This chapter covers the following topics:
Telecommunications Billing Integrator (TBI) provides a seamless integration between Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and one or more external billing applications to assist in customer management and enhance business benefits.
Telecommunications service providers use Oracle EBS to create and maintain data. They use external billing applications to bill the customers for the services and products ordered through Oracle EBS. Oracle TBI is an interface between Oracle EBS and the external billing applications. Oracle TBI enables exchange of information between Oracle EBS and the billing applications to ensure that data essential for billing purposes is made available to the external billing application.
TBI depends on the Oracle Telecommunications Service Ordering (TSO) solution. The TSO solution leverages multiple components in the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to enable telecommunications service providers to add, change, move or disconnect telecommunication services.
Telecommunications service providers also use Oracle EBS to conduct post-sale interactions with customers, such as processing service requests and billing inquiries. Oracle EBS provides information on customers, accounts, products and sales orders which is replicated and synchronized in the external billing applications. Oracle TBI provides the customer care agent with the bill summary information and actual customer bill images from the billing application. It provides bill summary data in Oracle Contact Center. Oracle TBI thus addresses the need for fast and efficient access to billing information and EBS data.
Information Exchange: TBI enables exchange of information between Oracle EBS and external billing applications. TBI publishes details on accounts, products, and sales orders to the external billing applications and Oracle EBS receives acknowledgements for the published messages.
Integration with multiple billing systems: TBI can integrate with multiple heterogeneous billing applications simultaneously.
Status Tracking: TBI integrates with the Oracle Collaboration History to monitor communication between EBS and the billing applications. TBI uses Collaboration History to:
Support integration with multiple heterogeneous billing systems. TBI uses Collaboration History to determine if each of the billing application has successfully created accounts and orders. It checks the account messages and sales order messages in Collaboration History.
Ensure that order information is published to billing systems only after each billing system has successfully created a party and account.
Publish updates to party and account relevant to the billing system.
Track the status of each message that is published to the external billing application.
Allow users to query for specific collaborations by account numbers, order numbers, or product/item numbers. Users can view the contents of the messages being published and the history of the events.
For more information, see Setting Up Collaboration History.
Middleware independent: TBI requires a middleware as an integration point to billing applications for messaging, transforming, and routing the XML messages. TBI can integrate with any middleware that has a native AQ or JMS adapter. TBI has been tested and certified using Oracle Applications InterConnect (OAI 9.0.4). For information on configuring Oracle Applications InterConnect (OAI 9.0.4), see Configuring Oracle Applications InterConnect.
Display bill summary and bill image: TBI provides access to the bill summary data through Oracle Contact Center. The Bill Summary UI displays the bill summary for a single account number. The customer service agents can view the bill summary from the 'Bill Summary' option in Oracle Contact Center. The bill number provided in the bill summary UI is linked to the image data supplied by the billing application. To enable the 'Bill Summary' option in Oracle Contact Center, see Setting up Bill Summary UI.
Business Event Enabled: Business Event System is a real-time notification system. The Business Event System notifies TBI when an account or sales order is created or updated. For account update, the TBI users can choose the TCA events they wish to subscribe to. For more information, see Subscribing to Account Update Events.
TBI publishes information on the following EBS entities to the external billing applications:
New Account
Account Update
Item/Product
Sales Order
Grouped Sales Order
Publishing New Account Details
Account information is maintained in Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) and is published to the external billing application only when an order is booked for the first time for an account.
For more information, see Integrating Workflow Process for Publishing Account Information and Message Specifications for Account.
Publishing Account Update Details
TBI subscribes to a set of TCA events related to account updates. TBI generates and publishes an account message to the billing system when changes relevant to the billing system are made to accounts in TCA.
The updated information is marked in the message. For example: If the credit classification information of an account (relevant to the billing system) is changed in TCA, TBI publishes the account message with the Credit Classification section marked as "U" (Updated).
If multiple changes are made to an account in TCA, TBI publishes multiple account messages.
For more information, see Subscribing to Account Update Events and Message Specifications for Account.
Publishing Item/Product Details
TBI provides a concurrent manager program to synchronize the product catalog in Oracle EBS with the billing system. Synchronization helps in maintaining accurate pricing and billing information. To synchronize a large number of items between EBS and the billing system, the concurrent program generates an XML or CSV file for all EBS product catalog items that must be uploaded to the billing system. For synchronizing small additions, the concurrent program can generate and asynchronously publish an XML message of items from the EBS product catalog to the billing system.
For more information, see Setting up and Running the Item Publish Concurrent Program and Message Specifications for Item/Product
Publishing Sales Order Details
Sales order information is created and maintained in Oracle Order Management. Sales orders with multiple order lines are created in Oracle Order Management when:
A new telecommunications service (example: wireless service) is ordered
New features (example: voice mail) are added to a service
Changes are made to features (example: number of rings before voice mail is activated)
Changes (upgrade/downgrade) are made to price packages
Provisioning actions (example: service is suspended, resumed, moved or disconnected) are performed on an active service.
