HP completes billing system for Telekom Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, March 1 (Asia Pulse) - Hewlett-Packard (HP) Sales (M) Sdn Bhd today announced the completion of a RM23.4 million ($US6.15 million) cost-based inter-carrier billing system for Telekom Malaysia Bhd and its mobile subsidiaries, TMTouch and Mobikom.

The Cost-Based and Access Billing System (CABS) collects, processes and provides access to information on traffic between different telecommunication operators and supports billing and reconciliation functions.

HP managing director Badlisham Ghazali said the heavy transaction volume as well as the mission-critical nature of Telekom Malaysia's billing system challenged HP to develop one of the most robust processing infrastructure in the country. Telekom Malaysia executive director Dr Abdul Rahim Daud said CABS would give an efficient and accurate means to record call transactions and bill the appropriate parties accordingly.

With the system, Telekom Malaysia could manage better traffic growth of the company and its subsidiaries. "With the old system, we need at least 20 days to complete the billing process. With CABS we could process it within five days," he told reporters after the completion of CABS project here today. "There are many other advantages in terms of ease of processing, a flexible and better system and tools which would ultimately improve the internal productivity and efficiencies," he said.

"In doing so, it will improve our business objective within Telekom Malaysia," he said. CABS replaces the earlier Revenue Sharing System (RESS) which could only support processing up to 1.2 million Call Data Records (CDR) per hour.

The high-performance CABS system, however, can handle more than five million transactions or CDR per hour. The functions of CABS include receipt of call records and CDR formatting, validation, pricing cum rating, period summarisation, discounting, invoicing and accounts management, reconciliation, competitive analysis and forecasting, agreement management, network data management, destination premium management and time premium management. The CABS project was also developed by HP's solution partner, Inception to Implementation (M) Sdn Bhd (i2i).