Telecom billing in ServiceNow

[dan_cooper]

I'm interested to know if anyone is doing telecom billing in ServiceNow - particularly having replaced Pinnacle or MySoft.

[ianmaciver]

I have also been looking at using ServiceNow as a telecoms billing system. I have been in telecoms for over 30 years and know all there is about rating call records. Outside of the US you should rate call records which will be for Voice, SMS & data because you can bill the Voice & SMS originating operator which is a revenue stream separate to the customer billing. You will also be billed by the operators you send Voice calls & SMS to. The real question though is what happens when you import 50 million call records a month, assume they are all individual customer records which need to have data manipulation applied ( rating/charging ) on import and stored in the database. Would this be to much for ServiceNow and their data storage and CPU usage? If that is not an issue then it would make a nice billing system.

[chris_jones2]

Thanks, Ian. I think my point about call rating was whether or not the revenue generated by billing for long-distance use is enough anymore to make it worth it. I'm not convinced it is. Yes, we'll get billed by the provider for any usage, but I think it is beginning to cost more to collect it from departments than it is to just pay it from a central budget.

Not sure I understand the distinction of outside the US stuff, though, to be honest.

[dan_cooper]

Hi Chris, I was actually the developer that put together University of Kentucky's integration, and their long term plan was replacement.

I would be interested in gathering some requirements and investigating a private development of a telecom module for the platform. My new employer also uses both Pinnacle and ServiceNow, but integrating with/replacing Pinnacle is not on our priority road map right now, but a bit further down the road. I'm interested more in replacement than integration, and I think there's a lot of potential for momentum behind this.

-dan

[ymdavis]

We would like to replace Pinnacle down the road, well, sooner rather than later, and the stumbling block is billing. We are in the middle of upgrading to Pinnacle 6.5, with a goal of integrating with our recently implemented ServiceNow. I was surprised given how long these have both been around that either a native SN billing solution or a Pinnacle integration was not already available.

We have talked to UC Berkley who did quite a bit of customization with code they got from Berkeley Labs. We were hoping not have to customize so much, but it doesn't sound like it's an easy task at all at this point.

Has anyone had anything further to add to this conversation?

Regards,

ymd

[chris_jones2]

Wow, great to see this thread come back to life. No further work on this for us (Univ of Oklahoma) either, but it is still on my ServiceNow roadmap, and I'm still convinced it can be done. In our case, a "billing system" is not really about an actual billing process (a bill that is the trigger for payment being made). A bill is actually just a REPORT of what money is automatically going to be pulled by the financial system (PeopleSoft financials in our case) and moved from one department (the customer) to another (us, the vendor). This happens automatically in the background with no intervention from the customer/department. The "bill" is just   a way for us to tell the department what we're going to take and for service items. They can use it to reconcile if they want.

I think this matters to the potential for doing this in our organization.