EFFECTIVE INTER-CARRIER TRADING & ROUTING COST MANAGEMENT · EFFECTIVE INTER-CARRIER TRADING & ROUTING COST MANAGEMENT ... billing are all paramount to this success. ... leading supplier

© 2011 CSG Systems International, Inc. Confidential and Proprietary

EFFECTIVE INTER-CARRIER TRADING & ROUTING COST MANAGEMENT CSG Interconnect OR

© 2011 CSG Systems International, Inc. Confidential and Proprietary 2

CONTENTS 03 EFFECTIVE INTERCONNECT

COST MANAGEMENT

04 THE PRODUCT AT A GLANCE

05 WHOLESALE BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

06 OPTIMISED TRADING & ROUTING

07 MANAGING COMPLEX WHOLESALE AGREEMENTS

10 INTERCONNECT OR, SUBSYSTEMS

12 TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS PROCESS

Operators have to manage a growing range of agreements and

interconnect rates, many of which may need to be changed on a daily basis. As they seek to streamline and automate all aspects of their international wholesale and traditional voice business, the search for the optimal business support tool is ever more important. Interconnect OR is a trading & routing system that enables operators to break free from the constraints of unresponsive systems and inflexible processes.


EFFECTIVE INTERCONNECT COST MANAGEMENT

Interconnect OR automates complex tasks and gives you control, allowing you to configure your network and manage interconnect revenue and costs accurately. You recognise that effective interconnect cost management is critical to the success of your business. The dynamic process of buying, selling, routing and billing are all paramount to this success. CSG is the leading supplier of interconnect billing systems in the world, and we can help you to differentiate and achieve higher margins. Interconnect OR provides you with the tools and efficiencies necessary to launch new services, deliver new revenue and streamline existing processes for maximum profitability. CSG also offers a broad portfolio of integrated billing, mediation and settlement products to augment the power and flexibility of Interconnect OR. A long list of fixed line and mobile customers including Telia-Sonera, Eircom, Bharti, VimpelCom, Indosat and UTS have chosen Interconnect OR to satisfy complex and diverse operational, network, and system requirements. Interconnect OR enables you to optimise trading and routing for all aspects of your wholesale business:

Wholesale Planning

Ensure positive margin on all products and destinations

Build new revenue streams by creating differentiated products

Support complex business models and agreement types

Access real time performance indicators to manage profitability

Dynamic process management based on thresholds and alarms

Comprehensive management reporting to improve business performance

Commercial Operations

Introduce innovative new services without routing constraints

Manage complex negotiations and pricing models

Automatically import rates, area codes and performance indicators

Automatically map destinations against your own definitions

Sophisticated Least Cost/Optimal Cost routing algorithms

Maximise the profitability of customer relationships

Network Operations

Improve productivity, reduce lead times, increase quality and eliminate errors

Synchronise complex commercial and technical routing decisions

Optimise the distribution of traffic to eliminate bottlenecks and overflows

Automate switch configuration to cut lead times and improve accuracies

Full traceability of technical implementations


THE PRODUCT AT A GLANCE

Interconnect OR is pre-integrated with CSG’s Interconnect billing system and Intermediate mediation platform. Alternatively it can inter-work with your existing interconnect and mediation platforms. It can be easily adapted to suit your way of working and supports the following functionality:

Management of wholesale agreements, such as bilaterals, transit, hubbing and refile

Management of the dialling plan from carriers and in the network

Tools to support the process of buying and selling minutes of traffic i.e. trading

Basic least cost routing or advanced optimal routing, including parameters such as differential routing by customer groups, time-of day or traffic type

Automatic programming of complex routing structures into many switch types

Analysis of EDRs/CDRs to determine carrier quality and traffic volume measures to influence routing

Capacity Management based on differential cost analysis to minimise costly overflow caused by network congestions

Highly flexible and complex reporting based on user definable formats including graphics, drill-down and export to Microsoft-Excel

Addressing Dynamic Business Demands

Flexibility: Operators have diverse structures and the processes of traffic trading and routing affect many departments. Our integrated trading and routing system supports this variety of operation and offers you flexibility. You can easily leverage operational intelligence to manage, route, measure and audit interconnect traffic, thereby obtaining consensus from multiple viewpoints to help customise business logic and optimise business performance.

