Billing and CRM Systems

I have been always thinking that a Billing system and a CRM system are a piece of cake. You know, the things you teach programming with in schools, the database linked applications like the Super Market thing, Inventory and then the hospital management programs which your teacher asks you to “memorise” for the exams 😉

So, when I heard Billing and CRM System when I first walked into Telstra in Accenture, the above was pretty much what I had been expecting. I had no idea what I had gotten myself into 😉 It was like accidently running into the beast. Comverse and Oracle are the makers of the wonderful products called Kenan Arbor and Siebel CRM. Kenan is coming from comverse and Siebel is coming from Oracle. I just learned that Comverse has now made a new product called the Comverse One which includes both Billing and CRM systems together as a package.

 Now I guess its pretty obvious that any company who needs a billing system would also need a crm system. Why? Well, Duh,,, you deal with customers, right???

Ohk, coming back. These systems I mentioned above are the beasts of the industry. Now, why would I call them the beasts? Well, lets just say at this point that they are not as simple as they sound 🙂 Both of them come with tools that help you customize it to your requirement and by requirement, I mean that you can use it no matter what kind of products you are dealing with and what kind of customers you are dealing with too. Infact, companies provide support to get you in the right track of using them in the way you want them to and I am not talking about any support given by the makers. I mean other service based companies like Accenture for example provides Billing and CRM transformation services to a lot of clients by customizing Siebel and Kenan for them.

You see, these products make the developers life easy. You can use it on their own or use it as a base system where you build up the features what your client needs in addition to them. Well, Kenan has so far been the favorite billing system for the Telecom industry and telecom providers like Telstra, Vodafone, Airtel, AT&T, BT, Siemens, all use Billing and CRM systems based on Kenan and Siebel (Now we know how Comverse and Oracle makes the money ;))

I have personally worked with these systems. Both these systems have oracle database working in the back-end. Its a highly complex network of databases that become the key ingredient to the way they work. The rest of it depends on how you use the tools available to customize it. Now based on the amount of data you want to take care of ie. the amount of customers you are dealing with, you would need to split up among a number of servers, even supercomputers(if you are that big a service provider) and make scripts that work in integrating all of them.

Now for those in the lame side and wondering what a Billing and a CRM system are, let me tell you this :

Billing systems make all the customer bills and send it to the customers. It uses a lot of real-time monitoring systems connected to it to maintain all the data it needs to bill the customer. You can schedule it to generate bills based on a bill date. This date can be same for all customers or can be different for each customer. Recently they have added a real-time billing option. It all depends on what you need and how you need it.

A CRM on the other hand is the system used by Customer Service people. CRM is Customer Relationship Management. Basically if you are working on a call center, then the application you have in your screen is probably the Siebel. This has a really nice GUI. The screenshot shows the typical Siebel GUI :

So, the ideal way of setting up the system is for Siebel to be the front-end along with Kenan at the back. Now, you would need to configure some sort of adapter that acts as the bridge for data transfers between the two. You see, they are designed to be independent systems(the kenan also has a good GUI but not useful as a CRM tool) thats why you need the adapter.