supplier / service provider information, R6 Product Management 4

5 technically on-board and define services and service features allocate mediation feeds to the services, and associate service fulfillment events and workflows to the service. Service Monetization The monetization of service usage is equally important as enablement. The supplier management functionality is the foundation for effective Mediation and Rating processes and the correct allocation of charges for execution of the wholesale and retail bill runs. The service management functionality is also the foundation for the correct allocation of charges during wholesale invoicing for the creation of reconciliation invoicing to the supplier / service provider(s). The platform administrator creates and manages service providers / suppliers and manages their service portfolios by defining services and related service events and service features. The platform administrator then defines and manages (wholesale) products by choosing services from one or more suppliers' service portfolios and associating a variety of charges to them. Once the (wholesale) product has been exposed to the retail operator, it enables the retail operator to individually price the underlying services for the end-customer consumption. A service is made available by a service provider and can be offered to customers by means of a product offer. The included service features can be configured as required. The same service specification (e.g., PSTN, Mobile, Internet) can be included in more than one product with varied pricing policies. 1.2 Product Management The platform administrator creates and administrates products by choosing services (his own or provided by external service providers) with related service events and service features. A wholesale product offer is than created by adding a wholesale tariff model. This wholesale product offer can then be assigned to retailers for creating retail products offers. The assignment of offers can be configured for planned product roadmaps and will automatically be activated on future assignment dates, with notifications and other processes triggered by a scheduled workflow. Retailers then create retail products for their customers from the assigned wholesale product offers by applying retail tariff models and offer rules Wholesale and Retail Business Architecture To understand the product and offer structure used in the system, an understanding of the terms Wholesale and Retail is required: Wholesale is the sale of telecommunications services and features in quantity for resale; Retail is the sale of telecommunications services and features to end-customers. In order to cover both aspects and offer a flexible and versatile solution, the system introduces the concept of virtualization: a virtual service providers (VSP) and virtual service operators (VSO) residing within the same business framework. Currently, only one VSP may R6 Product Management 5

6 be active. By defining both VSP and multiple VSO domains, both wholesale and retail types of sales can be managed on the platform, while both sales areas are strictly divided from each other through the virtualization concept in R6. Virtualization separates the wholesaler's objects from those of the retailers. A VSP sells wholesale products offers to VSOs. The VSP is the "owner" of the system. A VSO resells the wholesale product offers as retail product offers to end-customers. Figure 2 - Wholesale Retail Business Model Retail Product Offer... defines the pricing and business rules for retail offers & bundles for selling them to the end customers (e.g. DSL Broadband for /month) Virtual Service Operator uses the services from a VSP to provide retail product offers to customers Wholesale Product Offer combines services with wholesale pricing in order to make them available for the retailer (e.g. DSL Broadband with Mailbox) Virtual Service Provider aggregates services and sells them to virtual service operators Service defines the resource and its features that are made available to be orchestrated by R6 (e.g. DSL Broadband, Webspace, Mailbox, etc.) Service Provider an entity that offers services to another entity R6 Product Management 6

7 1.2.2 Products and Offers Products (retail or wholesale) are made available to customers as commercial offers known as product offers. These offers are combined with a suitable tariff model that holds tariff and pricing information. Because of the strict differentiation between retail and wholesale a differentiation between wholesale product offers and retail product offers is enforced. Wholesale/retail product offers and product offer bundles can be created, configured, maintained and retired in R6 Product and Service Management. The following figure shows how a wholesale product becomes a product offer suitable for end-customers: Figure 3 - Wholesale and Retail Catalogue Hence the mapping between the business model for products and services and the product offers in the R6 architecture is as follows: R6 Product Management 7

8 Figure 4 - Business mapping to product offers The Wholesale Product A wholesale product is a combination of services provided by a supplier / service provider. Services include fixed-line network connections, mobile networks, or Internet connections, equipment, insurance, installation packages, etc. The same service (e.g., PSTN, Mobile, or Internet) may be included in more than one wholesale product. Wholesale products do not have pricing information; if a tariff model is added to a wholesale product, it becomes a wholesale product offer The Wholesale Product Offer A wholesale product offer combines a wholesale product with a wholesale tariff model. A wholesale product offer can be assigned to one or more Virtual Service Operators (VSO). The assignment of a tariff model enables the wholesale product offer to be sold to a VSO or retailer by the VSP. In case the retailers are external retail providers and their services are not managed in the system directly, the Retail Operator (the retailer s operator) is managed as a VSO role and is assigned the wholesale product offers he pays for, but all charging information is sent through the wholesale interface to the external retailer. The retailer then manages the retail product offers himself The Retail Product Offer or Base Offer A VSP assigns a wholesale product offer to a VSO; this wholesale product offer is then called customized. Then a VSO attaches a retail tariff model to the customized wholesale product offer and creates a retail product offer. R6 Product Management 8