Automation: Operators handle large volumes of data and you need a system capable of automating as many business processes as possible: rate management, dial code management, Least Cost Routing / Optimal Routing, switch configuration, capacity management, reporting, and agreement monitoring. Our solution enables this and provides significant improvements in productivity, accuracy and efficiencies. Rapid reaction to change: As new agreements with multiple partners are created and new routing capabilities arise, the design of Interconnect OR means the resources required to analyse, control and modify factors is reduced. Changes may be easily reflected within the system and incorporated into flexible workflows to ensure financial optimisation of commercial agreements and the network. Business insight: Decision making parameters of cost, quality and capacity change with increasing frequency. We give you the information you need, when you need it to manage carrier relationships, support vendor negotiations, analyse commercial and technical routing suggestions, identify capacity constraints and volume commitments, and track performance. Cost control: Interconnect OR is a flexible system that manages costs and margins associated with each partner agreement, network conditions and service levels so that you can accurately identify the best commercial and technical decisions. By leveraging this you lower costs, eliminate margin leakage and automate the entire routing process. Regulatory compliance: All of CSG’s solutions are designed to help support your compliance obligations ensuring your trading and routing processes are controlled, validated and easy to audit.


WHOLESALE BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

CSG offers a broad range of complementary products to augment the power and flexibility of Interconnect OR. Together these form a comprehensive ‘Wholesale Business Management Solution’ comprising inter-carrier billing and settlement, content partner management, roaming, business intelligence, pre-

processing and mediation, in addition to trading and

routing capabilities, all in a single, pre-integrated solution. CSG’s Wholesale Business Management Solution includes the pre-integration of CSG's award winning, best-of-breed products. CSG’s Wholesale Business Management Solution is fully modular, which means that all components can be installed individually or in combination.


OPTIMISED TRADING & ROUTING Streamlining Your Business Process

Operators are looking to create more flexible and streamlined processes, so that they can take advantage of dynamic market changes, be more responsive and reduce cost to a minimum.

Automate the Uploading of Price Lists and Dial Codes

Interconnect OR automates the labour intensive function of importing price lists and dial codes and mapping destinations against your internal numbering plan, providing both speed and accuracy for choosing the best providers. As definitions change, new ranges open up and others close, you can automatically keep on top of these movements for greater accuracy and responsiveness.

Reduce Lead Times and Ensure Optimum Routing

Interconnect OR enables you to automatically calculate how best to utilise existing capacity to maximise revenue and to minimise costs. You benefit from the optimum calculation of different sets of information including dialling codes, quality, capacity, traffic flow, costs and pricing. This enables you to dramatically reduce commercial and technical leadtimes, spot conflicts and resolve them effectively.

Swift Uploading of Routing Information to Switches

The ability to pre-test routes, overlay routing plans on the physical network, generate routing instructions, activate the routing on each switch and reconfigure network routing is often time consuming and fraught with discrepancies. Interconnect OR automates these processes and eliminates manual work required, enabling you to significantly cut lead times.

React Quickly to Risks and Changing Conditions

Reducing costs and increasing profitability across interconnect routes is dependent on managers being able to react quickly to changing network conditions. Interconnect OR provides a high degree of accuracy and visibility across the network to manage volume commitments, optimise routing, monitor quality of service levels and identify financial risks and capacity

opportunities.


MANAGING COMPLEX WHOLESALE AGREEMENTS Managing Complex Wholesale Agreements

The wholesale business has changed from long term contracts, predictable volumes, consistent quality and simple rate plans to operators juggling complex agreements, with multiple partners. Without flexible systems in place they need greater resources to track financial obligations and ensure each agreement is being satisfied.

Control of all Commercial Agreements and Obligations

Interconnect OR automates and streamlines the monitoring of contractual agreements, including forecast levels, costs, revenues, margins, and utilisation, which provides complete transparency and control of performance at a per agreement level.

