2 Understanding the Process Integration for Billing Management

This chapter provides an overview of the process integration for billing management and discusses the billing management business process flow. Also discussed are the solution assumptions and constraints.

This chapter includes the following sections:

• Section 2.1, "Process Integration for Billing Management Overview"

• Section 2.2, "Billing Management Business Process Flow"

• Section 2.3, "Solution Assumptions and Constraints"

2.1 Process Integration for Billing Management Overview

The Siebel CRM Integration Pack for Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management: Agent Assisted Billing Care provides these process integrations:

• Billing management.

• Customer management.

• Collections management.

The Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management: Agent Assisted Billing Care PIP also includes additional touch points between Siebel Customer Relationship Management (Siebel CRM) and Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM) that are required to enable this process.

The Oracle Communications Order to Cash PIP for Siebel CRM, Oracle Service and Order Management, and Oracle Billing and Revenue Management is a prerequisite for the process integration for billing management.

The process integration for billing management enables a customer service representative (CSR) to retrieve account balances, invoices, and unbilled data at a header, summary, and detail level. The PIP also enables a CSR to adjust and pay invoices.

After a service is activated, usage events (for example, a phone call, text message, or a data session) are sent from the communications network to the billing system. These events are rated, bills are generated, and then bills are sent to customers.

The service cycle of the process integration for billing management starts when customers call to question the content of their bills, query on unbilled usage, make payments, or file disputes. Billing information must be sent from Oracle BRM to Siebel CRM so that CSRs can respond to billing questions. Payment information and bill dispute requests must then be sent from Siebel CRM to Oracle BRM.

Most of these billing integration touch points do not replicate the billing data in Siebel CRM. Instead, the integration retrieves the billing data on demand from Oracle BRM and displays it within Siebel CRM. For this integration, Oracle supports Siebel CRM and Oracle BRM as the participating applications; the design does consider that customers may have multiple billing systems (all Oracle BRM systems) and enables them to use routing rules to retrieve billing data from other billing systems.

The process integration for billing management consists of these integration flows and their respective integration scenarios:

• The Account Balance integration flow provides the QueryBalanceGroupList, QueryBalanceGroupServices, QueryBalanceSummary, and QueryBalanceDetails integration scenarios.

• The Invoice integration flow provides the QueryInvoiceList, QueryInvoice, QueryInvoiceUsageAllocation, SearchInvoiceUsageAllocation, and QueryInvoiceUsageAllocationResource integration scenarios.

• The Service Usage integration flow provides the QueryServiceUsage, QueryServiceUsageAllocation, SearchServiceUsageAllocationResource, and QueryServiceUsageAllocationsResource integration scenarios.

• The Payment integration flow provides the CreateReceivedPayment, QueryReceivedPaymentList, and SearchPayment integration scenarios.

• The Adjustment integration flow provides the QueryAccountBalanceAdjustment and CreateAccountBalanceAdjustment integration scenarios.

2.2 Billing Management Business Process Flow

Figure 2-1 illustrates the overall flow for the process integration for billing management.

Figure 2-1 Billing Management Business Process Flow

2.3 Solution Assumptions and Constraints

These are the assumptions and constraints for the process integration for billing management.

1. One billing profile in Siebel CRM is associated with a single billing system.

2. Billing data is not replicated in Siebel CRM. Rather, it is retrieved on demand from the billing system.

3. In cases where the deployment topology has multiple billing systems, each Siebel billing profile should map 1:1 with a billing system (assumption stated in #1). This is because the integration does not have any provisions to converge or consolidate billing data between multiple billing systems. If this premise is ignored, the solution cannot guarantee fetching the billing data consistently from the same billing system.

   For more information about configuring multiple billing systems, see the Oracle Application Integration Architecture Oracle Communications Order to Cash Integration Pack Implementation Guide for Siebel CRM, Oracle Order and Service Management, and Oracle Billing and Revenue Management, "Appendix F: Configuring Multiple Oracle BRM Instances for Communications PIPs"

4. Monetary and nonmonetary adjustments within a single adjustment request from Siebel CRM are not possible.

5. A single adjustment request can have adjustments from only one level and not across multiple levels such as header, item, and event.

6. Adjustment requests always originate in Siebel CRM and are sent to Oracle BRM for processing through the process integration.

7. Adjustment requests that are absolute and percentage value are supported at bill/header and event level only. Adjustment request of only absolute value are supported at the item level.

8. Invoice adjustment requests are applicable at header, item, and event levels.

9. Account-level adjustments are not supported.

10. Unbilled adjustments are applicable only at the event level.

11. Payment validation occurs in the billing system.

12. Create Payments is used for making one-time payments and supports credit card and automatic debit payment methods.

13. Viewing an invoice image in Siebel CRM is not supported for this release.