9 Each base offer contains one product and the corresponding tariff model. Base offers can be sold directly to customers or as a bundled offer. Base offers can also be organized in offer groups. A retail product offer group is a collection of base offers. All the base offers in the same group have to have the same offer type. Offer groups can be used to build bundles in a number of variations. Offer groups allow choosing between base offers of the same offer type; for example, mobile phones of different makes and models can be assigned to the same offer group. When end-customers order the corresponding mobile offer bundle, they can choose between the mobile phones included in the offer group. Base offers can be combined to make up offer bundles. An offer bundle consists of one or more base offers and offer components. These base offers can be either fixed or selectable (one base offer can be selected from a list which is defined in an offer group). One of the advantages of this concept is that the base offer price can be modified for the product offer bundle, for example, a reduction of the monthly fee. Retail product offer bundles can contain base offers and retail product offer groups, and additional offer components. Figure 5 - Example of a bundle including an offer group Charge Components A charge component specifies parameters for billing in a tariff model. Generally, charges are categorized in usage charges and non-usage charges. Usage Charges: Usage data (or usages) are data indicating the usage of a service. These data (i.e. usage data for Internet, mobile or telephone services) generate information in the R6 system that shows the extent of the usage of these services. The information obtained through different R6 Product Management 9

10 internal processes is then used for charging the customer. Examples are charges for telephone calls, SMS, Internet data. Rated UDR (rated usage). Non Usage Charges: The non-usage charge type consist of Once-Only charges, Instalment charges, Recurring charges, Override charges, Allowances / Limits, Equipment Charges, Discounts, Contracts (Binding periods) and Deposits. Once-only Charge Once-only charges will only appear once on the bill. Once only charges could be installation fees, setup fees, etc. A once-only charge can also be triggered by or related to an event, for example, service activation fee, or dishonor fee. Recurring Charge The recurring charge is used to charge standard amounts on a regular basis. A recurring charge is applied at specified intervals (monthly, bi-monthly, etc.). A recurring charge is a non-usage charge related to a service, for example, an insurance fee or an access fee. Instalment Charges An instalment is where the total charge is divided into interval payments for a specified number of payments, e.g., for expensive equipment. Equipment Charges Equipment charges enable the product manager to define once-only, installment or recurring charges that have an explicit hardware reference. Other than the reference to a hardware type and hardware, the charge definition is exactly the same as for once-only, installment and recurring charges. Override Charges The product catalog has the ability to apply overriding charges to other charges. Overrides replace prices/tariffs defined in a product offer bundle, a product base offer or offer component features. Similarly, dependency rules can be defined between offers, offer groups, and offer components that an override charge is applied if one of these items is selected as part of the offer instance. Allowances and Limits Allowances are monetary or non-monetary benefits granted to the customer. They are always combined with a recurring charge and can be added to all product offer types. Non-monetary allowances include free phone minutes (fixed line or mobile services), text allowance (mobile service), or data allowance (internet service). Monetary allowances include service usage to the amount of the defined monetary value. Limits can define usage thresholds for an offer that trigger a level command (e.g. notification, throttling) when the customer's usage reaches a certain level. A limit can be monetary or non-monetary. Contracts Contracts bind customers to a service / bundle for a specified time period. Deposits A deposit is a once-only charge which is refunded to the customer at a later point in time. Discounts Discounts apply to customer billing accounts on invoicing and are a proportionate deduction made on a customer's charges (e.g. charges on a customer's phone bill are reduced by 5%). Discounts can be based on the total amount invoiced, or on the R6 Product Management 10

11 charge types or volume of one or several usage types, for example, on international calls or mobile calls. Furthermore, discounts can be based on the number of services used, for example, voice and data Tariff Tariff is a general term for a charge definition, it contains the pricing model for a product offer. Flexible pricing of all services and features is possible because every service or feature has its own prices, which make up one tariff model. A tariff model defines the prices or rates for services and service features in a product offer. Charges apply according to service usage. The tariff in R6 is created as a tariff model XML file that is imported to the system in WebAC, the graphical user interface. R6 Product Management 11

12 Truly Transformational Solutions Infonova was founded in 1989 and delivers highly automated IT solutions for Telco, Media & Convergent as well as Utility companies. Infonova s BSS solutions have been implemented for incumbent, attacker and cable operators supporting triple & quadruple play service portfolios. Encapsulating decades of knowledge, Infonova s latest BSS product, R6 is a fully J2EE concept to cash platform that supports real multi-tenant concept to cash operations for fully convergent and complex business models. To learn more, visit our Web site at Contact For more information on Infonova lead to high performance, contact infonova@infonova.com. R6 Product Management 12