23-08-2012, 12:13 PM
OPTIMIZATION OF A TELECOMMUNICATIONS BILLING SYSTEM
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ABSTRACT
To remain competitive in a turbulent and rapidly evolving
market, telecommunication companies have found it
necessary to invest large sums of money on the latest technologies
and IT infrastructure. These investments have
been a serious drain on the financial resources of these
companies who are now seeking ways to pare costs and regain
their financial footing. This new reality is increasingly
forcing companies to focus on improving processes in order
to increase profitability. Process simulation is proving
to be a useful tool in helping these companies attain higher
levels of efficiency in business critical processes by revealing
inefficiencies and redesigning processes. This paper
seeks to illustrate the method used to obtain substantial
savings in the billing system of Telenor (Norway’s largest
telecom company), through the use of simulation.
The Analysis
The analysis began by extracting a fresh set of data since it
had been over six months since the original data had been
extracted. After preliminary data analysis was carried out
to test for suitability, each KOF job was analyzed by regressing
each billing cycle’s CPU time against the number
of customers in the billing cycle. Since there was a broad
range of billing cycle sizes their scatter plots contained
very few gaps and demonstrated distinct trends.
The plot in Figure 3 shows the regression line fit to a
sample job in KOF 2. It shows clearly that the relationship
between BC size and CPU time is non-linear especially after
the BC size reaches 22,000. Although there were jobs
where there was a linear relationship, jobs where no apparent
relationship existed by and large they seemed to follow
the pattern in Figure 3.
CONCLUSIONS
Discrete event simulation proved to be useful tool in the
analysis of complex, dynamic IT systems. It also resulted
in significant cost-savings for the Client and helped the
Client mitigate risk by testing the system under various
conditions before implementation.