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.

[cleesn]

In the event this helps your progress, my company offers a data service that will provide all types of telecom service invoice data (i.e. cost billing) including wireline / wireless for any carrier in US/Canada and most of Europe.   The data service will provide the data to your SN instance as it is received directly from the carriers (our customers authorize us to request/receive data through LOAs).   The data is imported into our table structure which normalizes the data from all of the providers and allows SN users to build their own functionality not worrying about time and cost to build out countless number of ETL routines to load the data.

[bhl104]

I'd be interested in participating in this conversation.

Thanks,

Brian Ladrido
Penn State IT

[Earl L]

Daniel Cooper wrote:

I realize that this thread is over two years old now, but we keep coming back to the question of replacing Pinnacle with ServiceNow. The short answer is yes, but then comes the question of what it would actually take to implement something like that, and to answer that, we need requirements. So I thought, who better to help put together requirements for a telecom billing application built on ServiceNow than the people who've been asking for it for two years. 

Any input is helpful, my plan is to use your comments to put together an estimate of effort involved in developing something like this and gauging its feasibility. 

Thanks,
Dan

Dan,

We use both Pinnacle and ServiceNow where I am. I was the PM on the implementation of both platforms as they came into the organization (University of Utah IT dept). We have been using Pinnacle for over 8 years (and ServiceNow for 4) and it's served us pretty well over that time. It's big and cumbersome in some places, but it is very thorough when it comes to handling all things telecom.

We've gone through some changes in the past few years and have started to ween ourselves away from some of the features of Pinnacle (unfortunately), like inventory, warehousing, procurement, etc. IMHO, there were some misguided decisions made here that led to this situation. As you probably know, these are some of the critical components of a thorough telecom system, if you have in-house cable techs and do your own work.

We still do all of our telecom charge bill-backs (from our carriers) with Pinnacle. We're also using pre-orders, MACs, feature codes, feature details and all of that to make and track changes for the telephones deployed across the campus. I believe we got rid of tracking long distance and CDR/rating stuff a few years back as well.

With the way things are changing in the telecom landscape it seems more and more logical that most of it's feature/function could be replaced with ServiceNow. However, every time I think about the number of years that Pinnacle (Calero I guess, now) has been around, the size and complexity of their database, and the sheer volume of their PL/SQL code-base, I just shudder thinking of rebuilding huge chunks of that in ServiceNow.

So that's one thing to consider.   And maybe you already have considered that. I don't know. But the complexity of building out anything in ServiceNow will depend entirely on which components of the Pinnacle platform you're using right now, and how you're using them. And like us, maybe that list is dwindling over time.

The next thing I wanted to say is that your current use of Pinnacle is actually the best place to start with your requirements. Again, IMHO. You already have it. You're already using it. You know what you like and what you don't like. You know what the current data and work flows are, based on that platform. There is is a huge wealth of knowledge there, that should be leveraged to the extent that is prudent. My point is that building out a telecom billing system is not a "greenfield," from a requirements point of view. Use what you have (in the way of information) and keep what you like and toss out the rest.

The last thing I wanted to say is that if you are serious about taking this on, in ServiceNow, I'm seriously interested in teaming up with like minded people to look at the feasibility of it and take a stab at building out some prototype pieces to see how it goes. I have experience with development on both ServiceNow and the Application Express platform that the current Pinnacle version is built on.

Earl

[chris_jones2]

An incredibly well-timed response, Earl. Just yesterday (July 13, 2017), the ServiceNow Higher Education Google group held a webinar where two institutions discussed and demo'd two responses this long-term issue: One has built a fantastic-looking integration that uses SN for all the work management and automates data & inventory tracking with an integration to Pinnacle; the other has done a full-blown build out of Pinnacle functions and actually created their own SN-based billing system.

The recording of the webinar is now available to view/download here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2Hz2AmlJ_1ETjVHa2VERDU3dzQ and I would encourage you to watch it. Both universities did a great job!

In addition to this, as luck would have it, a small group of us are actually talking directly with ServiceNow next week to address this very situation. While at Knowledge17, we made some connections with relevant product owners and they seem interested in at least understanding our use case(s) better. I plan to update this thread more when we have more information.

[Earl L]

Thanks so much for letting me know about this. I'll check it out.