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Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

  • 1.  Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Nov 06, 2018 03:24
    Hi All,

    I am looking for real-time unbarring process availability in telco.Do you know any system provide real-time unbarring  software application or methodology?


    thanks
    #CustomerExperience

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    hasim temiz
    Vodafone Turkey
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  • 2.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    Posted Dec 04, 2018 04:31
    Dear Hasim,

    I am not sure in which context you are asking, but real-time unbarring is possible. Ericsson BSS system and Huawei CBS support this functionality.

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    Manikandan Kalidas

    Maveric Systems Ltd
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    Manikandan Kalidas
    TO BE VERIFIED
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  • 3.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Dec 05, 2018 03:42
    Dear Manikandan,
    I mean that unbarring process (for postpaid customers) start with payment in bank or etc. and end of the order in internal system in telco.
    Now we are using different application for payment gateway,billing,CRM and provisining because of that our customers are not satisfy to using their phone and buying new bundle.Our barring process triggred from billing system (Kenan Billing) and action taking  to once a week depends on invoice due date.

    my expectation is all unbarring order process should take time less than 15 seconds for individual order.We are seeing 250K  transaction a day after barring action and if  one of  internal system busy for order processing ,unbarring orders processing takes more than 15 minutes some of customers.

    Because of that I am looking for real-time unbarring  system,application or medadology to improve our system.

    I will be analyze that application (Ericsson BSS system and Huawei CBS )

    Thank you very much


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    Hasim Temiz
    Vodafone Turkey
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  • 4.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    Posted Dec 05, 2018 08:54
    Dear Hasim,

    If I get your problem correctly, then real-time credit control is the most desirable solution. The credit limit of the postpaid subscriber should be maintained in IN, instead of the Billing system. This will allow you to maintain the credit limit of the postpaid subscriber online. Now there will not be much difference between prepaid and postpaid, similar to your prepaid if postpaid subscriber credit limit reaches 0 he will be barred immediately, But the concern here is Unbarring the subscriber after payment, IN should be synced with payment information very fast, which is very difficult to achieve. Anyhow you can reduce the time from 15 min to less than 5 min since the barring has happened only in IN and not the core network. Although you have a certain drawback in this, you cannot have a lot of business rules defined for credit control in your IN, compare to your billing system. Please feel free to contact me for any more queries and information. I have given the solution in similar scenarios.

    Thanks. Hope this helps you.

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    Manikandan Kalidas
    Senior Consultant, Telecom BSS
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    Manikandan Kalidas
    TO BE VERIFIED
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  • 5.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Dec 06, 2018 06:23
    Dear Manikandan,

    Using IN for postpaid customer is very different and out of box idea .
    We have similar solution just like you say but its just work around solution. 
    When payment processes in our system directly updated on HLR ,on the other hand order create with payment to sync other system (CRM,BILLING,OSM,TIBCO,PROVISIONING) ,totally our system has two different way for unbarring journey.

    Workaround solution is very fast and stable but mostly I am interest to unbarring order performans ,firstly customers get unbarred on HLR ,they can just using their phone when they decided to buy package or bundle they have to wait order complation to all internal system.This is my main issue for asked question.

    TIBCO system orchestrated all order transaction to 5 different system to manage unbarring transaction,its a little bit complicated.As you know complexity can be reason of problem so many time,now we can try to simplification and working with solution team ,system designer etc.

    totally,I need to get faster order performance  and keeping stabilization or looking for new application etc.

    Thank for idea and advice to Manikandan,Keith Milner , Thomas Dupre and  Surojik Mukerji .
    Please continue to support  me.





