CBOSS
Communication Business Operation Support System (CBOSS) is an integrate software-hardware solution which provides the automation of a telecommunication company by linking all departments and services via advanced information technology. The solution itself is highly scalable, with options on an Intel platform starting from 1000 subscribers up to existing large mobile operator customers running advanced UNIX based platforms on RISC technology.
English
Supported Technologies
Windows XP/2000/NT ,
HP/UX,
Solaris/Sun OS
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Pricing
Users (# of seats), Server, System, Other
marketing@cboss.ru
+7 095 7555995
Additional Product Information
Communication Business Operation Support System (CBOSS);CBOSS TECHNOLOGY;Communication Business Operation Support System (CBOSS) is an integrate software-hardware solution which provides the automation of a telecommunication company by linking all departments and services via advanced information technology. The solution itself is highly scalable, with options on an Intel platform starting from 1000 subscribers up to existing large mobile operator customers running advanced UNIX based platforms on RISC technology. ;The system has all the necessary components for providing complete automation of a telecommunication company, including:;· sales automation with the registration of the subscriber in the system in "standard" and "quick" procedure;· inventory procedures, that allow the organization of "logic" stores for separate batches of equipment on stock;· supporting accounting functions and payments registration in both manual and automatic modes;· automatic customer service with the function of direct HLR (or a switch) management, including service deactivation to avoid debts;· outband automatic information about the subscriber?s account balance and recommended prepayment ;· interactive automatic customer service system giving account balance and payment information to subscriber and allowing for subscription to new services etc. ;· call rating and billing subsystems including "hot billing";· a tool for analyzing financial, marketing and technical information from the database;· a controlling system for monitoring staff work activity;The main goal of CBOSS is to relieve the company?s staff of routine work, wherever possible by substituting inefficient manual operations with modern automation technology. ;SALES AUTOMATION ;The service cycle starts with entering subscriber data into the billing system. The standard CBOSS procedure "service initiation" requires filling three forms: "Contract", "Account" and "Service Application" by a sales representative.;The "Contract" form includes data such as user status (person/organization), address, account period etc. and is intended for drawing up contracts between the provider and the user.;The "Account" form is intended to run accounts with the user. The hierarchy presented in CBOSS provides several accounts per user. It also gives the possibility of combining several accounts into one or vice versa.;The "Service application" form presents information about the equipment and services acquired by the subscriber. As mentioned above, one account may comprise several service applications. CBOSS procedures provide the possibility to extract an existing service application on a separate account or vice versa.;INVENTORY CONTROL;The inventory control subsystem makes the link between equipment available in stock and the sales representative by reserving the equipment, allocated to potential clients. All equipment, entered in the subscriber contract during service initiation, is registered in the Inventory control subsystem. ;The subscriber?s equipment is held in the inventory control subsystem until the bill for the contract is paid. During this time it?s reserved and unavailable for sale. If the reservation period exceeds (for example) 10 days, the potential contract is cancelled and the equipment is released. This process solves the problem of "double reselling", that may occur in the absence of direct interface between the inventory control subsystem and the sales subsystem.;The inventory control subsystem supports a "logical" inventory function and carries out equipment inventory in groups ( for example, in the case of remote P.O.S).;ACCOUNTING ;The service initiation procedure of filling out the forms "Contract", "Account" and "Service application" is completed by printing the text of the contract (two copies) and the bill of payment. The next step is paying the bill (by bank transfer, credit card or cash). In any of these payment methods, the sum is registrated by the company?s accounting department onto the subscriber?s account.;CBOSS operates with the current account documents such as invoices, sales ledger, cash ledger and provides multi-currency accounting. The process of evaluating changes in exchange rate between the base currency and the national one is carried out automatically. ;As an alternative to the manual mode of payments registration CBOSS enables the interface which supports electronic transfers. To cooperate with stand alone accounting systems, CBOSS has the function to extract from the Database in aggregated form the financial information like revenue, corrections etc.;To receive cash payments for telecommunication services by the company itself or its branches, CBOSS technology provides the automated cashier work place that is supplied with a certified cash-machine operating in fiscal registration mode.;The fiscal registrator is connected to a computer (CBOSS work station) via COM port. Entering cash payments directly into the billing Database is performed by a cashier. The entered sum is presented in the subscriber?s account. The automatic telephone activation procedure is carried out instantaneously by the billing system through the direct interface to HLR (reaction time is about several seconds).;As a result of the integration of the sales department, inventory department and accounting, the