An integrated solution

PCS venture Digiph PCS wanted to implement a new data archive system. Data archiving vendor TASC was happy to help

Digiph PCS was founded in 1996 to launch wireless telephone service based on GSM. To effect a rapid entrance into the highly competitive PCS market, Digiph planned to install, configure, test and put into production its entire administration infrastructure in a matter of months. As part of this somewhat monumental task, Digiph needed a complete back-office solution, including a reliable telecommunications infrastructure, that would "just work"-and not break the bank along the way.

In December 1997, TASC Inc. installed a statement viewing and archive system at Digiph. The TASC archive application is designed for long-term storage, viewing and reprinting of computer-generated data, particularly the electronic output used in printing applications.

The TASC system stores millions of electronic statements, including complex print output such as advanced function printing and Xerox Metacode. Data such as account number, date and customer name are indexed into a database, which manages the entire statement file on magnetic or optical disk. Users can view the data through a graphical user interface in Windows or through a Web browser.

Figure 1 shows the transaction archive as an integral component of the billing and customer care environment at Digiph. The billing cycle starts with LHS Communications' billing engine software that processes call details received from a newly installed cellular system. In a sense, the LHS engine is the heart of the new back office at Digiph; the system was planned and integrated by Cap Gemini, an LHS billing software provider.

The LHS billing application accepts raw call details and organizes them via a series of Oracle tables to create bills, feed correct data to financial systems and support various tax applications. The bill is created in an LHS standard format and then transmitted via a high-speed dedicated circuit to International Billing Services, an outsource printing and mailing company. Working with TASC, IBS converts the bill data to advanced function printing format with properly identified index values that meet Digiph's customer care needs.

From the IBS data center, the bills are printed and mailed to Digiph customers. The same print stream used to create the bills is sent via a T-1 connection to the TASC archive server located at Digiph. The server is a Hewlett-Packard Co. system with an Oracle 7.3 database. Because both TASC and LHS applications work well with Oracle, they can share the same server, simplifying network connections and system maintenance. Because TASC has integrated its retrieval application with the LHS system, customer service representatives can retrieve views of cellular bills directly from the LHS customer care modules (Figure 2).

The traditional goal of a call center system is to provide rapid and accurate response to customer inquiries while minimizing the amount of customer service effort. At Digiph, the call center is the primary customer access point for cross-selling PCS products and services.

In a typical call center, 60% of incoming calls concern bills. For this reason, Digiph requires an exact view of what the customer receives in the mail.

The LHS customer care application retrieves from the archive a screen-based replica of the bill, complete with embedded images and overlaid forms. Because customer service representatives work in the customer care application the majority of the time, it makes sense for the retrieval to be done directly from this application.

Integrating systems For Digiph, choosing an integrated solution relied on several factors. The integration of the TASC and IBS systems-and a marketing partnership announced in mid-1997-were pluses. Also important was the tight integration of IBS and LHS service offerings.

Because statement design is considered a crucial part of customer satisfaction, an increasing number of companies are producing bills and statements with color, graphics and other techniques to improve the aesthetics and ease of use of statements sent to customers. As a result, archive systems must intelligently and efficiently manage the evermore complex print stream standards widely used today to support these design improvements, including advanced format printing, Metacode and portable document format. In addition, it is essential that the archive supplier have in-depth knowledge of all points addressable print streams so that customers can make the best decisions about statement design.

In Digiph's case, TASC could already process IBS-generated advanced format printing. In fact, the system could rotate the remittance coupon, which appears vertically on IBS' BookBill, a presentation that organizes information in a manner appealing to both companies and their customers.

An integrated back-office solution that flows from the tight partnering of complementary vendors and their service offerings mitigates challenges related to file transmission and processing. For example, without this degree of integration, a system would normally encounter file transmission problems such as aborted files, disk full conditions, network traffic problems and incompatibilities (for example, between Unix compress and uncompress commands on different platforms).

But the Digiph system experienced no file transmission problems when automatic file transmission was put into production using FTP with the network data manager product. Part of the reason was that the TASC/IBS system already had a process for adding header and trailer information to each file to ensure that all files transmitted were complete and accurate.

Other opportunities A strong document management capability can strengthen many features of both the billing engine and the statement processing solution.

Billing engines produce data that is not part of the statement and hence not normally maintained by the archive. However, this data is valuable and should be maintained efficiently for the long term. Detailed call data, for instance, is sometimes required for fraud and law enforcement review. Billing engines were not designed with a document management perspective. They disseminate data to various tables without regard to the organization issues surrounding long-term storage and retrieval. Today, this data is often purged from the system to avoid storage costs, leaving in its wake a time-consuming search process. Archive systems that can move data to less expensive yet equally responsive media such as optical storage can help carriers meet data retrieval requirements.

As the archive evolves to become an indispensable utility for computer-generated information, it will provide increasingly sophisticated data analysis capabilities. At Digiph, the archive is used mainly for storage and retrieval. The system can add an extraction layer, which can massage the data from a report or statement and put it in a customized view for review. Unlike billing databases that provide data for analysis, the archive can maintain the data longer.

The IBS data contain basic customer information, demographic profiles and spending behavior, all of which enable the carrier to study churn patterns or responses to pricing options. TASC uses Oracle Discoverer as a data mining/extraction tool, which makes it possible to analyze the IBS-stored advanced format printing data in the computer output to laser disc Oracle repository.

The accelerated installation of billing, statement processing, high-volume archiving and customer care systems at Digiph provided the venture with a production-ready solution critical to timely entry into its markets. From the customer's point of view, the integrated solution is, in essence, turnkey. The archive solution is "buried" in the vertical application, providing nearly transparent service.

The resulting ability to deploy rapidly also makes the combined solution attractive in upgrade or replacement scenarios, in addition to pure start-up situations.

The capability to quickly ramp up a replacement solution in an operating environment, including conversion of legacy systems, is a major benefit of the combined offering.