Credit Cards Billing Process
THE BUSINESS NEED
THE SOLUTION
CSS provided a total solution to the client, from analysis and design phase, up to implementation, testing and migration to the new system, as well as post implementation support services.The Project was implemented in phases as follows:The Analysis phase which lasted 6 months was based on key business user interviews and study of the existing source code and documentation. Deliverables of this phase included the “Business Requirements documents” which were approved by the client before progressing to the design amp; implementation phase.
The design and implementation phase lasted 12 months:
A new database was designed from scratch to support the business requirements. Main and secondary modules were created in order to support all business requirements recorded.
The main modules manage the interest calculation of debit transactions, the account repayment, the minimum payment due, and finally the account’s balance calculation and aging rules application. Since the client requested that no core CMS modules should be redesigned, secondary modules were designed in order to control all the interfaces from and to the existing system.Migration between the two systems was a huge challenge for the development team. Simple data mapping rules could not apply in this case, since the two systems data bases were completely different. A one time job consisting of separate modules was designed and implemented, in order to perform data migration between the two systems. Extensive reconciliation rules were defined to assure the integrity of the credit card’s balance for all transaction types.The application was hosted in the iSeries DB2 data base. All code was developed using ILE Cobol SQL and ILE CLP. Arrays were extensively used in order to reduce the inevitable huge I/O demands for this project. All jobs were implemented under commitment control. Core interest calculation modules and common routines were implemented as separate ILE modules.
BENEFITS
- Migration from the old to the new system in a non-working day (more than 2 million cards migrated to the new system), without disturbing the client’s day to day processing.
- Easy Marketing campaigns launch.
- Increased functionality delivered. Easy integration of product characteristics and Marketing campaigns was achieved.
- Detailed data storage available to internal auditing control.
- Extensive information available to the customer’s Help Desk.
- Easy integration with 3rd party systems (eg TRIAD, QUALCO).
- Despite huge I/O requirements the installed IT job is executed in the client’s production system with extremely good performance.