In the TSO solution, each order line includes a provisioning action, an item (example: service, feature, price package, one-time charge, recurring charge), pricing, address, and other information. The billing system requires all the information in the order. TBI publishes an XML message for each sales order line, to the billing system after each order line is fulfilled (provisioned).
The sales order is published after confirming that the account that created the sales order is also published. If the account is published, the sales order flow continues to publish the sales order message. If the account is not published, the account is published before publishing the sales order message.
For more information, see Integrating Workflow Process for Publishing Sales Order Information.
Publishing Group Sales Order Message Details
A Group Sales Order message is a consolidated sales order XML message which contains all the order lines published to the third party billing application instead of order lines as individual message. TBI allows you to publish a single message for each line or a single grouped sales order message for all the lines in a sales order. Both of these options are mutually exclusive.
TBI uses the following Oracle applications that provide the underlying technology stack, schema, and structure for TBI.
Oracle Telecommunications Service Ordering (TSO)
Oracle Collaboration History
Oracle Contact Center
Oracle Workflow Business Systems
Oracle XML Gateway
Oracle Advanced Queuing
The enhancements are as follows:
Creation of a Grouped Sales Order message that includes all the lines of an order.
Publish Bill-To account information for a sales order.
Additional TCA events for Account Update Message.
Enhancements to the Account Message.
Enhancements to the Sales Order Message.
Uptake of JMS compliant queues in XML Gateway.
This feature provides a single XML message that includes all the lines of an order. This enables the billing system to initiate the billing process for the entire order at the same time. The complete sales order message is grouped by order number and published to the billing application. A single message per order ensures that the dependencies and relationships across order lines are maintained when the message is delivered to the billing system and the billing system can initiate the billing process for the entire order at the same time.
A group sales order message is useful when an order contains different parts or order lines that are provisioned at the same time and the billing also happens at the same time. For example: An order for provisioning Wireless Service, Voice Mail and SMS for an account. These services are activated immediately and do not have a long waiting time. These services also can be billed immediately.
In the earlier version of TBI, three separate messages would have been created for each of the services provided. With group sales order message, billing information for all these three items can be sent in a single message. The group sales order message is generated after all the billable lines in the order have been successfully fulfilled and the products and services on the order are reflected in the customer's installed base.
Additional Information: Group sales order and sales order line messages are mutually exclusive.
The Bill To account (payee account) for each order line is published to the billing application. The Bill To accounts are published separately as independent account messages.
The TCA events added to the existing Account Update message are:
oracle.apps.ar.hz.Person.update: This event is triggered when there are changes to personal information about a person.
oracle.apps.ar.hz.Organization.update: This event is triggered when there are changes to information related to an organization.
oracle.apps.ar.hz.CustomerProfile.update: This event is triggered when there are changes to information about the credit characteristics of a single customer account, customer account site or a party.
oracle.apps.ar.hz.ContactPoint.update: This event is triggered when there are changes to information about how to communicate to parties or party sites using electronic media such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), e-mail, telephone, telex, and the Internet.
The information added to the account message is:
Customer profile amount for the account.
Credit classification details of the account.
The obsolete Billing Preference Events are as follows:
oracle.apps.ar.hz.BillingPreference.create
oracle.apps.ar.hz.BillingPreference.update
The obsolete billing preference information is as follows:
BILL_DISPATCH_METHOD
BILL_FORMAT
BILL_LANGUAGE
BILL_TYPE
BILL_CURRENCY
The following enhancements have been added to a sales order message:
Ship To Address of the Order Line: Include Ship To address details like Address (Street, City, County, Zip Code, Country), Contact Name (Salutation, First Name, Middle Name, Last Name), Contact Phone Number (Primary) and Contact E-mail Address (if available) for each order line
Ship To Contact of the Order Line: Include the Ship to Contact details
Payment Term for the Order Line: Include the payment terms. This information is used to calculate when a payment is due and factor in any discounts that are given for early payment.
Periodicity Details of the Order Line: Include periodicity details to indicate how often a service is charged.
XML Gateway generates XML messages in JMS format. There are two new JMS enabled AQs: WF_JMS_OUT and WF_JMS_IN that can be setup to directly process outbound and inbound JMS messages.
In outbound transactions, XML Gateway generates the XML message directly in the JMS format and enqueues the messages onto the queue WF_JMS_OUT. The middleware should be configured to connect to the WF_JMS_OUT queue so that it can dequeue the message and utilize it for further processing.
The Inbound transaction is similar to the outbound transaction. The Middleware enqueues the message onto WF_JMS_IN, which is the inbound AQ provided by XML Gateway. The XML Gateway dequeues this message and processes it.