First he described what is billing and presented relevant key trends in the telecommunications sectors. He sees four main trends for billing:

• shrinking margins in traditional revenue areas
• convergence of networks and services
• new business models (e-Commerce and m-Commerce)
• growing internationalisation and company mergers

Corporate Billing Services provides "billing process management" for the whole Deutsche Telekom Group. This means that they have a business model which focuses on the two objectives. First there is convergence. Each of the divisions may be resellers of products and services of the other divisions. Convergence is needed on several levels, for example all services of a customer on one bill, or interdivisional settlement based on usage, or fast close accounting for all units of the group. The other objective is synergy. The cost can be reduced by generating economics of scale and standardisation of billing processes nationwide and internationally.

Böhm then presented some impressive figures of fixed wire subscribers and invoices in the year 2001, without subsidiaries and affiliated companies. France Telecom has 34 million subscribers and 300 million, compared to Deutsche Telekom, 51 mio subscribers and 455 mio invoices per year. Providing a billing service within the German Telekom Group is a real challenge because of 50 different systems that deliver data from 1800 sources, 45 carriers, more than 20.000 products and the system is used by more than 30.000 users. The result are 36 million paper invoices and 2 million electronic invoices. This IT system not only has to provide flexibility and functionality but also need the processing power to handle mass data with high reliability. Every second they produce 15 invoices, provide more than 220 TeraByte of storage for billing related data, and their data warehouse contains about 1,2 billion records. Then he presented the billing service in some detail, describing the ADS (Auskunftsdatenserver, information services) and its components. It has about 2 million accesses/day online and 1,5 million/year foe archive. The system consists of more than 4 mio. lines of code, 7 TeraByte on disk, 3,5 TByte on worm (Jukebox) with an average response time of .56 s.

In the end he listed some challenges and issues of the billing activities. Most important is to reduce costs and attain "best in class" status through specific cost reduction measures including controlling. The efficiency has to be improved within the Corporate Billing Services through improved process design and organisational structure. The quality will be increased by optimised services and processes as well as through leadership oriented towards values. "Customer and service-oriented billing competence center will clear cost leadership in the Deutsche Telekom Group", ended Christoph Böhm.