e IIC's ability to contact customers about trouble situations before they start making unhappy phone calls. 7.1 Billing Transactions SLA Credits. Competition and new network technologies have driven the demand for specific penalties to the IIC if service level agreements are not met. Ideally, if an SLA is not met, the proper billing adjustments should be made automatically. The problem with achieving this is that several systems might have to be integrated just to determine the proper credit. A SLA monitoring system, generally tied to a performance management component of the network manager, will measure network performance along pre-defined metrics. This application can identify if an SLA metric was violated, and then flag it. One issue for automating the whole process is gauging whether the SLA violation was real or not. It could have been due to a planned outage, for example, or because the customer accidentally unplugged its router. Another issue is managing SLA parameters that differ by individual contract. The SLA manager with the NMS suite typically does not have access to customer contract information. If the IIC sets individual SLA parameters, then the network performance information will need to be integrated with customer contract information to identify SLA violations. Therefore, to truly automate the entire process, the SLA monitoring system may have to refer to one database to check for planned outages and, if it finds the violation is valid, then refer to an SLA contract management database to determine the proper credit. This information must then be fed to the billing system. The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS Overall, truly integrated SLA credit generation is an area of great interest and development for many IICs, but is currently very difficult to achieve. This could be a new area of opportunity for a willing solution vendor. BUSINESS GOAL: DERIVING INTEGRATED BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Understanding the business and making intelligent decisions is a direct function of having th