Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description V 3.1 Contents Contents Introduction Platform Overview Core features Bill/Invoice presentment Corporate hierarchy support Billing Account hierarchy support Call detail record listing Bill reporting Bill consolidation and deconsolidation Operational features Role support Notifications Personalization Aggregated views Bill consolidation 1 4 5 5 5 5 6 6 6 6 7 7 7 7 7 7 Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 1
Self-care features Administration and corporate management Mobile channel features Paper channel features REST API Platform architecture and capabilities 8 8 8 8 9 10 Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 2
Copyright 2010-2014 Brite:Bill Limited, 23 Windsor Place, Dublin 2. All rights reserved. All product names, company names and/or trademarks mentioned in this document remain the property of their respective owners. This document and any software delivered by Brite:Bill Limited ("Brite:Bill") and its affiliates is confidential to Brite:Bill and is provided by Brite:Bill on the strict understanding that no part of this document or any software delivered by Brite:Bill may be modified, translated, decompiled, disassembled, reproduced, reverse engineered, used or transmitted by the recipient in any form without the prior written consent of Brite:Bill. Brite:Bill shall have no liability whatsoever in relation to this document or any software delivered by Brite:Bill and shall not be liable for any loss, expense, damage or claim arising out of the advice or statements made or omitted in this document. Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 3
Introduction The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer is a bill and invoice presentment platform that delivers a lightweight, flexible and robust solution for telecommunications companies, energy companies and billing aggregators. For corporate and SME customers, the platform provides a convenient one-stop shop in which the display of billing data reflects the departmental hierarchy and where permissioned users can run reports and perform call record analysis on the data. For internal care teams, the platform offers the ability to oversee the billing and user data for all corporate customers; review, approve or reject bill runs; manage the personalization options that enhance the end user experience, and run custom reports on users, calls, bill ingest and all aspects of the service for which data is available for analysis. Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 4
Platform Overview Brite:Bill licenses two core products for bill presentment: 1 Consumer Bill Presentment Platform 2 Corporate Bill Analyzer Figure 1 depicts the Brite:Bill Bill Presentment Platform and shows the Brite:Bill Core, the Brite:Bill Products and the Channels, with their logical components. The Brite:Bill products share the same core platform with UI features, capabilities and middleware. The products then add specific features for the Consumer or Corporate offerings. Finally, channels define what the output channels for the solution are. These are web, mobile, print and API. CHANNELS WEB PAPER MOBILE REST API HTML5 Support PDF / AFP Publishing Native Widgets OAuth V2 SSO API Web Based, Web 2.0 UI XSLT & CMS Based Publishing IOS / Android (various sizes) Batch Support SSO Security InDesign Templating Tools Optimized HTML5 for Tablets Batch User Provisioning CONSUMER Bill presentment & Payment Unbilled Usage Bill Analytics Bill Consolidation & Aggregation BRITE:BILL DATABASE PRODUCTS BRITE:BILL COMMON WEB UI COMPONENTS Personalization + Decisioning Consolidated Bill Presentment Interactive charts BRITE:BILL AUDIT BRITE:BILL ANALYTICS INTEGRATION ENGINE COMPONENTS Semantic Bill Validation Parsing & Transformation Light Touch Integration CORPORATE BILL ANALYZER Hierarchy Editor Group Dashboards Report Builder Group Level Summaries Figure 1: Overview of the Brite:Bill Bill Presentment Platform Core features Bill/Invoice presentment The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer provides components to support bill and invoice presentment across the web, mobile, print and API channels. These components include the dashboard, bill summary and bill listing views, a custom HTML5 view and a standard bill view (PDF or AFP). Corporate hierarchy support The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer provides supports the creation and management of corporate hierarchies as follows: Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 5
support for single or multiple billing accounts within a corporate and multiple unlimited hierarchy levels. a role and associated dashboard at each level within the hierarchy to show costs for the relevant department or section, and associated bill data reporting and call record reporting. manual or automated corporate setup and management. Automated setup may import the corporate account structure from existing CRM or billing systems. support for SMEs with simpler company structures but the same functional set. Billing Account hierarchy support The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer offers the ability to import and maintain synchronization with the billing system of a complex N Level billing account hierarchy. Parent and child billing accounts are maintained and updated automatically prior to a bill run while an owner may be assigned to each billing account automatically or manually. Call detail record listing The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer supports call detail record listing analysis by corporate, department and end-user with filters and custom reports allowing drilldown on a department, user, usage type, date range or cost. Bill reporting Analytics and usage reports are key features and the platform ships with support for a fully customizable reporting framework that may be used to give the user better insight into bills and invoices. This framework is coupled with a high quality set of HTML5 and smartphoneready graphical report templates that may be deployed on the bill view, call usage views, dashboards and dedicated usage analysis pages. Default bill reports are supplied as standard for reporting and analytics on bills showing service and usage costs by department, in- and out-of-bundle costs, top X bills and top usage by call type. Reports may be executed and presented at each level in the hierarchy. The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer also ships with a fully configurable WYSIWYG report builder tool, supporting the creation of custom reports that may be assigned to a specific role or user; these are then presented in dynamic corporate HTML dashboards that may be customized by the end user. Bill consolidation and deconsolidation The platform supports the consolidation of billing accounts into single invoice for a given corporate or SME. This allows for either a full and valid consolidated invoice to be generated for the corporate, or a statement or account overview. The platform may also be used to allow for the decomposition of a consolidated bill into individual bills for dispatch to end-users for expense reporting and other bill administration processes. Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 6
