Corporate Bill Analyzer

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Corporate Bill Analyzer

Product Description V 3.1

Introduction

The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer is a bill and invoice presentment platform that delivers a lightweight, flexible and robust solution for telecommunications companies, energy

companies and billing aggregators.

For corporate and SME customers, the platform provides a convenient one-stop shop in which the display of billing data reflects the departmental hierarchy and where permissioned users can run reports and perform call record analysis on the data.

For internal care teams, the platform offers the ability to oversee the billing and user data for all corporate customers; review, approve or reject bill runs; manage the personalization options that enhance the end user experience, and run custom reports on users, calls, bill ingest and all aspects of the service for which data is available for analysis.

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Platform Overview

Brite:Bill licenses two core products for bill presentment: 1 Consumer Bill Presentment Platform

2 Corporate Bill Analyzer

Figure 1 depicts the Brite:Bill Bill Presentment Platform and shows the Brite:Bill Core, the Brite:Bill Products and the Channels, with their logical components.

The Brite:Bill products share the same core platform with UI features, capabilities and middleware. The products then add specific features for the Consumer or Corporate

offerings. Finally, ‘channels’ define what the output channels for the solution are. These are web, mobile, print and API.

Figure 1: Overview of the Brite:Bill Bill Presentment Platform

Core features

Bill/Invoice presentment

The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer provides components to support bill and invoice

presentment across the web, mobile, print and API channels. These components include the dashboard, bill summary and bill listing views, a custom HTML5 view and a standard bill view (PDF or AFP).

Corporate hierarchy support

The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer provides supports the creation and management of corporate hierarchies as follows:

PRODUCTS CHANNELS

HTML5 Support Web Based, Web 2.0 UI

SSO Security

WEB

Native Widgets IOS / Android (various sizes) Optimized HTML5 for Tablets

MOBILE

OAuth V2 SSO API Batch Support Batch User Provisioning

REST API

PDF / AFP Publishing XSLT & CMS Based Publishing

InDesign Templating Tools

PAPER

Hierarchy Editor Group Dashboards

Report Builder Group Level Summaries

CORPORATE BILL ANALYZER BRITE:BILL COMMON

Semantic Bill Validation Parsing & Transformation

Light Touch Integration

INTEGRATION ENGINE COMPONENTS

Personalization + Decisioning Consolidated Bill Presentment

Interactive charts

WEB UI COMPONENTS CONSUMER

Bill presentment & Payment Unbilled Usage

Bill Analytics Bill Consolidation & Aggregation

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• support for single or multiple billing accounts within a corporate and multiple unlimited hierarchy levels.

• a role and associated dashboard at each level within the hierarchy to show costs for the relevant department or section, and associated bill data reporting and call record reporting.

• manual or automated corporate setup and management. Automated setup may import the corporate account structure from existing CRM or billing systems.

• support for SMEs with simpler company structures but the same functional set.

Billing Account hierarchy support

The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer offers the ability to import and maintain synchronization with the billing system of a complex N Level billing account hierarchy.

Parent and child billing accounts are maintained and updated automatically prior to a bill run while an owner may be assigned to each billing account automatically or manually.

Call detail record listing

The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer supports call detail record listing analysis by corporate, department and end-user with filters and custom reports allowing drilldown on a department, user, usage type, date range or cost.

Bill reporting

Analytics and usage reports are key features and the platform ships with support for a fully customizable reporting framework that may be used to give the user better insight into bills and invoices. This framework is coupled with a high quality set of HTML5 and smartphone-ready graphical report templates that may be deployed on the bill view, call usage views, dashboards and dedicated usage analysis pages.

Default bill reports are supplied as standard for reporting and analytics on bills showing service and usage costs by department, in- and out-of-bundle costs, top X bills and top usage by call type. Reports may be executed and presented at each level in the hierarchy.

The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer also ships with a fully configurable WYSIWYG report builder tool, supporting the creation of custom reports that may be assigned to a specific role or user; these are then presented in dynamic corporate HTML dashboards that may be customized by the end user.

Bill consolidation and deconsolidation

The platform supports the consolidation of billing accounts into single invoice for a given corporate or SME. This allows for either a full and valid consolidated invoice to be generated for the corporate, or a statement or account overview.