Effectively Manage Supplier Relationships

To have full control of revenues you need the ability to analyse offers quickly, right down to individual dial codes and further break-outs. Interconnect OR enables you to automate the uploading of vendor offers, number plan comparisons, dial code discrepancies and invoice validation. It also helps you to manage change by identifying any operational impact and risk.

Negotiate and Monitor Sales Prices

Interconnect OR offers full end-to-end visibility to support rate negotiation with suppliers and price setting with customers. This enables you to make cost efficient decisions incorporating profitability by customer, destination and product, projected termination costs, network configurations, and agreement history etc. to maximise your margin on all transactions.

Improving Your Decision Making

When key decisions need to be made, there are often many sources across your organisation, that hold the information you need, including revenue performance, customer profitability, termination costs and network utilisation. Interconnect OR provides consistent and reliable information for your entire wholesale business needs.

A Single, Consolidated View of Activity

Interconnect OR enables you to obtain a holistic view of performance across your commercial and network organisation through a system that is optimised for trading and routing. Whether you want to analyse Least Cost Routing or Optimal Cost Routing options, track key performance measures or compare the health of the network against commercial agreements, Interconnect OR unlocks the information you need.

Constant Picture of Operational Status

Interconnect OR comes with the built-in capability of performance management to define and monitor key measures for a constant picture of your business status. The system enables you to analyse rates, monitor the volume and quality performance of the routing plan, to determine key performance indicators, and track revenues and margins as the cost base fluctuates.

Informed Resolution Management

Interconnect OR delivers the insight you need to pin point and investigate routing and contractual problems. The system enables you to actively determine the nature and cause of the problem e.g. service quality issues, sudden changes in volumes, cost fluctuations, or invoice disputes, to ensure a fast and informed response to deal with the situation. Interconnect OR automates this process using intrusive test call generation to test MOS, CLI and other parameters and eliminates manual work required, enabling you to significantly cut resolution times.


TELIA-SONERA CASE STUDY Telia-Sonera and its subsidiaries provide mobile, fixed line and broadband internet services

throughout the Scandinavian and Baltic markets. Telia-Sonera also provides mobile services through its Eurasian, Turkish and Russian affiliates. The group is the single largest communications provider in the Nordic region.

In addition to its core Scandinavian and Baltic markets, Telia-Sonera also has a broader global presence, with international switches and users in several locations around the world including Stockholm, Frankfurt, London, Paris and Washington D.C. It required a comprehensive trading and routing system to support its international wholesale minute business of over a billion minutes per year. General international minute price erosion also meant Telia-Sonera needed to restructure, streamline operations and reduce annual costs.

Telia-Sonera chose Interconnect OR as the most comprehensive and proven solution on the market. The solution has enabled Telia-Sonera to significantly improve their business processes, reducing interconnect and operational costs. Furthermore, the solution has strengthened Telia-Sonera’s market position by adding enhanced control elements to the business for better real-time management and overview of the profitability of deals in the tough international carrier market.

Telia-Sonera identified the implementation of CSG’s Interconnect OR solution as a major underlying factor in an all-time-high traffic results in the international voice business.


“CSG’s trading and routing solution provides us with an integrated tool to ensure quality, flexibility and accuracy in managing complex inter-carrier relationships. We are very pleased with the solution’s performance to date and we are confident that it will continue to support our plans for further centralising and streamlining business processes.”

Brendan Ives, VP & HEAD OF TRADING AT TELIA-SONERA INTERNATIONAL CARRIER


Contract Management

Offers complete information for effective business decisions. A central repository stores all rating and contract information and provides a consolidated view of activity. Combined with advanced mathematical models, you can intuitively create, customise and implement price offerings and manage forecast levels and contractual agreements with minimal effort. All the repetitive tasks of capturing, analysing and presenting data are fully automated including importing of rates and area codes, displaying meaningful information for negotiations, identifying breakout opportunities, and creating customer-specific price-lists etc. It manages dynamic changes to decision making parameters such as cost, quality and capacity to help you to maximise your margin on all transactions.

