About Implementing Billing and Revenue Management

Implementation Process

A typical BRM implementation process includes these tasks:

Configuring the BRM definition of services and events. For example, if you provide a service that is not configured in BRM, you need to define the /service and /event classes to support that service. See BRM Developer's Guide.
Creating your product offerings.
Setting up customer account creation.
Configuring billing, payments, and other revenue management processes.
Testing your implementation on a test system.
Installing a production system.

Ways to Use and Customize BRM

You can customize BRM to change the default BRM business functionality. By customizing BRM, you can change how BRM responds to customer activity. For example, you can do the following:

Change the net due date for invoice accounts.
Specify the reasons for automatically inactivating an account.
Specify how and when to validate credit cards.
Collect additional data about a customer (for example, the customer's bank ABA number, employee number, or member referral information).

You customize business functionality by editing configuration files and by customizing BRM source code. You do not need to be a programmer to edit configuration files, but you must be a programmer to customize source code.

You can use several methods to use and customize BRM features:

Use BRM client applications, such as Billing Care, to manage customers, record payments, and change BRM default behavior. Client applications run on the Windows platform and have a graphical user interface.
Use BRM command-line utilities such as the pin_collect utility and the load_pin_glid utility to run billing utilities and load data into the BRM database.
Edit configuration files to change the default BRM behavior and tune system performance.
Customize BRM source code. This requires programming.
Caution:
- Always use the BRM API to manipulate data. Changing data in the database without using the API can corrupt the data.
- Do not use SQL commands to change data in the database. Always use the API.

About Creating Custom Account Management and Billing Tools

Using the BRM APIs, you can create custom client applications and customer interfaces. For example:

Web-based applications that customers use to change their account status, upgrade their services, and pay their bills.
An online account creation package requiring no existing broadband access and distributed on a variety of shareware CDs.
An application that runs nightly, searches for accounts that have a free trial account, and sends email when the free trial account is about to expire.
An application that runs nightly to check the age of an account. If the account is over two years old, the customer is automatically upgraded to a discounted package.
An application that checks customer profiles and applies a discounted charge for teachers.
An application that monitors the customer's disk space on a server and charges more if allotted disk space is exceeded.

About Connecting BRM to External Data Processing Sources

BRM is modular and extensible by design. Many customers add custom interfaces to external components. Some customers use external components instead of standard BRM components. For example, some customers use BRM rating but use their own proprietary billing system. Other customers use a third-party customer management system.

Examples of external integrations:

Tax calculation services.
Credit card processing services.
Legacy billing systems.
Customer management systems.
Credit checking services.
Accounting applications to handle A/R and G/L data.
Business information distribution services (for example, services that automatically distribute the results of database reports).
Fulfillment services that send welcome letters and goods such as CDs.
Invoice processing, printing, and mailing companies.
Offsite customer service organizations.

About the Data Displayed in BRM Client Applications

You can change some information displayed in client applications to support your business needs. For example:

Change the list of packages or edit your package lists.
Change the predefined reasons that describe why a change was made to an account.
Add a payment method.
Change the list of currencies you support.

About BRM Defaults

Almost all business policies have a default implementation. For example, the default billing cycle is one month. You can change the default implementation by editing configuration files, or customizing policy code.

When Is Programming Required?

Most BRM features can be customized without any programming. For example, most product offerings, CSR-based account creation, and billing setup requires no programming to customize. The following customizations require some programming:

Creating services. If you offer a service that is not supported by default in BRM, such as a fax service, you must create a custom service to capture and rate fax-related events.
Modifying some BRM defaults. In some cases, you must modify policy source code to change BRM behavior. For example, to rate broadband access by the number of bytes downloaded rather than by connection time, you must edit source code.
Creating custom applications. Some BRM implementations can be greatly enhanced by creating simple applications that manipulate data in the BRM database. For example, you can write applications to do the following tasks:
- Alert customers that their free hours are almost used up.
- Search for customers who have late payments.
Customizing Billing Care. To change appearance and functionality, use the Billing Care SDK.
Customizing Customer Center. To change appearance and functionality, use the Customer Center SDK.
Supporting a legacy system. If you already have data stored in a database, you can write a Data Manager (DM) to provide an interface to that database.
Customizing event notification. You use event notification to set up processes to run automatically. For example, you can customize BRM to send an email message to a customer automatically when a credit limit is nearly expired.
Implementing advanced pricing features. Some pricing features (for example, product-level provisioning) require some programming for the initial setup.