Billing system migration for Virgin Media.
Successful consolidation of multiple billing systems as the business grows through acquisition.
Project overview.
Virgin Media, the UK’s largest cable broadband providers, formed through the merger of NTL and Telewest, needed to consolidate multiple legacy billing systems into a single billing system.
With multiple legacy billing systems in place, Virgin Media found that billing inconsistencies were creeping in and keeping track of multiple products and services across all systems was time consuming and error-prone. Initial research into the system landscape identified several billing systems across the two companies. NTL had two billing systems which were
running on old versions of the Geneva billing system, whilst Telewest were using a version of the RBM billing system along with a custom solution running on Oracle.
The overall aim of the project was to ensure that the data from each of the billing systems was standardised and consolidated into a new centralised system, with as little business disruption as possible. All migrations had to be completed accurately and in a timely manner, as most of the systems were either out of, or nearing, the end of the product support lifecycle.
The solution.
The first phase of the project was to inspect the four billing systems, compare the database schemas and create custom mappings for historic transactional data, subscriber service data and required product/tariff catalogues. This allowed the team to determine whether the data from the source systems would need transforming to meet with the required data structure of the target system.
Having created the mapping rules in the discovery phase the next step was to decide on the best load approach. Several options were assessed for mapping the source and target data types. These included:
- Writing the load mechanism from scratch, using the target system API layer to load data
- Writing the load mechanism from scratch, directly inserting records into tables using SQL inserts
- Utilising the load mechanism provided by the target system vendor (file-based batch load)
Option 1 was chosen as it allowed PhixFlow to utilise the target system’s validation rules to ensure the integrity of the data being loaded and to identify any data quality issues from the validation errors generated. This also had the added benefit of allowing PhixFlow to control the load phase of the project by loading the data in the order required for the target system. For example, from the generated record sets, a customer record would be created first, followed by the account reference, then the products associated for each customer, all customer events and finally, all historical billing data (invoices, adjustments, payments etc).
The next step was to prepare the data for loading into the new billing system. To do this, the PhixFlow team configured logic to extract the data from the source system, apply mapping and business rules then transforming the data to match the desired specification of the target system. The transformed data would then be put into tables ready for the ingest process to start.
A vital part of the load phase was to ensure that any errors or validation failures were captured to enable reports to be generated and fed back to the customer for further checks to be carried out. Rules were configured that would determine whether the record would continue to be loaded or be rejected. For example, if a validation error was discovered whilst loading a Customer Record, that customer
would not be loaded. However, if a product that was associated with the customer failed during the validation checks, the customer record would still be loaded, with a report generated identifying the products that were not loaded.
The results.
Working collaboratively with Virgin Media, PhixFlow took an iterative approach to fix data problems in the source system
and ensure the data quality of the files loaded into the target system.
With the data quality issues resolved, PhixFlow performed multiple dry runs of the migration, starting with the data from NTL first. These were specifically aimed at testing throughput performance, due to the volume of records involved, testing the end-to-end process, accuracy of the mappings and then reconciling the data between the two systems, before performing the full migration.
Having performed a successful migration for the two NTL billing systems with a 99.4% success rate, attention was then focused on the billing platform for Telewest. With all migrations, care was taken to include historical billing information to ensure that customer billing would continue seamlessly from the latest point on the new billing system.
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