Contract Recording: Loads and stores all contract information (refile, hubbing, transit and bilateral agreements)

Single Point-of-Entry: Single-point-of-entry of refile and hubbing agreements to CSG Interconnect

Agreement Tracking: Tracks volume agreements and forecast levels to help minimise penalties

Cost Base Analysis: Calculates the routing cost based on the actual routing plan

Customer Price Analysis: Generates recommended price lists per service and records actual customer price agreements

Margin Maintenance: Tracks price margin as the cost base fluctuates to help maintain margin levels

Routing Management

Enables you to manage considerably more routing changes more frequently. It offers a central repository for all routing parameters and enables real time analysis of a large amount of data – rates, agreements, quality levels, volumes etc – to ensure traffic is routed to the optimal supplier for each destination, service and time period. Managing the routing of interconnect traffic is about configuring your network to deliver the required service to your customers, while maximising your operating margin. The system acts as the primary control mechanism for routing decisions and automates the processes of determining an optimal routing plan, verifying the plan in the network, monitoring temporary routing decisions and using network elements to fine tune the plan.

Routing Data Repository: Captures and stores the primary routing decision factors, such as carrier rates, carrier quality, traffic volumes, capacity etc.

Proportional Routing: Supports proportional routing to control the traffic levels being sent to each carrier in order to satisfy volume commitments and capacity constraints

Optimal Carrier Selection: Analyses the decision factors to determine the optimal carrier selection for routing traffic to each destination, service and time period

Opportunity Analysis: Analyses carrier’s dial codes and rates to identify opportunities for new dial code breakouts for routing in the network

Prefix Management: Controls the addition, modification and deletion of dial codes in the routing plan used by all system modules

Service Assignment: Assigns service classes

to individual customers by destination

INTERCONNECT OR SUB-SYSTEMS Interconnect OR Comprises of Four Sub-Systems:


Network Management

The Network Management sub-system enables you to transform commercial decisions into effective network activities. The system dramatically increases the speed, control and quality of the routing process by monitoring existing routes, optimising routing plans, generating routing commands, uploading and activating them in multiple switch types, and offering full traceability. Your entire network structure is modeled, allowing you to overlay decisions and verify how traffic should be routed to each selected carrier to prevent inefficiencies and bottlenecks. Intelligent algorithms allow you to identify the most appropriate way to distribute traffic based on network conditions, profit, cost and quality etc. The system provides control of the entire routing process to prevent errors and increase the capacity to manage routing tasks.

Generic Routing Plan: Supports user defined rules to describe how traffic should be routed through a multi-node network to each selected carrier

Route Selection: Overlays the carrier selection onto the network model to determine a physical routing plan

Routing MML Generation: Generates routing instructions in the form of switch readable MML based on the approved carrier selection

Routing MML Activation: Controls the download and activation of the routing MML on each switch in the network

Dial Code MML Generation: Generates Dial Code routing instructions in the form of switch readable MML based on the dial code breakout in the numbering plan

Topology Synchronisation: Supports a synchronisation facility to check that the system reference data aligns with the physical network model

Performance Management

Is a powerful analytical framework that enables inter-department collaboration. It provides access to the right information, in the right format, fast and more efficiently e.g. agreement details, sales performance indicators and trends, rate offerings, destinations, traffic utilisation, network events, capacity issues, quality levels and discrepancies. The system enables users to extract, transform and actively compare data from different processes to determine how well the business is performing. It provides measurements that enable you to benchmark improvements to help continually strive for increased productivity and profitability. The system offers meaningful reporting and analysis including margin analysis, routing efficiency analysis, carrier trend analysis and customer price analysis.

Traffic & Quality Measurement: Analyses EDRs / CDRs from the network to produce aggregated traffic volume and carrier quality measurements to support optimal routing decisions.

Near Real-Time Alarms: Produces some near real-time alarms using colour coded graphical maps for traffic volume changes, carrier quality changes and routing discrepancies.

