Draft:Business Control and Support Systems

BSCS (Business Support and Control System) is a telecom billing and customer care platform originally developed by LHS Telekommunikation GmbH, a German company founded in 1990 by ex-IBM engineers Hartmut Lademacher, Jachim Hertel and Rainer Zimmerman.

Still today BSCS is one of the most widely used billing systems in the global telecom industry, especially for mobile operators, the current version is named Ericsson Billing.

BSCS, and its various versions, was deployed by over 100+ telecom operators in 80+ countries, the product was mostly popular in Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Africa, and Asia, serving both Tier 1 and Tier 2 telecom operators.

Telecom Areas

BSCS is a modular, scalable BSS (Business Support System) platform that supports telecom operators in handling:

• Billing: Generates invoices for voice, data, SMS, roaming, and value-added services.
• Rating: Applies tariffs and discounts to events like calls, data sessions, or content usage.
• Customer Care: Supports agent interfaces for customer management, service activation, account updates.
• Product Management: Allows operators to define and manage complex pricing plans and service bundles.
• Collections: Handles dunning, overdue payment workflows, and integration with credit bureaus.
• Mediation: Gathers and preprocesses usage data (CDRs) from network elements before rating.
• Provision: Enables the activation of SIM Cards, IMEI and other device information on Network Elements in different market platforms and technologies (GSM, Voice mail, iDEN, Leased Line, IP, etc.)

iX Series products

After BSCS 8, the Rating Package and Billing Package were modularized and could be installed as separated products. At MWC Barcelona 2009, LHS launched the iX Series, a range of next-generation business support system components that enable operators to rapidly roll out new services to their entire customer base. The new iX Series product portfolio comprises iX Rating and iX Billing, iX Mediation, and iX Recharge. With its iX Series products, the stand-alone business systems for tier-1 carriers that are designed to fit easily into their business environment.

• iX Rating: Real-time rating of usage events, CDR reading, rating and tarif taxation.
• iX Billing: Bill run, invoice generation, account settlement.
• iX Recharge: Support real-time and event-driven prepaid balance top-ups and recharges across telecom services.
• iX Collections: Debt and dunning management, automatic handling of debt collection.
• iX Customer Care: Agent interface and CRM.
• iX Mediation: CDR collection and normalization.
• NPX Network Provisioning Extension: Customizable provisioning interface.

Architecture and Technologies involved

BSCS operated on a client/server software platform. It uses Oracle database to persist information, Java-based modules with integration with SOAP/REST APIs, Data Queues, and external mediation devices. Rating, Mediation, Provisioning and Billing were developed in ANSI C and C++ with PRO-C access to Oracle database.

Begining in BSCS 7 version, the product development centres around the company’s ‘6 degrees of convergence’ methodology, which is as follows:

• Single Customer Care and Self Care, Partner Management – resulting in enhanced

customer care efficiency and extending CRM to partner management

• Single Marketing View – reducing churn, and improving marketing by having no replication

between the prepaid and postpaid databases

• Unified Services and Tariffs – all services are available to all subscribers, it is just a payment

choice at the service level

• Integrated Balance Management – realtime balances maintained centrally with balance

control at the service level

• Integrated Payments and Recharge – lowering costs and increasing revenue and customer

service levels

• Consolidated Platforms and Technology – resulting in more efficient hardware, skills and

maintenance costs.