Operational features Role support The Brite:Bill Corporate Analyzer supports a range of users with different roles and responsibilities. Users are assigned a user role, which gives them access to a unique dashboard in the web UI that is customized with the features relevant to that user role. At the service provider, the user roles are Platform Administrator, Billing Operations, Content Manager, CSR Administrator and CSR. These user roles cover setup and administration of the corporate clients, billing information and analytics, bill run management, user interface management and customer care. At the corporate client, the roles are Corporate Internal Administrator, Department Head, Billing Account Owner and the Subscriber. These roles allow users to view only the information that is relevant to their position in the corporate hierarchy. This information may be user profile and preferences or billing information such as call records, reports and analytics associated with their role. Notifications Notifications for corporate and SME customers may be customized to be sent to users linked to the corporate cost-centers. This means that finance, the corporate s telecom administration manager, the department head and the end-user may each be set up to receive the bill. The Platform Administrator, the Corporate Internal Administrator or a Department Head are able to manage notification settings. The bill notification may be customized for each user type, brand and segment, with configurable user interface notification settings that allow for management of complex notifications preferences. Personalization The platform has strong support for personalization of dashboards and bill/invoice views. All incoming bill data sets are mapped to a XML schema-defined format on import. This is then used to drive a series of decisioning rule sets that provide a semantic check of the imported data, and derive facts about the customer and the bill that may be used to insert personalized messaging or content on the bill and dashboard views. This can be used strategically to drive cross-sell or upsell of additional services or products relevant to the end-user, to better explain usage or charges to the user, or to explain new packages and events such as 'first bill'. Aggregated views The platform has been designed to provide the user with an aggregated view of all bills and invoices allowing them to view and manage all their relationships with a biller, or billers, from a single application. Bill consolidation The platform supports bill consolidation to present a single invoice with data from multiple billing systems. This may be useful in offering new packages and bundles (tri or quad play) Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 7
and in presenting a single invoice to the customer. Integration for invoice creation and reporting into the billing and financial system are supported by well-defined APIs. The bill consolidation process is supported by a customizable set of semantic bill data checks to ensure the consolidated bill matches the sum of the invoices. These semantic checks can be performed on the sum of the inbound invoices and can also be checked against totals across each product type and service. In addition there may be a manual check by the corporate account manager to ensure the final amount matches revenue assurance and the financial general ledger. Self-care features The Brite:Bill platform ships with support for a wide range of self-care features to allow the user to self-serve thereby reducing inbound call center traffic. These features include the display and management of user profile information (name, addresses, sex, email addresses, contact mobile number), subscriptions, product and package information, Direct Debit information, notification settings, bill payment history and sharing management. Administration and corporate management The platform ships with a series of roles for the administration and management of corporates. These include corporate setup and on-going administration, reporting on corporate billing, management of bill cycles and reporting on bill cycles including reconciliation and billing operational reports. The Administrator user has a suite of reports available on ingested bill runs. These provide reconciliation and operational management reports. The platform ships with out of the box standard reports and comes with a reporting framework for the development of custom reports. Mobile channel features HTML5 mobile browser layouts are provided for by the standard web platform. Smartphone applications may be integrated using the platform s REST API. Smartphone app support The platform ships with a fully featured REST API that has functional primitives for all platform features and supports the OAuth V2 authentication standard. This may be used for smartphone app development. Brite:Bill also ships with template applications that may be branded and styled. These are licensed separately. See the section describing the platform REST API below. Browser-based app support Browser-based mobile applications may be developed for the product to resize automatically for mobile devices using HTML5 templates. Examples of possible optimizations are carousel bill listings, pinch mode in bill views and varying usage reports by device size. Paper channel features The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer can support all delivery channels, from web to mobile to paper output. The paper channel is supported by core Brite:Bill platform capabilities aligned Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 8
