revenue assurance
TRANSCRIPT
Revenue assurance
1 'Revenue assurance (RA)' is a niche business activity most commonly undertaken within businesses that
provide telecommunication services.
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Revenue assurance
1 The activity is the use of data quality and process improvement methods
that improve Profit (accounting)|profits, revenues and cash flows
without influencing demand. This was defined by a TM Forum working
group based on research documented in its Revenue
Assurance Technical Overview [http://www.tmforum.org/browse.asp
x?catid=865linkID=30508].https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html
Revenue assurance
1 In many telecommunications service providers, revenue assurance is led by a dedicated revenue assurance
department.
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 Assuming a provider with a typical organizational split, responsibilities for revenue assurance primarily sit
between the Finance and Technology directorates, however, revenue assurance initiatives are often started in a business unit or
marketing group.
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 wholesale or retail business lines) will often embark on revenue assurance
projects in an effort to improve product line margins
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 However, there is significant disagreement about the ultimate
aims and legitimate scope of revenue assurance teams
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 (4) the difficulty in reliably measuring the value added by revenue assurance as separable from
underlying performance.
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 For example, in decreasing order of frequency, revenue
assurance may cover:
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 The rationale for why revenue assurance has come to be
considered particularly important in telecommunications, unlike other
industries, is disputed
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 It is also important to recognize that there is a long history of revenue
assurance activities in some telcos that predates the coining of the term
revenue assurance.
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 As with consultancies, IT-oriented revenue assurance solutions are
offered by both large vendors like providers of billing and mediation software, and by specialized niche
providers.
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 There is some debate about the relative merits of the different
techniques that can be employed in revenue assurance.
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Revenue assurance - Overview
1 Some scientific research in other fields is also applicable to revenue assurance, though most revenue assurance facts rely heavily on
anecdotes and oft-repeated truisms
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Revenue assurance - The value of revenue assurance
1 This can lead to a parasitical relationship between a Revenue
Assurance department or vendor and the wider business, where the
department/vendor finds it easiest to justify its ongoing existence/contract by repeatedly fixing symptoms and
not the root causes.
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Revenue assurance - The value of revenue assurance
1 The survey measured only actual under-billed and unbilled amounts discovered by the participants; it excluded other
types of leakages such as cost leakages and loss of opportunity leakages, and it excluded projected leakage estimations
that are commonly used (i.e., what would have been the amount of leakage, if the leakage would not been discovered by
revenue assurance activities)
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Revenue assurance - The value of revenue assurance
1 (2) All the research was conducted by businesses wishing to promote their revenue assurance products;
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Revenue assurance - The value of revenue assurance
1 (3) Increased annual spend on revenue assurance has not resulted
in a clear downward trend in estimates;
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Revenue assurance - The value of revenue assurance
1 For example, in reconciling interconnect costs and revenues between telcos, a 5%
variance is the common practice to accept before a disputed invoice can
lead one party to withhold payment, and a 0.5% variance would be considered industry-leading practice according to
best practice advice issued by the [http://www.revenueassurancegroup.net/
UK Revenue Assurance Group].
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Revenue assurance - Revenue Assurance in Telecom
1 Although Revenue Assurance has always been present in the telecom
parlance it has recently been brought at the forefront of the top
management. This is due to several factors including
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Revenue assurance - Revenue Assurance in Telecom
1 Revenue Assurance in a telco environment covers a wide range of technical and business
aspects
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Revenue assurance - Where is the problem
1 The most debated part of revenue assurance is where to start checking, i.e. at the network
side, the rating side, the billing side, the interconnect side, the CRM side, etc.
However, most surveys and reports state that the maximum leakage happens during
the flow of Call Detail Records (CDRs) or Event Detail Records (EDRs) from the Switch
to the respective rating / billing engines. Some of the common problem areas are :
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Revenue assurance - Revenue assurance discipline
1 Among the disciplines in
revenue assurance are:
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Revenue assurance - Revenue assurance discipline
1 1. The CORE functions of a revenue assurance group: Monitoring,
Baselining, Auditing, Synchronizing, Investigating and Compliance.
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Revenue assurance - Revenue assurance discipline
1 2. Decomposing an organization's revenue assurance scope (The Revenue Management
Chain).
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Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance
1 There is no formal maturity model for Revenue Assurance which is
universally accepted. However the Revenue Assurance processes can be pegged against a generic five stage maturity model. The five stages are
listed below and are described in terms of a Revenue Assurance Strategy, People, Process and
technological advances. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html
Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance
1 At this stage there is no formalized Revenue Assurance
strategy in place
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Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance
1 People are still learning the skill set
of revenue assurance
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Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance
1 There is a formalized and approved Revenue Assurance charter and strategy in place
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Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance
1 There is a formalized strategy and long term road map for people, process and technology for the revenue assurance department
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Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance
1 Controls reach a maturity where Revenue Assurance only acts as an
improvement agency for other process areas including product
development, product deployment, customer retention, billing,
collections, dunning etc
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Revenue assurance - RA Process Categories
1 The Revenue Assurance processes in many ways can be regarded as an auditing process
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Revenue assurance - Detective Processes
1 Revenue Assurance Detection is the process of spotting a change in value
of a dimension relative to its movement from System A to System
B or within a given systems itself. The change in the value is relative to a dimension is question. Detection in RA can be achieved by both manual
and automated means. Typical detection activities include monitoring, summarization, investigation and auditing.
