The PoC uses MEF Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) APIs with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to create Smart Bilaterals for end-to-end ordering, billing and settlement of data services.
"Thanks to the great work of this PoC team, we are able to demonstrate the benefits of the combination of DLT and MEF LSO APIs," said Daniel Bar-Lev, vice president of strategic programs, MEF.
"Cost reductions through automation and synchronisation virtually eliminate costly billing errors and process cycle times.
The PoC supports the MEF's new Commercial and Operational framework (W114) by showing how we can overcome cross-partner business process integration challenges across the telco service value chain, a process that costs the telecom industry hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
"LSO-APIs have enabled a large degree of standardisation and automation in our Lead-to-Order processes. Developing and integrating the DLT-base Smart Bilaterals to our LSO-APIs service chain will enable us to complete the Lead-to-Cash process within seconds,” added Jacqueline Teo, chief digital officer at HGC.
The MEF 3.0 PoC (130) was created to demonstrate a viable solution to address "implement once, use many' process integration for data services. The core of the PoC and the associated in-development-standard MEF W114 are "Smart Bilaterals".
Smart Bilaterals are DLT-based Smart Contract systems that enable an immutable, self-executing commercial state between two or more service providers by establishing a shared commercial state that ensures the correctness of all generated commercial documents.
"While inter-carrier API orchestration is mature with MEF LSO Sonata API standard, we are thrilled to get further evolution on billing and settlement aspect using DLT-based Smart Bilaterals,” said Victor Ma, general manager at DCConnect Global.
“This MEF PoC 130 has successfully demonstrated the benefits which we believe the federation of carriers would enjoy by getting onboard the Billing platform. It has been a wonderful experience working with QLC Chain and HGC on this ground-breaking Proof-of-Concept."
Using QLC Chain's Trusted Billing platform that uses standard MEF LSO Sonata APIs and standardisable Smart Bilateral protocols, the partners through the PoC were able to demonstrate that only a one-time onboarding is required to conduct business with any other service provider on the same network.
It also established the automation of the Order-to-Cash value chain for data services transactions in near real time.
" In summary, our initial outcomes from the PoC demonstrated QLC Chain, the privacy-preserving and high-volume chain, is suitable the nature of transactions of telecom services, the PoC 130 will be available for partners to test at an open platform,” said Susan Zhou, chief operating officer of QLC Chain.
