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Case Study/

Creating an Agile Environment to Drive Growth in the IoT

At Numerex, we leverage the LogiSense system for some key billing and BSS functions in our managed solution service offerings. This enables our business to become more agile and increases our speed to market to roll out innovative offerings and adapt to the explosive growth in the IoT/M2M ecosystem. The end-to-end converged billing capabilities of the LogSense system gives us operational efficiencies that accelerate the business results we desire.
Sri Ramachandran – Chief Technology Officer, Numerex

The Customer

HEADQUARTERS: Atlanta, GA, USA
EMPLOYEES: 201-500
INDUSTRY: Wireless
TYPE: Public (NASDAQ: NMRX) Now Sierra Wireless
SERVICES: wireless communications, asset tracking & recovery applications, M2M business solutions, device monitoring applications, M2M service integrator, open platform architecture, telematics solutions, wireless network services, location-based services

Numerex is an expanding global provider of M2M enterprise solutions that enable the Internet of Things. They provide a broad range of M2M business services, technology, and products used in the development and support of global IoT solutions for many different industries including waste management, energy and utilities, healthcare and medical devices, probation, parole and corrections, manufacturing and distribution, safety and security, and transportation.

Numerex’s fully-integrated, end-to-end solutions enable organizations such as ReliantHeart, TrackPoint Systems, T-Mobile, and AT&T to securely track, monitor, manage, and secure their connected assets.

Numerex remains uniquely positioned in the marketplace to deliver vertically focused solutions to enterprise and government customers eager to create enhanced value through Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. With a 20-year track record of success, they are a pioneer in the industry and remain an award-winning innovator, having deployed their platform-enabled IoT solutions across more than 50 vertical markets spanning the globe.


The Challenge

The Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving rapidly, with billions of connected devices already transmitting data and completing tasks in consumer, commercial, industrial, governmental, and other settings. To stay far ahead of the competitive curve and deliver on customer expectations, Numerex needed to provide innovative products and service offerings and adapt to the explosive growth in the IoT/M2M ecosystem.

As Numerex was transforming into delivering on-demand offerings to its wide range of markets, they realized their back office systems weren’t capable of providing flexible feature sets, critical to helping turn up new product catalog configurations to close deals and better manage service offerings. An example of this needed flexibility would allow a Numerex customer to buy devices in bulk yet only pay for those that actively use data on the network. Their systems required significant development efforts to introduce new service offerings such as this. They had segregated billing systems that didn’t scale for high volume processing requirements.

Numerex was also growing via M&As, which brought the additional challenges of outdated technologies and a variety of disparate billing systems that didn’t talk to each other, resulting in complex operational expenditures and integration requirements. It became so dire that Numerex was forced to implement manual billing processes for certain lines of business.

Through close collaboration with representatives from Numerex’s accounting, project management, IT, development and product management teams, LogiSense captured Numerex’s key requirements for a new billing system, to include:

  • Ensuring bills could be issued in a timely manner with increased accuracy to provide bill certainty to customers and adequate reporting to the finance department.
  • An end-to-end solution that would also support adjacent processes related to inventory management, service provisioning and customer support in a single system.
  • A flexible commercial hierarchy catering to master-dealer, dealer, sub-dealer and end user structures to facilitate distribution, resellers, enterprise and billing-on-behalf-of was key.
  • Ability to perform “what-if” analysis by changing plan pricing for select customers and re-rating prior to bill runs to determine the potential impacts on revenue.
  • Most important of all, easy creation, management and retirement of new promotions, rate plans and bundles to support increased revenue growth with reduced costs.

The Solution

To address the explosive growth in the IoT/M2M ecosystem and to improve its back-office effectiveness, Numerex leveraged the LogiSense M2M Usage Rating and Billing platform, a data-agnostic Usage Rating and Billing solution supporting complex M2M value chains, and able to handle a large variety of M2M services and huge volumes of devices.

The LogiSense usage rating and subscription billing solution will provide Numerex with the scalability and flexibility needed to automate, optimize and simplify its M2M business model. The real-time solution accommodates Numerex’s requirement for complex and flexible billing processes, enabling them to rapidly make changes to usage rating plans or service offerings while also providing flexible support for pricing of recurring and usage based fees.

The LogiSense solution allowed Numerex to migrate all of its existing functionality while also enabling the correct simplified approach to product catalog management to be in place from day one. Development items identified were done in parallel with migration to ensure minimal effects of downtime on the system when cut over happened.


The Results

Numerex selected LogiSense primarily for its end-to-end and real-time converged billing capabilities that would support a low-cost licensing model and a flexible and robust product catalog.

According to Numerex operational stakeholders, all major objectives are being met using LogiSense’s fully managed, end-to-end cloud-based usage rating and billing platform, including:

  • An out of the box solution deployed in the cloud for rapid deployment of services
  • Billing is fully converged, allowing for hybrid account management per subscriber
  • A 360° view of subscriber data that provides tools to view account balance, tickets, packages, service information and account hierarchy
  • Access to historical and real-time network usage information for business intelligence
  • Supports pay-as-you-grow SaaS-based licensing, helping customers effectively manage startup costs
  • A multi-tenant environment, allowing the onboarding of multiple brands and business units onto the same platform.