22.11.2010

FORS regional Representative office in St.-Petersburg announced the completion of the project on deployment of the comprehensive billing system based on Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM) software at Metrocom — a Russian well-known telecommunication services provider. Though it was the first Oracle BRM implementation in Russia, the achieved results proved to the customer that the choice has been made correct.

Oracle BRM, being a highly-efficient convergent billing system, was certified in Russia in accordance with the local telecom «Rules of Appliance of the Automated System for the Calculation of Payments» for the networks up to 1 million subscribers. To meet the requirements of the Russian regulations and norms, the product was adjusted and customized to the specifics of the business processes of the local operators (including support of the multicurrency accounting and integration with the Russian accounting systems). Due to the skills and high professionalism of FORS team it was developed an actually new, ready-to-the market replicating solution based on Oracle BRM and available for implementation at the medium and large telecommunication companies.

The project, which has been started at 2008, was driven by the following needs: higher level of automation of the tariffication and billing operations, creation of the consolidated system on tariffication of all kind of services and reducing of timing and financial costs while launching new services, actions and special offers. It was also required to produce the single catalogue of services and to adopt a standard reporting procedure.

Product basic functionality was significantly updated for the full range of subsystems. Implementation of the advanced billing system on the base of Oracle BRM enabled automatic performance of the following services:

• Billing and subscribers maintenance for all types of services;
• Payments settlements between operators (Interconnect);
• Other services — like hosting and TV translations.

In total it has been deployed 14 functional subsystems, providing automatic processing of all the types of input and output data flows — starting from collection of the primary information on the consumed services to issuing of the invoices, payment acceptance and dealing with the receivables, including revenues and profit management.

Implementation of the Oracle BRM–based billing system allowed to reduce dramatically the amount of the manually operated processes for tariffication and calculation of the agent’s fee. Efficiency and data processing rate increased several times, reducing significantly operating costs and providing accurate payments receipt. The quality of services improved a lot too; this along with the swiftly appearing new products and capabilities for the customers strengthened the marketing position of Metrocom at the highly competitive North-Western region of Russia.