time required to connect a new subscriber is substantially reduced by several minutes. This integration guarantees against abuse and negligence.;CUSTOMER SERVICE;As soon as the telephone is activated, the subscriber is passed to the customer service department which runs both the service functions and financial control of the account?s status.;CBOSS has an extensive search system to seek subscribers in the data base which includes searching on the mobile number, the account?s number, personal information, the company?s name, address and contact telephone number etc.;Customer service may be carried out manually or automatically.;The customer service department?s functions are divided into those that require staff to service the user and those broader functionality which seem reasonable to run automatically. Human interaction in foreseen for referring complaints about network faults, analysis of the situation when the user?s mobile equipment is out of order; while user?s requests about their account balance status, altering the service set, etc. can be carried out automatically.;The main point of the CBOSS technology is the automation of burdensome routine operations using computers and direct HLR interfacing.;To receive inquiries, new service subscriptions, to order a bill by fax etc. the subscriber calls the Automatic Call Center and gets access to information about his account.;The main task of financial control is to avoid debts by giving the user accurate information about his account balance and recommended prepayment. Also it includes automatic suspension of the user whose account balance has dropped below the threshold value preset by the company.;Such control is impossible to organize manually for telecommunication companies, which have more than 1000 users. The situation may be very complicated due to delays in payments for communication services via bank transfer. In this case, the billing system considers the user to be in debt and his phone number should be suspended. But the payment actually has been made, therefore the suspension is not considered reasonable. CBOSS has a solution to the problem, which is based on the principle of automatic customer service and is called "promised payment".;AUTOMATIC CALL CENTER ;Automatic Call Center (CBOSSacc) has two modes of operation - outbound subscriber notification and interactive mode. In the first case, the system calls subscribers and supplies them with important information, for example , the need to pay for communication services; in the second, the subscriber makes a call to a company?s toll-free number and communicates not with an official of the customer service department but with a friendly automatic voice informer. ;Automatic procedures associated with informing the customers about the need to pay and possible service cancellation time are carried out by separating the customers in terms of "reliability categories". For each such category there are defined thresholds (balance value) of partial or complete suspension for non-payments and thresholds to unblock the customer.;An automatic analysis of airtime usage versus amount left on account is conducted and a warning call is made in advance based on the determined number of days.;When a subscriber calls to the CBOSSacc?s number, he can navigate through the system menu by pressing buttons on the keypad of his telephone in reply to system?s voice prompts. Thus the information about his account balance, received payments etc. can be obtained. The subscriber can leave information about payment transfer (promised payment), alter the service set (for example, to get international access or suspend his phone number) etc. All the customer?s operations are immediately registered in the billing system and affect the switch via the direct interface with HLR.;CBOSSacc comes on 4-channel analog or 32-channel digital hardware platform.;With the digital platform option the system may include Voice/Fax Mail (VFM) functions. The VFM increases CBOSSacc?s functionality. For instance, the bill that?s set to be received by fax may be addressed to a subscriber?s mailbox, and is available for the subscriber at any time, should he call the allocated mailbox number.;The system offers the function for the subscribers to send and receive voice and fax messages between each other and to the outside world.;SoftPro sells CBOSSacc separately and as an integrated part of CBOSS billing system.;As an additional product, SoftPro offers the Internet Customer Service System (CBOSSics) that performs the same functions of customer service, using Internet access. ;SWITCH MANAGEMENT;One of the CBOSS basic concepts is to eliminate non-efficient manual operations within the telecommunication company. In the manual approach, the request for subscriber?s activation or suspension is filled in by a sales representative or a customer service representative by hand. After that, the document is directed to switch staff to type the appropriate command in the switch software. Such an approach has a very high risk of mistakes and leads to time loss. In addition, subscribers are irritated with waiting, as a process to get a new service or, for example, phone reconnection, may take long time (from tens of minutes up to several hours) after payment was made.;The solution is provided by CBOSS?s ability to emulate switch operator?s commands and to direct them to the HLR in real-time mode, according to the activity of all departments of the company.;The billing system to HLR interface can be arranged in one of two ways: 1) in the terminal emulation mode via RS -232, or 2) by means of X.25 connection. In addition to the fully automatic regime, the semi-automatic option is available to give the possibility of control of billing system?s commands by the switch staff.;The X.25 solution along with the HLR management activity, can serve as a channel for Call Data Records (CDR?s) loading from HLR to the Call Rating server of the billing system. This loading process may