of the current rate plans, bills may even be consolidated before sending to customer. Additional data to support hierarchy-based billing is available in a billing manager. Most solutions also support real-time billing and the ability to provide data for settlements with other operators and content providers. Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS 18. Churn management: An important activity in most telecom companies is to manage churn. It can be any form of change that can impact the customer to switch to another service provider. It is also noted that the best practices used in managing churn can be reused effectively to solve similar scenarios. Applications that manage churn keep track of the activities involved in fixing the churn. Identifying similar scenarios enables solutions reuse. Telco(s) are using churn management systems to almost accurately predict the behavior of customers. Churn is a widely accepted problem in telecom service provider space. In simple terms, churn refers to customers cancelling their existing contract to embark on a subscription with a competing mobile service provider. 19. Sales management: This is more an application used across the enterprise and not just limited to telecom. A sales management application does sales planning, sales development, and sales reporting. Based on sales data, sales planning mainly involves predicting the sales figures and demand for a prod- uct. Sales planning will improve business efficiency and bring in focused and coordinated activity within the sales process. As part of sales development, the sales activities performed are tracked. All incomplete activities are worked to completion. History information is ana- lyzed to bring in continuous sales development. Sales reports are generated to check operational efficiency of the sales process and to ensure that the results set forth in sales planning are achieved. 20. Customer contact management: These applications ensure effective com- munication with the customer and are usually slated as customer relation