NATEC is a provider of BSS software development solutions for communications service providers (CSPs).
NATEC’s primary offerings include WideCoup BSS solution and MEF.DEV serverless platform.
In the early 2000s, the company developed a converged billing system Wide Coup Billing. At that time, the product was used by telecommunication operators of small TSPs in the banking sector, small telecommunication companies, hotel complexes, etc. (B2B and B2C segments). The system allows the pre-processing of information and automation of payments for telecommunication services when receiving primary data from external telecommunication equipment.
Wide Coup Billing features included:
- Setting access rights for system users
- Tariff plan directory maintenance
- Maintenance of the directory of users (subscribers)
- Work with the balance of users (subscribers)
- Statement of accounts
- Device administration
- System redundancy Etc.
At the beginning of 2019, NATEC was contacted by one of the largest mobile operators and Internet providers in Ukraine (information under NDA), with about 4,000 employees and serving more than 27 million users throughout Ukraine.
The client's company task was to implement an innovative collaborative development approach in one of its major projects to migrate billing and contract billing functions to new platforms from the company's legacy BIS system. That is why the ready-made solution Wide Coup Billing became interesting for the company.
In turn, NATEC turned to our company NetLS for help in expanding the functionality of Wide Coup Billing.
The primary and main issue was that an outdated legacy system was not fitable for implementing client’s tasks described above.
To do this, we gradually migrated IT services of the wired connection and the Internet, and then Home Internet Services (FTTB) and TV (Fixed Mobile Convergence) services to a new core of post-paid billing WideCoup using the co-development platform MEF.DEV also developed by NATEC R&D, the main task of which in turn was to accelerate the development of marketing activities, product deliveries and further operation of updated services. We also migrated non-telco services to the new platform.
In parallel with the expansion of functionality, we have updated the legacy .Net Framework 2.0 to the latest stable version, as the product Wide Coup Billing was created back in 2000 and has not been updated since then.
As a result, the new extended functionality included:
- Features & modules
- Accounting & entities
- Rating & tariffs
- Charging
- Billing & invoicing
- Mediation
- Reporting
- Cases of architect design
- DevOps options
- Redundancy & scalability Etc.
With this expansion, the client company was also able to support the B2B2X segment.
After expanding the functionality, the next challenge was to improve the uploading of data by caching on the site, to reduce the load on the database, and to optimize the time spent by users on data processing on the website.
Having solved this problem, thanks to data caching, the processing of information on the page began to take up to 3 seconds, although earlier it could take up to 15 minutes.
In parallel, we have created a dozen of custom components such as:
- tree-like table grid database viewer,
- data autocomplete for input fields,
- dynamic modal window which auto-generates a UI table based on columns from SQL stored procedure for any entity in a service,
- dynamic alerts which may appear after calling certain SQL stored procedures.
By creating those custom components, we were able to save time on engineering.
Thus, the development of the functionality began taking up to 2-4 hours instead of 2-3 days, as it was before, on average.
After optimizing the upload of data using caching, we, together with the NATEC team, decided that it would be a good idea to add multilingualism to the functionality of the system.
To do this, our team localized more than 100 pages of the site by modifing the page views, stored procedures, resource files with provided translations which allowed Wide Coup to enter new markets.
Thus the legacy system Wide Coup Billing was renamed to Wide Coup BSS - solution that provides CSPs access to key functional capabilities. The updated system provides a standard template for multi-vendor hybrid deployments. It can support flexible billing relationships which can enable multiple business models including B2C, B2B, and B2B2X value chains. In addition, it also supports offline and real-time charging with rules-based discounting.
The new BSS solution transforms business agility and accelerates concept-to-cash from tens of months to 3 weeks, enabling 40% growth in B2B revenues.
At this stage, the product has been successfully implemented and used by the customer company. From our side, the project is still under support.
You can also download the full presentation of the Wide Coup BSS product by clicking here.