function continuously in near-to real-time mode ("hot billing"), or periodically according to the particular company internal business procedures.;CBOSS technology covers extended solutions for telecommunication providers having more than one HLR. In this case, HLR management is based on the allocation of subscribers to particular HLR?s.;BILLING ;The billing subsystem is based on the flexible tariff structure, which assumes the possibility of tariff zones tuning according to switch routes, long-distance and international prefix codes.;Development of new tariff plans is fully accessible to the telecommunication enterprise staff. The specific tools are available to change the cost of calls according to time, day of the week or in the case of exceeding the specified traffic limit of a subscriber. ;CBOSS provides the possibility to set the initial time interval of the call to be free of charge, to combine service packages and many other popular marketing mechanisms. It is possible with CBOSS to set the individually tailored tariff to a particular base station. Having this, the communication provider can charge calls differently along the coverage zone and organize branches in other cities, connected to one billing center.;In the Billing subsystem calls are rated and subscribers accounts are balanced. CBOSS algorithms allow to achieve the maximum bill generation speed and to spread the billing cycle among the subscribers groups with a time gap between them to make the process run smoothly. It is possible to generate off-cycle bills as well for a particular time interval.;The additional CBOSS feature is to generate off-cycle bills based on specific criteria, for example: only for subscribers with a credit method of payment and with the account balance value below a set limit.;CBOSS supports automatic roaming TAP files generation and loading, with the appropriate checkout of records formats. The Billing subsystem Calls Rating module is tuned to interface with switch equipment of any type, including: ERICSSON, NOKIA, SIEMENS, ALKATEL, LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES, ITALTEL, QUALCOM etc. and can be customized for others.;REPORT SYSTEM ;CBOSS provides an analysis of financial, marketing, network and other information included in the Database on the basis of a reports system. This system comprises more than 400 report forms. Based on a given template, each report form has input parameters set by the manager using it, such as, time period for data analysis, customer group or account category, number region etc. The reports may be presented in graphical or text forms.;CBOSS has a companion product system based on the ORACLE OLAP technology which can extend the possibilities of data analysis, using not predefined reports templates, but a spreadsheet form, convertible to EXEL or ACCESS. This product is called CBOSSdss (Decision Support System). The system has friendly interface and doesn?t require special skills to make requests. Summing, the end-user gets a powerful tool to design reports himself, not being limited with the existing report templates.;CBOSS - TRULY PROFESSIONAL SOLUTION;SoftPro's mission is to professionally develop advanced software solutions for telecomunications companies, and offer turn-key integration of hardware, software and services including training and support.;Production of world-class sophisticated software is not only a matter of technology , but also requires a professionally organized company with a great degree of interdepartmental integration and a highly automated infrastructure. ;Softpro begin forming its telecommunications software product line in 1994, and was formally registered as a company in 1996. Current staff is approaching 200 people. The company has a heavy focus on R&D, with a number of groups focusing on different solutions development. The Project Implementation department has more than 25 specialists, and focuses both on project design and system installation. It also functions as a front line for determining future customer needs based on rapidly developing technologies. ;The Testing department has more than 20 personnel and in close cooperation with R&D groups checks all changes and updates made to CBOSS, thus guaranteeing the quality of the products.;The Softpro Manual department creates extensive yet user friendly product documentation and is able to make it good looking and convenient to use. ;CBOSS is the core product of SoftPro. A standardized product, it is also highly customizable to meet specific operator needs, and is constantly being improved via new releases, which are always given guarantee and post-guarantee support. Software updates go through a rigorous testing procedure which traces all modifications and radically simplifies migration from and older version to a newer one, with all appropriate documentation.;This approach to careful but constant improvement is especially valued by Softpro's customers. It is well known how painful the process of changing a billing system can be, affecting the entire operation of the telecommunications company. It is especially important to reduce the migration period from an older version or from another company's software. One customer testimonial confirms SoftPro's expertise at this:;"?CBOSS was installed in our company in February, 1998. The installation took place under great pressure - within only 2 days we have migrated from our old LHS system to CBOSS. Due to SoftPro?s experts professionalism, we managed to do this with no ill-effects to the database. Installation and training took place without any effect to the quality and quantity of service to our customers?";Nikolai Shuleshov, General Director of ;Nizhny-Novogorod Cellular Communications.;SoftPro works as a team. The success of SoftPro and its key product CBOSS is based on a steadily growing base of satisfied customers and the commitment of the company to support them while aggressively pursing new opportunities with established and start up operators.