Revenue Assurance

• Revenue Assurance

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Revenue assurance

1 'Revenue assurance (RA)' is a niche business activity most commonly undertaken within businesses that

provide telecommunication services.


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.


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.



1 wholesale or retail business lines) will often embark on revenue assurance

projects in an effort to improve product line margins



1 However, there is significant disagreement about the ultimate

aims and legitimate scope of revenue assurance teams



1 (4) the difficulty in reliably measuring the value added by revenue assurance as separable from

underlying performance.



1 For example, in decreasing order of frequency, revenue

assurance may cover:



1 The rationale for why revenue assurance has come to be

considered particularly important in telecommunications, unlike other

industries, is disputed



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.



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.



1 There is some debate about the relative merits of the different

techniques that can be employed in revenue assurance.



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


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.



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)



1 (2) All the research was conducted by businesses wishing to promote their revenue assurance products;



1 (3) Increased annual spend on revenue assurance has not resulted

in a clear downward trend in estimates;



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].


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


Revenue assurance - Revenue Assurance in Telecom

1 Revenue Assurance in a telco environment covers a wide range of technical and business

aspects


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 :


Revenue assurance - Revenue assurance discipline

1 Among the disciplines in

revenue assurance are:



1 1. The CORE functions of a revenue assurance group: Monitoring,

Baselining, Auditing, Synchronizing, Investigating and Compliance.



1 2. Decomposing an organization's revenue assurance scope (The Revenue Management

Chain).


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


1 At this stage there is no formalized Revenue Assurance

strategy in place



1 People are still learning the skill set

of revenue assurance



1 There is a formalized and approved Revenue Assurance charter and strategy in place



1 There is a formalized strategy and long term road map for people, process and technology for the revenue assurance department



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


Revenue assurance - RA Process Categories

1 The Revenue Assurance processes in many ways can be regarded as an auditing process


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.



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



1 Every Revenue Assurance audit has a list of specific objectives which may

come from management, regulations or industry standards



1 By focusing on correction of root causes, revenue assurance problem recurrence can

be prevented.


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



1 Typically process correction is required to have a pro-active

revenue assurance step to provide better governance across the

operations



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.



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.


Revenue assurance - Preventive Processes

1 Preventive activities lead to effective risk management around Revenue Assurance



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.



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


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.



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.



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.


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:


Revenue assurance - Reconciliations

1 Given below are some of the requirements (not exhaustive) which a Revenue Assurance Reconciliation side of the product should provide.


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):


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


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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Revenue Assurance