with open source and best-of-breed third party design tools and content management. This channel is licensed as an additional component to the main corporate platform. REST API The Brite:Bill platform ships with a full REST API that allows for smartphone and third party application developers to access a full set of functional primitives for presentment and analytics of billing and unbilled usage. This API has primitives to support the following features: OAuth V2 authentication Full bill data set including call records Billed usage User profile and subscriptions Reports and analytics Personalization decisions Unbilled usage All data is returned in a well-defined JSON format that is suitable for smartphone and other client application development. Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 9
Platform architecture and capabilities The Brite:Bill platform has been built upon a base of proven, open source technologies to provide strong support for open standards, non-proprietary tooling and a flexible, extensible architecture. Figure 2: Overview of the Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer Architecture Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 10
The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer has the following key capabilities of note. Customizable HTML5 standard widgetized feature set The platform is shipped with a feature set that may be deployed either standalone or in a new or existing external portal. Dashboard, bill listing, bill views, payments, analytics and other views are shipped as responsive HTML5 compatible widgets that may be deployed into external web portals as a lightweight JavaScript & JQuery client-side layer. The platform user interface has been built with best in class user experience and web standards in mind. Look and feel is extremely flexible and open to deployment to meet third party UI designs using CSS, HTML5 templates and configuration. Fully headless architecture The web and mobile channels are delivered based entirely on the platform s well-defined API, available as JSON objects over the REST protocol. This allows for the full functional set of the platform to be utilized via standardized API calls for using Brite:Bill template UI widgets or for the development of a fully customized user interface. This gives seamless support of the mobile channel and 3 rd party applications. Single sign-on enabled The platform may be easily configured for single sign-on (SSO), shipping with support for OAuth, SAML and custom protocols to support SSO via existing and third party identity providers. The platform supports the OAuth V2 standard out of the box. This is a popular standard for SSO via social networks and identity provider platforms, and is the emerging smartphone application authentication standard. Light-touch integration The Brite:Bill platform has key strengths in integrating with billing and other invoicing systems with a focus on aggregating bills from a variety of systems ensuring integration may be primarily loosely coupled. The product has features to allow for the retrieval and mapping of XML, PDF, AFP, ASCII delimited and other document formats from billing systems with little or no custom development. This is supported by open source and Brite:Bill developed ETL mapping technology, a strong XML data model and rigorous semantic checking coupled with highly scalable billing data transport options from SFTP to SOAP. This approach allows for the rapid integration of the product with billing systems with little to no impact on the billing system infrastructure in very short timeframes. Highly scalable, lightweight architecture The Brite:Bill product has been built to run on an open source enterprise technology stack. It is deployed on three tiers: A lightweight web tier An open source integration tier A persistence tier that has been built for major scale. Each tier may be readily scaled with some key design approaches to ensure a strongly scalable architecture that may grow to web scale, without the requirement for an expensive commercial enterprise technology stack. Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 11
Cloud optimized Brite:Bill may be deployed within the Enterprise on any standard hardware and operating systems, and may also be deployed on a managed cloud basis. The platform has architectural features that are optimized for standard commercial private and public cloud services. These include the utilization of managed databases, load balancing, highly scalable and cost effective storage pools, auto scaling at all tiers and multi region availability and disaster recovery. Multi channel enabled The platform ships with a series of product components that may be deployed standalone, are fully HTML5 compatible, support the print and mobile channels and may also be run in REST API mode to facilitate rapid mobile application development. Analytics and reporting The platform supports a wide variety of out of the box reports for campaign management, billing operational and financial reconciliation purposes. This provides a view of failed ingests, billing totals across billing runs by products, services and usage statistics, by channel with and with deeper analytics for key events such as bill view and bill payment. The reporting and analytics features are supported by the use of a separate reporting data store. This allows for real time reporting and analytics (to feed decisioning and personalization) without any impact on the main data store. The report data store is fed by an extract transform load (ETL) process that may be scheduled or kicked off as an event. The report data store and associated ETL process may be fully customized to feed the specific requirements of the solution. The analytics and reporting data store is also able to support all Corporate level reporting, the report builder tool being used to create reports across a full corporate data set, which may then be embedded within dynamic corporate dashboards. Monitoring Monitoring and management functions are supported allow for monitoring of platform statistics and health metrics, and also for management operations such as the re-run of billing cycles and management of end-user accounts. Localization, accessibility and audit The platform is fully localized and multi brand capable across all channels. It is built for rich internet application accessibility (WAI-ARIA compliant) and supports a full and separate audit trail of all transactional activity. Audit is a key tool for admin and CSR staff in troubleshooting and tracking end user problems. Defense in depth The platform has been designed to provide for secure defense in depth. At each tier best practises, compatible with the OWASP top ten recommendations (see https://www.owasp.org), are employed to provide a robust and secure solution. This includes encryption in storage and in transit, coverage for all known web vulnerabilities and a tiered architecture that locks down access to user data. Corporate Bill Analyzer Product Description 12