Routing Efficiency: Monitors routing costs to identify destination where excessive overflow to alternative carriers is resulting in reduced margins or losses.

Test Calling: Pro-actively verifies call quality through test calls, to determine Caller Line Identification (CLI), Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and other important quality indicators.

Comprehensive Reporting: Interconnect OR comes with its own highly flexible reporting capabilities, but CSG also offers the additional business intelligence capabilities associated with Business Objects Reporting, providing an embedded best-in-class business intelligence and reporting solution.


TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS PROCESSES

Interconnect OR offers you the freedom to transform a large number of your existing selling, buying, routing and billing processes into an active and integrated trading and routing solution, giving you:

Tight controls and processes for the highest levels of data accuracy

Up-to-the moment information to support complex negotiations

Re-assurance that no record goes unrated and no revenue goes unbilled

Optimised routing plan to reduce your interconnect bills

Ability to make real time routing changes quickly and accurately

Capacity management on interconnects to ensure maximum returns

Sophisticated real-time reporting and analysis, complemented by Business Objects Universe and reporting

Ability to troubleshoot and react quickly to changing

market conditions

Designed for Ease of Use and Ease of Implementation

Interconnect OR provides an intuitive and easy-to-use GUI for enhanced usability, supporting graphical depictions of network maps and zoom-in/zoom-out capabilities. Interconnect OR also has the distinct advantage of being easy and fast to implement. Thanks to the modern underlying architecture, getting the system 'live' is a rapid process that is carried out to committed timescales and ensures fast return on investment. Intec’s product portfolio is also underpinned by expert consultancy and support services delivered by teams of experienced telecoms professionals and IT specialists to help maximise the return on your investment.

System Architecture

Interconnect OR has been developed for use with Oracle using Java and therefore benefits from the latest technologies available for software design. The product can be implemented using either a 2-Tier or 3-Tier software architecture, depending

on your specific requirements.


Interconnect OR automates complex tasks and gives you control, allowing you to configure your network and manage interconnect revenue and costs accurately.


Your business is complicated: by technology evolution, by infrastructure and system constraints, by competitive pressures, and not least by the demands of your customers. Your Business Support Systems (BSS) should never constrain your business. With the right BSS, your business can focus on delivering compelling, high quality services that allow you to stand out from the competition.

Your BSS should enable you to take charge:

Take charge of innovation – activities can be focused on the market and new product launches.

Take charge of relationships – return on investment can be maximised through service delivery and customer satisfaction.

Take charge of profits – enhance revenue streams by increasing efficiency and lowering costs.

Take charge of business – unleash network capabilities, provide excellent service, and deliver the content that your customers demand.

CSG frees you to take charge. Managing your revenue stream from end-to-end, CSG solutions integrate and take charge of the critical processes. CSG’s BSS portfolio comprises convergent mediation, convergent online charging, offline charging, customer care and billing, and

comprehensive settlement solutions.

Our applications have a long history of supporting charging in all its forms: charging for consumer services of all types, charge allocation between partners and providers, and charge allocation and correlation. Collectively, CSG’s applications deliver an unrivalled suite of solutions for your business. With a global force of Professional Services experts, CSG delivers solutions that simultaneously automate and optimise your critical business processes. CSG’s partners include the industry’s finest strategists, technologists and integration experts who all work with us to deliver solutions into your environment. Together, we make an exceptional team. Together, we release you from existing constraints and put you in charge of your future.

Take charge with CSG.

Visit www.csgi.com for more details and global contact information.

© 2011 CSG Systems International, Inc. All rights reserved. Although every effort has been made to ensure that the information contained within this document is up to date and accurate, CSG Systems International, Inc. cannot be held responsible for any inaccuracy or error in the information contained within this document.

Corporate Headquarters | 9555 Maroon Circle Englewood, CO 80112 W www.csgi.com

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EFFECTIVE INTER-CARRIER TRADING & ROUTING COST MANAGEMENT · EFFECTIVE INTER-CARRIER TRADING & ROUTING COST MANAGEMENT ... billing are all paramount to this success. ... leading supplier

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