Revenue assurance teams have resolved many of the problems that faced their companies ten years ago through the introduction of new techniques, custom-built code and off-the-shelf software.
However all of these moves have failed to resolve one of the most costly issues facing the industry: the inaccuracy and inconsistency of data across the many data silos within a telco. Product Portfolio Management software provides a solution to this problem through efficient use of the operator’s existing software and databases.
In recent years, revenue assurance has maintained a high ranking in telecommunication operator surveys of top business priorities. Even so it seems that the industry has still not defined a comprehensive scope of the problem nor a detailed set of functional requirements. It is clear, though, to everyone involved that significant revenue and margin is still being lost unnecessarily.
The reasons for the industry’s failure are many but certainly include the fact that revenue assurance is a complex and broad issue. Take a simple definition of revenue assurance such as “the activities of ensuring and validating that the revenue collected equals the chargeable service used”. This dictates that the subject covers everything from chargeable event identification through to debt management.
However, I believe that even this scope is too small and should include “revenue loss due to failure to supply a desired service where there is the means and intent to pay”. Many would argue for a variation and extension of this scope.
Let us consider all revenue assurance activities as falling into one of the following categories:
• Chargeable event capture, billing and settlement
• Reconciliation and analysis of revenue data
• Policing of customer and operator activity
• Data accuracy assurance and correction
This may not agree with everyone’s decomposition analysis, but that doesn’t matter for the following argument: nearly all of the discussion, operator development and software product activity has been focused on the first three of the above areas. These are of course all important and necessary.
However with so little focus on ensuring that the unique or shared data across many applications is accurate and up to date, how do we know that the revenue identified is correct? Also we have left a large door open for revenue leakage:
• Failure to sell or provision a service correctly, hence take-up of the service by the customer is delayed (or abandoned)
• Failure to bill due to service data being wrong or absent
• Customer disputes and resulting credits caused by incorrect bills
• Inaccurate allocation of inventory or network resources and unnecessary truck rolls
The list could go on, but the point is that the industry has not spent the necessary effort, nor gained the necessary reward, by attacking the issue of data accuracy. This causes operators to fail to provision service or to bill correctly and results in both lost revenue and a high cost to resolve the errors, if and when they are identified.
The major problem causing the high level of data inaccuracy is that today most telecommunications operator’s architectures are built of many tens or hundreds of systems each with their own siloed copy of shared data. Even if data is created consistently across the architecture (which of course it often isn’t) the chance of retaining data accuracy over a few months of operation is small. Therefore errors occur with a high regularity.
If however the important shared data, needed by multiple applications was managed from a central system that federated its data from the existing applications then it is possible firstly to assure that data changes are correctly applied across multiple applications, but also that inadvertent modifications cannot happen without at least a warning being sounded. Such an application, which federates data as opposed to creating a copy or aggregate of business data, does not create the problems caused by more duplication of data across the OSS/BSS. Federating the data ensures that the latest data is always available to any decisions or rules made by the application and ultimately that inconsistencies in the data can be identified and if required fixed from single place.
Product Portfolio Management products assure the accuracy of customer product inventory in this way. This software is therefore able to ensure that lost revenue due to inaccurate data becomes an obsolete problem. Product Portfolio Management enables rules to be defined to ensure that when customer product inventory is modified either manually or through automated applications that change is correctly resolved throughout the architecture and that any additional revenue assurance functions, aggregations or modifications are carried out. One of the largest remaining problems for revenue assurance — errors caused by inaccurate data — can therefore be removed.
By Paul Hollingsworth, Director of Product Marketing, Celona Technologies