Orange Polska, a company listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE), is part of the Orange Group, a leading provider of telecommunications services in Poland, Europe and world-wide. Orange provides mobile and fixed-line telecommunications services, including voice calls, news and content services, as well as Internet access and television. It also offers ICT (Information and Communications Technology), leased lines and data transmission services. Additionally, it is involved in the construction of telecommunications infrastructure, the sales of telecommunications equipment, and electricity trading.
In Poland, the company is a leader on the mobile telephony, Internet and data transmission markets. It is the leading operator offering comprehensive telecommunications solutions available throughout the country. Its aim is to ensure the highest customer satisfaction by becoming the most popular provider of telecommunications, multimedia and entertainment services, using modern technologies.
Constant development of the offer and the growing number of customers made the operator decide to launch a modern environment for their service and replace one of the existing billing systems with a new, more efficient solution. In this way, Orange Polska wanted to streamline the billing of about 1 million services provided to several hundred thousand B2B subscribers and several dozen operators from the wholesale market. For the implementation of this demanding project it chose Asseco Poland.
The goal of the project was to implement a modern, flexible billing system based on OBRM (Oracle Billing and Revenue Management), which would provide Orange with the possibility of further expansion and access to advanced services. It was to operate not only online, but also allow for the registration of all operations in real mode with full customer history. Asseco Poland was obliged to meet a number of guidelines, including very high ratios of invoice compliance between the new and old systems.
A key part of the project was to turn off the old solution, which required one of the largest data migrations on the Polish telecommunications market and one of the largest in Europe. All functionalities of the old system had to be reflected in the new billing environment (the so called AS-IS) in order to be able to fully map the existing business processes.
The biggest challenge during the implementation was the size and complexity of the solution, the interdependence of modules and the lack of coherent and unified code quality management, forced by external factors such as the use of various technologies and systems. Its implementation required from Asseco to organize the work of programmers who were under great time pressure. They were also involved in many development and testing environments, and were additionally bound by their complicated and time-consuming procedures for the installation of environments. Another big challenge was to keep up with the changes and new functionalities, which in the meantime were introduced to the old billing system. It required a thorough verification of the quality of implemented software at each stage of the project. To this end, the project team had to perform acceptance tests for about 5,000 test cases (TC). The preparation of such a large- scale system would not have been possible without the use of ACTE PLATFORM, Asseco’s proprietary solution, which ensured the automation of internal tests, thus minimizing the risk of possible errors. This increased the efficiency of the entire process and reduced the number of repetitive testing activities. Thanks to ACTE, the changes were implemented in the Continuous De- livery model, which, both during the implementation and the first months of the system’s operation, was an important element of the project’s success. Due to the importance of the solution and its complexity, a set of regression tests was performed each time when even the smallest changes were introduced – the tests lasted only several dozen minutes.
During the migration, within 72 hours, the registration data, service data, a set of billing records, as well as historical data of Orange Polska’s customers using nearly 1 million services were transferred. This took place during one operation, while maintaining the level of provided services and ongoing operational work, carried out to the extent necessary to meet the regulator’s requirements. The project, which ended in 2018, was carried out in close cooperation between the teams of Orange and Asseco, without which the implementation of this undertaking would not have been possible.
Key benefits
The implementation of the new system has significantly improved the billing of subscribers from the B2B sector and partially with wholesale market operators. An additional advantage turned out to be the architecture of the solution, which enables its further expansion. Thanks to the project implementation, Orange Polska has now a modern, scalable and efficient billing system, which is consistent with the needs of such a large telecommunications operator. The new solution has provided Orange Polska with a high level of configuration and personalization, as well as easy integration with other systems. It has also allowed to shorten „Time to Market” for invoicing additional goods and services.
