Overcoming the constraints of legacy and next-generation billing and customer care systems by allowing functionality to be exposed as web-services in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Released in April 2009, MetraNet enables organizations to adapt to rapidly evolving market conditions and to make change a competitive differentiator. This is critical for today’s enterprise which must thrive in a business climate where technological innovation, the harsh economic landscape, the demands of globalization, and issues of corporate social responsibility requires it to manage change at an unprecedented rate.
Enhanced Customer Care capability is at the core of the new release by providing:
- A configuration framework to implement a unique and tailored user experience and creating a high degree of usability through the ability to model User Interface screens to exactly match the needs of the business
- The ability to model workflows to exactly match business processes to capture customer data, product & service activation via intuitive GUI workflow user interfaces
- The ability to capture human-interaction workflows to cope with the unpredictability of dealing with human requests
- The enablement an integrated solution architecture embracing global standards, and allowing functions to be directly integrated into a Services Oriented Architecture as web-services
As is common throughout all MetraNet releases, no development or coding is required, and configuration can be made in a matter of minutes – even complete User Interface screen re-design and layout – thereby achieving a level of automation, customization and efficiency which is unparalleled.
Major Functional Enhancements
User Interface Layout – The real-estate available on a screen for CSR usage and navigation is vital in order to maximize productivity and ensure data is easy to access, view and modify. MetraNet allows complete flexibility in designing screen layouts, creating grids, search functions, and field validations. This requires no development and coding.
In context screen navigation – workflow is easy to define for specific business activities and processes when the order and flow can be pre-defined, such as adding a new product to a portfolio. However, human-interaction from queries is difficult to pre-plan. If screen-flows and processes always follow a predefined flow, the customer can feel frustrated, resulting in a negative experience. State-machine workflow is designed within MetraNet to allow for workflow where there is not a pre-defined flow.
Business Process Modeling – The original design of MetraNet was designed to enable new business models to be configured, and the interfaces, workflow, schema and documentation to be automatically created. MetraNet allows two additional types of workflow to be created, thereby implementing process flows within the front-office.
Data Entry Validation – Data is only as good as the person or system entering it. Often, different products, services, auditing regimes and industries require specific data in specific formats. When configuring the user interfaces, MetraNet allows fields to contain validation logic, designed to exactly meet user and business requirements.
Integration – MetraNet’s strength has been its ability to adapt to any input/output interfaces, thereby not requiring the interfaced system to be changed. MetraNet allows for all customer care functions to be exposed as web-services. As a result, all business logic resides within an integration layer which can easily be interfaced to other BSS systems, such as CRM, ERP and Order Management systems. In addition, MetraNet contains generic interface logic enabling the integration of both Microsoft and Non-Microsoft technology, such as Linux and Unix-based applications to be easily integrated.
Usability – CSR efficiency is directly related to how users navigate screen, search for data and interact to the many other systems, stake-holders and departments throughout an organization. MetraNet allows CSRs to design and store their own search-grids to obtain data in their preferred manner.
E-Commerce – Many organizations, irrespective of the industry they operate within, offer payment for services via electronic payment means. MetraNet supports Payment Card Industry (PCI) level 1, thereby enabling your organization to meet certification requirements for PCI-Level 1. This is in addition to SAS-70 Type II certification also enabled by MetraNet.
Key Benefits
MetraNet was designed to overcome the constraints of legacy and next-generation billing and customer care systems by allowing functionality to be exposed as web-services in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but also allowing configuration and extensibility of functionality without resorting to the vendor, thereby reducing cost and time to cope with new requirements. We enable this by separating business logic from the underlying technology of the product.
MetraNet builds on our inherent flexibility, and our core values of Managing Change, Embracing Complexity, Enabling Innovation and Increasing Efficiency by:
- Enabling greater CSR Efficiency
- Providing tools to promote better customer acquisition strategies
- Modeling and managing business processes and enabling change without disruption
- Promotion of global standards via web-services and SOA
- Acquiring de-facto e-commerce standards
Combined with our core strategy of enabling organizations to become agents of change, MetraNet provides the basis by which organizations can truly become out-performers.
Benchmark Performance
A MetraNet performance benchmark in March 2010 simulated 60 million active corporate subscribers, with 5 accounts each, consuming granular, high-volume service offerings. The results demonstrate exceptional end-to-end transaction throughput, as follows:
- Rating / Pricing - 84,781 usage records/second, with each record inserted into an indexed database
- Billing - 669 bills/second, with an average of 300 events per bill
- Balance Updates – 1.2 billion/hour, including event de-duplication, with each event updating an existing balance in an indexed database.
These findings demonstrate that MetraTech’s technology, already known for its exceptional flexibility, scales to high volumes while managing continuous and highly granular services. The conclusions of this end-to-end revenue management benchmark demonstrate that the critical billing requirements of industries with dynamically evolving business models including Cloud, Smart Grid, Financial Services, Media & Entertainment and Telco, can be fully supported by the Microsoft server platform deployed on cost-effective hardware.