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    hasim temiz
    Vodafone Group
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  • 6.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    Posted Dec 06, 2018 07:58
    Dear Hasim,

    • Real-time may be achieved only within one's attention span, typically 2 to 3 seconds with maximum up to 8, according to most psychology metrics on user experience
    • This is a classic business process depicted as a chain of events, tasks and decisions. It can be seen also as a front- to back-office integration
    • As such, it spans several different applications (Billing, ERP, CRM, service activation/deactivation etc.)  and is recommended to be orchestrated by a relevant platform that integrates asynchronously all silos in scope, in order to avoid resource depletion and operational problems (i.e. degradation) in each system
    • High-level use case:
      • Point A: Customers proceed with payment in front-office touchpoints (retail store, web store, smartphone, 3rd party, etc.) in parallel throughout the day (your reference KPI is 250K/day)
      • Payments are received in revenue management system in near real-time mode
      • Unbar orders are triggered and massively queued
      • Orders are forwarded to CRM
      • CRM registers them and forwards to service activation 
      • Point B: Service is enabled again
      • Bear in mind that each system needs to allocate logically a subset of resources to unbar service, so only a specific number of orders may be executed in parallel (for example, if you have allocated 1000 threads, only up to 1000 orders may be executed in parallel, meaning the 1001st will wait for a free resource in the queue). This implicitly is a constraint to having a real-time unbarring service, otherwise you would have to allocate n resources to each system, with n the maximum estimated number of parallel orders. For example, if you have 10K payments requesting an unbar at once, you should have equal number of resources for each depending system to achieve a parallel execution, hardly the case, as other competing services require resources too. This is why the queued asynchronous, resource-limited execution is the best architecture empirically to achieve this, however in order to guarantee up to 15 seconds from Point A to Point B, relevant resources should be allocated to enable this scenario


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    Charis Vezyris
    Vodafone Greece
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  • 7.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Dec 05, 2018 03:42
    ​Hi

    What do you want to achieve? You would like to unbar the prepaid services or barring due to overages / dunning in postpaid scenarios?
    Yes when you have a positive credit balance, the realtime charging can allow or authorize the call or some form of application developed that can evaluate the credit balance based on an event driven architecture, can unblock on the network. It is a very subjective term, and typically you need to rely on the capability of the realtime charging for example.

    Regards

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    Surojit Mukerji
    Enterprise Architect
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  • 8.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    Posted Dec 05, 2018 08:42
    I have to agree with Surojit

    Speaking generically:
    Barring is already baked into any subscriber management system. Internally it will be a flag indicating if the subscriber is enabled or not. Externally it may be a GUI or an API used to control that.

    There will be something driving the barring/unbarring process. That might be, for instance, a credit management tool in the billing system. That might be triggered automatically (e.g. by a credit threshold being breached or funds being added) or manually (by an operator). That process may or may not involve external systems such as a payment gateway.

    You asked:
    Do you know any system provide real-time unbarring software application or methodology? 

    This is an awfully vague question. If you are looking for some generic "magic bullet" piece of software or system that can easily solve this issue for you then, I'm sorry: you are asking the wrong question because such a thing cannot exist.

    The systems you have are almost certainly entirely capable of doing real-time unbarring. If they are not working then it is because they have been configured or integrated incorrectly, or because the process that is built around that is incorrect. All of these things are, to a large degree, unique to your implementation and, because of that, it's not possible for anyone to provide a simple solution for you.

    To get to a solution you are likely to need to do a careful analysis of the implementation including what systems are involved, how they are integrated, what the process is around unblocking, and how the systems are involved. You should then understand where the delay in the process is and be able to develop a view on how to resolve it.

    It may, for instance, be that the unbarring action is queued somewhere, and the system which processes those commands is overloaded, or that it doesn't currently process the entries in real time but batches them up and processes them at specific times. In the batching case, you may need to look at increasing the batch processing rate, or look at whether it's possible to build a streaming processor integration.

    This will require someone with intimate knowledge of the specific systems you have, how they integrate, the impact of things like load on downstream systems, and what alternatives are possible.

