Surviving the Recession: Keeping the Dollars You've Already Earned

This more formal and process-focused approach to revenue assurance is necessary largely because of the move to more converged networks and services. Gone are the days of simple service provisioning, supported by relatively straightforward billing and collection processes. Today’s services are highly complex compositions that require the coordination of multiple back-end systems and network elements.

Sources working in this area repeatedly mentioned how easy it is for a service provider to misconfigure a service – giving a user, for instance, something different or more than they ordered. Under-utilization of the network equipment used to deliver that service is just as damaging. Just as bad are billing mistakes – under-billing leaves money on the table, while over-billing is just as harmful, leading to bad publicity and customer churn. “In a downturn,” said Subex’s Nicholson, “the last thing you want is an unsatisfied customer.”

So just what areas does business optimization touch upon? The TM Forum, for instance, is tackling this issue in its Revenue Assurance Program, with a focus on digging into the root cause of revenue and cost leakages. Its program touches on an array of potential problem areas, including network provisioning; mediation and customer data record errors; billing and interconnect charging inconsistencies; data integrity and corrupt files; fragmented support systems and manual or fuzzy business processes.

By coordinating such processes and tracking data across business systems, service providers can get a more realistic view of the margins and profitability, crucial to running the business during a downturn. Are individual services hitting their revenue targets? Are the resources to deliver those services being used efficiently and for maximum impact? Which services are most profitable, and which need to be scaled back or abandoned?

A platform to monitor and enable answers to such questions could include a variety of individual systems:

Billing Assurance: Partly a function of billing systems and partly an audit-based function, this would ensure that customer bills accurately reflect all services provided and expected revenue.

Risk and Fraud Management: Detecting fraudulent activity and minimizing the risk of customer defaults.

Network and Service Assurance: Accuratelymanaging and optimizing network inventory and asset provisioningas well as ensuring the services delivered over the network are what the customer ordered and functioning properly.

Profit/Margin Management: Tying together systems and processes to understand overall business performance with an eye toward optimizing product margins and overall profitability.