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Operational features

Role support

The Brite:Bill Corporate Analyzer supports a range of users with different roles and responsibilities. Users are assigned a user role, which gives them access to a unique dashboard in the web UI that is customized with the features relevant to that user role. At the service provider, the user roles are Platform Administrator, Billing Operations, Content Manager, CSR Administrator and CSR. These user roles cover setup and administration of the corporate clients, billing information and analytics, bill run management, user interface management and customer care.

At the corporate client, the roles are Corporate Internal Administrator, Department Head, Billing Account Owner and the Subscriber. These roles allow users to view only the

information that is relevant to their position in the corporate hierarchy. This information may be user profile and preferences or billing information such as call records, reports and analytics associated with their role.

Notifications

Notifications for corporate and SME customers may be customized to be sent to users linked to the corporate cost-centers. This means that finance, the corporate’s telecom administration manager, the department head and the end-user may each be set up to receive the bill. The Platform Administrator, the Corporate Internal Administrator or a Department Head are able to manage notification settings.

The bill notification may be customized for each user type, brand and segment, with configurable user interface notification settings that allow for management of complex notifications preferences.

Personalization

The platform has strong support for personalization of dashboards and bill/invoice views. All incoming bill data sets are mapped to a XML schema-defined format on import. This is then used to drive a series of decisioning rule sets that provide a semantic check of the imported data, and derive facts about the customer and the bill that may be used to insert personalized messaging or content on the bill and dashboard views. This can be used strategically to drive cross-sell or upsell of additional services or products relevant to the end-user, to better explain usage or charges to the user, or to explain new packages and events such as 'first bill'.

Aggregated views

The platform has been designed to provide the user with an aggregated view of all bills and invoices allowing them to view and manage all their relationships with a biller, or billers, from a single application.

Bill consolidation

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and in presenting a single invoice to the customer. Integration for invoice creation and reporting into the billing and financial system are supported by well-defined APIs.

The bill consolidation process is supported by a customizable set of semantic bill data checks to ensure the consolidated bill matches the sum of the invoices. These semantic checks can be performed on the sum of the inbound invoices and can also be checked against totals across each product type and service. In addition there may be a manual check by the corporate account manager to ensure the final amount matches revenue assurance and the financial general ledger.

Self-care features

The Brite:Bill platform ships with support for a wide range of self-care features to allow the user to self-serve thereby reducing inbound call center traffic. These features include the display and management of user profile information (name, addresses, sex, email addresses, contact mobile number), subscriptions, product and package information, Direct Debit

information, notification settings, bill payment history and sharing management.

Administration and corporate management

The platform ships with a series of roles for the administration and management of corporates. These include corporate setup and on-going administration, reporting on corporate billing, management of bill cycles and reporting on bill cycles including reconciliation and billing operational reports.

The Administrator user has a suite of reports available on ingested bill runs. These provide reconciliation and operational management reports. The platform ships with out of the box standard reports and comes with a reporting framework for the development of custom reports.

Mobile channel features

HTML5 mobile browser layouts are provided for by the standard web platform. Smartphone applications may be integrated using the platform’s REST API.

Smartphone app support

The platform ships with a fully featured REST API that has functional primitives for all platform features and supports the OAuth V2 authentication standard. This may be used for smartphone app development. Brite:Bill also ships with template applications that may be branded and styled. These are licensed separately. See the section describing the platform

REST API below.

Browser-based app support

Browser-based mobile applications may be developed for the product to resize automatically for mobile devices using HTML5 templates. Examples of possible optimizations are carousel bill listings, pinch mode in bill views and varying usage reports by device size.

Paper channel features

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with open source and best-of-breed third party design tools and content management. This channel is licensed as an additional component to the main corporate platform.

REST API

The Brite:Bill platform ships with a full REST API that allows for smartphone and third party application developers to access a full set of functional primitives for presentment and analytics of billing and unbilled usage. This API has primitives to support the following features:

• OAuth V2 authentication

• Full bill data set including call records • Billed usage

• User profile and subscriptions • Reports and analytics

• Personalization decisions • Unbilled usage

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Platform architecture and capabilities

The Brite:Bill platform has been built upon a base of proven, open source technologies to provide strong support for open standards, non-proprietary tooling and a flexible, extensible architecture.