    Regards,

    Keith


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    Keith Milner
    Superlative Solutions Ltd.
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  • 9.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    TM Forum Member
    Posted Dec 06, 2018 03:47
    Hi,

    I am wondering which API should be used for this (i.e. suspension or re-activation of some services which the customer has subscribed).
    Given that the CRM system has decided to start such a barring/unbarring process for a certain customer contract - how will this be transferred downward to the network systems?

    1. One might think of using ProductOrdering API (TMF 622) - but is a (near) real-time barring/unbarring really to be modeled as a product order? Or would we better directly go down into Service Configuration API (TMF 640) without instantiating a product order?
    2. Given that we use ProductOrdering API (TMF 622) I can't find an appropriate place in the API where to state that the product should be transferred into a suspended state. Although TMF637 contains an attribute "status" of entity "Product" this attribute is NOT contained in the "Product" entity of TMF622 (this entity is not a "*Ref" class but looks like a "lightweight" version of TMF637's "Product"). 

    Moreover, I am struggling with the modeling of a barring itself. To my opinion, a suspension / barring is not simply an attribute or a state of a product / service because from business point of view a suspension (e.g. because of misuse) has to overdue deletion and re-creation of the product / service. So it has to reside "outside" the life-cycle of the product or service. (Otherwise a "bad" customer could easily escape from his suspension by simply terminating his product and order a new product of the same product specification.)
    • So is there somewhere a separate entity for suspensions (independent from the product lifecycle) that refers to a product or service?

    Regards
    Thomas

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    Thomas Dupré
    Solution Architect
    Deutsche Telekom IT
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  • 10.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    Posted Dec 06, 2018 07:57
    From my experience, barring usually happens at the account level, for instance, due to credit status.

    Regards,

    Keith

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    Keith Milner
    Superlative Solutions Ltd.
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  • 11.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    Posted Dec 09, 2018 02:04
    Hi 
    Before considering "a real-time barring/unbarring solution" you may want to first of all review your postpaid subscriber management process with a view to optimising it for the benefit of your customers. You may after-all discover your existing system is still fit for purpose.

    The rule of thumb will be to have a convergent billing platform that manages both prepaid and postpaid subscribers, subscriber credit limits can be managed at the account level in real-time while you can use a sales force automation (SFA) tool to manage the postpaid subscribers contracts and life-cycle. The SFA will be integrated to the convergent billing platform as well as the Core network and will be able to automatically trigger barring for subscribers that qualifies to be restricted from using specific services based on your business rules.

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    Olusegun Sanyaolu
    B/OSS Planning and Design Manager
    Airtel Africa
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  • 12.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    Posted May 17, 2019 06:00

    Dear Hasim Temiz,

    Yes Real time barring and Un-barring is possible in Telco.

    All the Convergent Billing systems provides this features ( E.g: Huawei CBS, Ericssion BSCS, Sterlite BRM etc..)

    The Use Case of real-time unbarring is as below.
    1. Account receivable initiated un-barring i.e System Initiated
    2. customer initiated un-barring ( Safe custody).

    In the First scenario, When Customer pays his/her debt via any channels ( Via Online Payment GW/ Stores/POS) once the Payment is posted to Billing Account, then Billing System update the credit limit of the subscriber  and automatically send the Un-baring request to Provisioning system and unbar the service on Network and sync the updated credit limit to OCS.

    In the Second Scenario: If customer opted to keep his service in Safe custody for some time then system will assign the end date of the custody. once the custody end date arrives, System will trigger unbarring request automatically. 

    Hope this will help you clarify your doubts.





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    Rakesh Ranjan Tiwari
    Sterlite Technologies Limited
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  • 13.  RE: Is it possible real-time unbarring process?

    TM Forum Member
    Posted May 20, 2019 04:36
    Hi Rakesh Ranjan Tiwari
    Thank your time and effort for the answer to me.It will be very helpfull for us.
    have a nice day

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    hasim temiz
    Vodafone Group
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