Subscription Billing in the Health Sector

Problem Statement

 

A company in the Medical Insurance and Services Industry joined one of Africa’s largest Communication Service Provider (CSP) to offer mobile health services to large undeveloped areas of Africa. To make the project viable the customer required a flexible subscription billing management platform to process detailed accounts. Their solution, after evaluating international offerings, was a pre- and post-paid convergent billing gateway developed and rolled out locally by Globetom.

 

 

Solution Overview

 

The customer required a productised billing integration layer to be used as a single integration point for billing. This integration layer was used to abstract the specific payment integration at various CSP Group operations where the solution was implemented.

 

Additionally, the customer required Globetoms Subscription Billing Solution to:

 

• handle recurring subscription-based payments
• notify the platform in advance of pending subscription renewals. The notification allowed the customer to timeously offer customers the opportunity to opt-out of the service subscription
• provide a future-proof billing platform that can readily integrate with the payment interface technologies in the various CSP Group operations without affecting the payment integration interfaces used by their core platform

 

 

Solution Description

 

Globetom implemented Revenue Weaver and constructed a Web Service and Business Process Orchestration (WS BPO) layer. The WS BPO was delivered as a productised Web Service layer for use by the platform. The WS BPO hides the underlying Mobile Network Operator (MNO) payment/billing technology interfaces from the platform in order to ensure that the solutions can be readily deployed in multiple CSP Group Country operations with varying payment integration technologies.

 

The Service Layer was developed using Orcha, Globetom’s Service Orchestration platform. Business processes were developed in accordance with the business requirements and were exposed as Web Services to the platform. The business process layer encapsulates the Use Case and, at the same time, leverages the standard Revenue Weaver services for billing and revenue assurance.

 

Some of the services exposed in the service layer include:

 

• SUBSCR_ENQUIRY – Subscriber enquiry service;
• SUBSCR_PROV – Subscriber provisioning services used to provision a subscriber for service delivery;
• SUBSCR_DEPROV – Subscriber de-provisioning service;
• SUBSCR_SVC_PROV – Subscriber service provisioning used to register subscriber services selected;
• SUBSCR_SVC_DEPROV – Service de-provisioning used to expire a subscriber’s subscription or to de-provision a subscriber’s service subscription when the subscriber opts out;
• RATE_ENQUIRY – Subscription rate enquiry used to provide subscription cost information to the platform as part of the offer management processes;
• RENEWAL_NOTIFICATION – a Scheduled business process used to notify the platform of pending subscription renewals;
• REPROV_NOTIFICATION – a Scheduled business process used to notify the platform of subscription renewals.

 

 

Results

 

Through ‘close partnering’ Globetom was able to offer the customer a subscriber management and revenue assurance solution that met all their specifications and requirements – convergence, next generation integration, a tight deadline and a local presence.