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The Brite:Bill Corporate Bill Analyzer has the following key capabilities of note.

Customizable HTML5 standard widgetized feature set

The platform is shipped with a feature set that may be deployed either standalone or in a new or existing external portal. Dashboard, bill listing, bill views, payments, analytics and other views are shipped as responsive HTML5 compatible widgets that may be deployed into external web portals as a lightweight JavaScript & JQuery client-side layer. The platform user interface has been built with best in class user experience and web standards in mind. Look and feel is extremely flexible and open to deployment to meet third party UI designs using CSS, HTML5 templates and configuration.

Fully headless architecture

The web and mobile channels are delivered based entirely on the platform’s well-defined API, available as JSON objects over the REST protocol. This allows for the full functional set of the platform to be utilized via standardized API calls for using Brite:Bill template UI widgets or for the development of a fully customized user interface. This gives seamless support of the mobile channel and 3rd_{party applications.}

Single sign-on enabled

The platform may be easily configured for single sign-on (SSO), shipping with support for OAuth, SAML and custom protocols to support SSO via existing and third party identity providers. The platform supports the OAuth V2 standard out of the box. This is a popular standard for SSO via social networks and identity provider platforms, and is the emerging smartphone application authentication standard.

Light-touch integration

The Brite:Bill platform has key strengths in integrating with billing and other invoicing systems with a focus on aggregating bills from a variety of systems ensuring integration may be primarily loosely coupled. The product has features to allow for the retrieval and mapping of XML, PDF, AFP, ASCII delimited and other document formats from billing systems with little or no custom development. This is supported by open source and Brite:Bill developed ETL mapping technology, a strong XML data model and rigorous semantic checking coupled with highly scalable billing data transport options from SFTP to SOAP. This approach allows for the rapid integration of the product with billing systems with little to no impact on the billing system infrastructure in very short timeframes.

Highly scalable, lightweight architecture

The Brite:Bill product has been built to run on an open source enterprise technology stack. It is deployed on three tiers:

• A lightweight web tier

• An open source integration tier

• A persistence tier that has been built for major scale.

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Cloud optimized

Brite:Bill may be deployed within the Enterprise on any standard hardware and operating systems, and may also be deployed on a managed cloud basis. The platform has

architectural features that are optimized for standard commercial private and public cloud services. These include the utilization of managed databases, load balancing, highly scalable and cost effective storage pools, auto scaling at all tiers and multi region availability and disaster recovery.

Multi channel enabled

The platform ships with a series of product components that may be deployed standalone, are fully HTML5 compatible, support the print and mobile channels and may also be run in REST API mode to facilitate rapid mobile application development.

Analytics and reporting

The platform supports a wide variety of out of the box reports for campaign management, billing operational and financial reconciliation purposes. This provides a view of failed ingests, billing totals across billing runs by products, services and usage statistics, by channel with and with deeper analytics for key events such as bill view and bill payment.

The reporting and analytics features are supported by the use of a separate reporting data store. This allows for real time reporting and analytics (to feed decisioning and

personalization) without any impact on the main data store. The report data store is fed by an extract transform load (ETL) process that may be scheduled or kicked off as an event. The report data store and associated ETL process may be fully customized to feed the specific requirements of the solution.

The analytics and reporting data store is also able to support all Corporate level reporting, the report builder tool being used to create reports across a full corporate data set, which may then be embedded within dynamic corporate dashboards.

Monitoring

Monitoring and management functions are supported allow for monitoring of platform statistics and health metrics, and also for management operations such as the re-run of billing cycles and management of end-user accounts.

Localization, accessibility and audit

The platform is fully localized and multi brand capable across all channels. It is built for rich internet application accessibility (WAI-ARIA compliant) and supports a full and separate audit trail of all transactional activity. Audit is a key tool for admin and CSR staff in troubleshooting and tracking end user problems.

Defense in depth

The platform has been designed to provide for secure defense in depth. At each tier best practises, compatible with the OWASP top ten recommendations (see

Corporate Bill Analyzer