SAP RM_CA and CBRM integration

SAP Revenue Management–Contract Accounting (SAP RM-CA), is a revenue management system that SAP offers to the telecommunications industry, Portal has an integrated solution for SAP RM-CA, telecommunications providers with the challenge of revenue management, such as controlling revenue leakage they experience as they roll out new services. May find this solution quite useful. From the press release:“By integrating the two systems, SAP RM-CA Manager enables you to supplement billing and accounting features available in Portal with additional receivables and collections management capabilities of SAP RM-CA”.

With SAP RM-CA Manager, you can first use Portal’s functionality to perform rating and discounting and run billing for accounts that Portal shares with SAP RM-CA. You can then initiate post-billing and accounts receivable (A/R) activities, which include applying payments, issuing refunds, calculating fees and interests, and so on. You perform most of the A/R activities using SAP RM-CA, while some are performed in Portal.

The billing data accumulates in the Portal database each time Portal runs billing, generally every day. While running billing, Portal generates a bill for each account that has a billing date of the previous day (or earlier if you don’t run billing daily). To finalize the bill, Portal changes the status of the bill items associated with the bill from pending to open. Open bill items stop accumulating charges, which makes applying payments and performing other A/R activities possible.

SAP RM-CA Manager collects all open bill items from the Portal database and transfers them to SAP RM-CA. SAP RM-CA posts them as open items and can now display the accounts’ billed balances and apply payments, issue credits, perform write-offs, and so on.

more on telcoOne

was recently going through some press releases surrounding TelcoOne and SAP RM-CA portal integration, thought I will add to the present posts a little background on TelcoOne. TelcoOne was jointly developed by Portal and Siebel Systems, idea was to develop an end-to-end solution that would make Portal billing software 'Infranet' (now Oracle CBRM) able to work with Siebles CRM right out of the box. TelcoOne's aims as stated by portal at the time was to increase call center efficiency and flexibility, and to introduce new services at a fraction of the cost of traditional custom-developed billing applications.

Siebel CRM integration with Oracle CBRM

recently had an exchange with friends over Siebel CRM/ORACLE CBRM integration here is the jest of it for the rest of the Enterprise developers community.

CBRM/CRM integration depends on

1- CBRM version
2- the extent of integration desired (functionality)
3- sync direction(uni/bi directional)
4- IT budget/licensing arrangement with oracle

if you have portal 7.0 running on the client side then the only thing you can do out-of-box is have EAI (Enterprise Applications Integration) Manager installed, what it will do is it will publish events that happen in CBRM out to an http port in XML format, this way Siebel Communications can monitor this port and can determine whats going on (this is essentially a uni directional approach, where only events are
being published to the outside world, and siebel is not controlling any thing in CBRM). Many clients wouldn't be interested in this minimalist functionality(you need to research further if there is more to EAI then what i just said), the things that are usually asked from connectors is

1- sync Siebel product catalog with CBRM Price list
2- Account management/order processing and product management happening only at Siebel Communications end, should be reflected automatically in CBRM

With 7.0 one option is to use an existing middleware and have siebel send out transactions to CBRM in XML, on CBRM end those transactions end up as an xml file in one of our directories, we would have an application polling this directory and once a complete file is detected we can parse it and fire the appropriate opcode and send back the return code via the same route to siebel. This would be your best bet if the customer doesn't want to spend money on licensing further products (such as oracle recommended tibco etc.)and/or has only a limited set of transactions that needs to be integrated.

With Oracle CBRM 7.3, they have a pretty elaborate integration setup straight out of the box but here is where the IT budget comes in, since its an optional component so its licensed separately, its called the TelcoOne Manager, it comprises of modifications (mostly configuration) done to siebel and installation of TIBCO business works as the middleware, it comes with a Web Service wrapper so it can talk SOAP, this is the most comprehensive integration solution so far.

Details on EAI and TelcoOne Manager can be found in CBRM documentation, if the support package for CBRM allows then maybe ORACLE can be asked to enhance an existing 7.0 implementation and make 7.0 work with telcoOne (since its a separate component it might work with out much tinkering).

Maybe some one can comment on the state of affairs with the new Fusion middleware, will it make TelcoOne Manager irrelevant in the near future?