Page 125 - SAMENA Trends - February-March 2021

ARTICLE SAMENA TRENDS

In 2015, the executive leadership team With a high pace of Knyazev, Director of BSS at MegaFon
decided to bring the whole company to a PJSC.
unified billing system and set the following modernisation in the
strategic goals: MEA telecommunications The COVID-19 outbreak also affected
• Support digital and business market, CSPs are looking the situation: migration of healthcare
transformation; organizations was postponed for the final
• Improve the quality of customer service; for a partner to support stage of the project and was led especially
• Centralize and accelerate launch of new and speed up their digital carefully.
business projects;
• Create an ecosystem that will facilitate transformation. To meet The project lasted for five years and was
faster integration of the external this demand, in 2020 Nexign completed in the middle of 2020 despite all
partners; the roadblocks caused by the pandemic,
• Optimize total cost of ownership (TCO) completed the large-scale the ensuing lockdown and shift to remote
for the billing system by 20-30%. digital transformation work.
project that successfully
Solution: the “Unified Billing” project Middle Layer and microservices fabrics
One of the project’s core tasks was creating addresses the challenges The transformation of the billing service
a cross-functional team with common of CSPs globally, including substantially decreased TTM for the new
goals. It was fairly challenging given that products. However, with such a high pace of
around 1,500 MegaFon employees were Middle Eastern and African modernization in the telecommunications
involved. The project’s success relied on regions. market, MegaFon needed to further speed
the mutual involvement and engagement up its transformation.
of both MegaFon and Nexign teams. Also, company also had to undergo serious
it required to simultaneously migrate organizational and procedural changes,” “BSS allowed us to launch and configure
subscribers to the new platform and noted Mikhail Matyushin, Chief Technology new products much faster. But if there
support legacy billing solutions until they Officer at Nexign. was a need for adjustments in the partner
are fully replaced – this only added to the solutions, we were hampered by vendors.
challenge. Thanks to coming up with an “We applied an individual approach To overcome this challenge, MegaFon and
accurate plan together with the operator, in the B2X segment. It was critical, Nexign created a layer of microservices
migration of B2C subscribers ran nearly because over the years, our customers above the billing, so new projects could be
unnoticed for the customers: additional accumulated a variety of parameters for promptly created and tested by our own
tariff schemes were added to the new product applications that were created developers or external suppliers,” said Igor
billing system at once, while the existing in accordance with individual needs of Glebov, Business Development Director at
ones were migrated gradually. customers in different regions – especially MegaFon PJSC.
the companies with geographically-
“This project is unique in many ways. dispersed structures. For the government Thanks to introducing this extra layer, the
Together with MegaFon, we ran complex and enterprise sector, it was also important TTM for a new functionality was slashed
transformation of its systems. With to follow SLA – otherwise, we could have from several quarters to 2-3 weeks. As
modernizing the BSS platform, the simply lost these customers,” said Andrey an added value, MegaFon is now able to
quickly solve tasks related to piloting and
testing without making changes to the
core of the billing.

Nexign Product Catalogue
works as a central
configuration point for
all operator’s offerings.
It supports the whole

product lifecycle from the
inception and adjustment
of price and other
parameters to the product’s
decommissioning.

125 FEB-MAR 2021