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Revenue assurance - Detective Processes
1 The various processes which typically are monitored by a Revenue
Assurance department include daily network usage, profile and
configuration changes, mediation, rating, billing, settlement, roaming,
collections and dunning related processes
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Revenue assurance - Detective Processes
1 Every Revenue Assurance audit has a list of specific objectives which may
come from management, regulations or industry standards
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Revenue assurance - Detective Processes
1 By focusing on correction of root causes, revenue assurance problem recurrence can
be prevented.
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Revenue assurance - Corrective Processes
1 In Revenue Assurance activities, the process of correction of a root cause
could involve correction of information, processes, technology or
people
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Revenue assurance - Corrective Processes
1 Typically process correction is required to have a pro-active
revenue assurance step to provide better governance across the
operations
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Revenue assurance - Corrective Processes
1 * People Correction: People correction is required when skills of
the resources are in question. Revenue Assurance is a niche
business process with limited people present with the right amount of
Telecom Network, Mediation, Billing, IT and Business related experience.
This leads to may Revenue Assurance teams with inexperienced people on operational departments.
Owing to this, most Revenue Assurance operations end up being only re-active rather than moving
into a proactive foundation.
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Revenue assurance - Corrective Processes
1 Any current implementation of Revenue Assurance becomes obsolete rapidly. As
technologies evolve revenue assurance tools and coverage of the tools also need to
evolve. This essentially means technology corrections need to be performed either on
the hardware side or on the tool / application side. Technology corrections are rare and
need to be performed with due diligence as technology corrections can be very expensive
to an organization.
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Revenue assurance - Preventive Processes
1 Preventive activities lead to effective risk management around Revenue Assurance
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Revenue assurance - Preventive Processes
1 * Synchronization - A set of activities which ensure that 2 data sets are
synchronized over a period of time. For example a set of Revenue
Assurance activities would ensure that all prepaid customers on the
CRM systems are represented in the IN - SDP (Intelligent Network) and
vice versa. Similarly all trunk groups between the whole sale departments
are in sync with the trunk groups mentioned in the MSCs. Another example could be to ensure all B
number tables between the MSCs are same.
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Revenue assurance - Preventive Processes
1 Some processes of Revenue Assurance can produce multiple co-
related outputs which need to be verified before being released to the
consumer either internally or externally
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Revenue assurance - Tool for Revenue Assurance
1 Since Revenue Assurance is a very niche area in the telecommunications environment, there are some specific
products and solutions supporting this subject. There are various
vendors in the market which address either the complete suite of Revenue Assurance requirements or specialize in the specific domains. This section
describes the basic features of a generic Revenue Assurance tool.
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Revenue assurance - Tool for Revenue Assurance
1 An organization should be careful when automating revenue assurance as it may end up with an expensive and inflexible solution which no one
can manage effectively.
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Revenue assurance - Tool for Revenue Assurance
1 There are a variety of specialized RA products which have different characteristics
including probing, RA add on modules on respective OSS / BSS elements. However the
most common tool adopted by most Telecommunication companies is one which can simulate the natural process of the CDR flow from Network generation to Invoicing. Given below are some of the requirements
(not exhaustive) of such a Revenue Assurance product.
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Revenue assurance - Extract, Transform and Load
1 Telecommunications is an environment where there are many heterogeneous systems creating a multitude of data. Typically a single day’s information runs into many Giga Bytes or in some cases Tera Bytes also. This creates a need to have very proficient and rigorous
extraction, transformation and loading tool for a Revenue Assurance
application. Some of the common features of this tool are:
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Revenue assurance - Reconciliations
1 Given below are some of the requirements (not exhaustive) which a Revenue Assurance Reconciliation side of the product should provide.
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Revenue assurance - Analysis and KPIs
1 Once all the information has been received into the Revenue Assurance systems it time
to crunch numbers and generate reports. The critical part is the analytical capabilities
of the tool. The tool needs to have the ability to make sense of the problems in the
vast set of data that it has gathered. This can only be done by a high performance
analytical engine which should be capable of the following activities (non exhaustive):
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Revenue assurance - Dash boarding
1 A Revenue Assurance dashboard is an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a
graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to
enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance
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Revenue assurance - Case Management
1 A case management capability in Revenue Assurance should be able to provide a 360 degree view of a given
case
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