Revenue Assurance in Telecommunications

Telecommunications marketplaces are maturing and becoming saturated. This is driving commoditisation of core services, and leading operators to find improved ways to harvest the maximum revenue value from their existing subscriber base. At the same time, they are addressing long overlooked revenue leakage issues, through Revenue Assurance Programs.

The Revenue Assurance [RA] discipline has traditionally focused on accurate reconciliation of intercarrier billing and fraud prevention. It has progressed to include other strategies such as network inventory assessment and least-cost routing.

Inaccurate data from order entry, billing and network systems combine to prevent accurate calculation of customer profitability. For this reason, many revenue assurance solutions solving data errors at deeper network and OSS levels, drive accurate information to the CRM level.

Convergence

The introduction of non-voice services has helped Telcos offset marginal profits from commoditised voice services. In many instances, top-line growth is up to 20 percent of total revenue in leading markets.

Non-voice IP services have also heightened the complexity of an increasingly convergent network and application platform environment.

The rapid expansion of non-voice IP services, network event mediation, interconnection, billing and other vital revenue management areas has put enormous pressure on the integrity of the overall revenue chain, with more risk and opportunity for revenue leakage.

Revenue Leakage

Studies have consistently shown that telecom operators fail to recognize between 3 to 15 percent of their revenue from voice and simple data services alone. Revenue leakage estimates of IP services are much higher.

Whilst some revenue leakage is normal, leakage amounts exceeding 3 percent are considered unacceptable and should be addressed.

With IP services bringing in a much larger share of revenue, it is imperative that operators adopt a revenue assurance solution that can detect leakage in a timely fashion and allow for more precise root cause analysis and resolution.

Revenue Assurance Solutions

Revenue Assurance solutions are moving financial accountability into the customer management process. According to the Yankee Group "customer profitability assurance synchronizes CRM, product promotion and pricing, billing, collection, cash management and financial analysis in an effort to reduce revenue leakage - a process that begins before the order is taken".

A typical Revenue Assurance Solution provides a complete, end-to-end environment that automates all key activities in the revenue management chain, providing an effective revenue assurance program.

Data Collection - data access engines that can easily integrate with various network elements and other revenue management points along the chain to collect the relevant information without disrupting the performance requirements of the system.

Reporting Configuration - configuration utilities that allow for flexible, user-driven definitions and rules to:

• Organize data
• Calculate variables
• Define KPI measurements
• Develop analytic models
• Create reports unique to each telecommunications environment

Agile Reporting - capabilities that support the generation of varied reports for:

• Detailed leakage monitoring and analysis of all the critical points along the revenue management chain
• Reports on the effectiveness of revenue assurance KPIs
• Models developed to manage AR policies

SAS Revenue Assurance

SAS Revenue Assurance solution is designed to help telecommunications companies reduce the business risk and costs associated with revenue leakage with effective monitoring and reporting capabilities. The strength of SAS's RA solution is is adapatability to support each operator’s unique situation. It delivers a suite of software and services that combine data management, analytic and reporting technologies with a proven, cost-effective, adaptable platform.

Peoplesoft Customer Profitability Management for Communications

PeopleSoft packages Revenue Assurance capability in its Customer Profitability Management for Communications, a solution combining CRM, financial management and business analytics. enabling Telcos to compare revenue and cost for each customer in real time.

Vibrant HyperAnalytics

Vibrant Solutions HyperAnalytics application captures, processes and analyses event records across the entire network in near real-time to prevent fraud, optimize network performance and support CRM initiatives.

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