1. Revenue Assurance https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

2. Revenue assurance 1 'Revenue assurance (RA)' is a niche business activity most commonly undertaken within businesses that provide telecommunication services. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

3. 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.aspx?cati d=865linkID=30508]. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

4. Revenue assurance 1 In many telecommunications service providers, revenue assurance is led by a dedicated revenue assurance department. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

5. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

6. Revenue assurance - Overview 1 wholesale or retail business lines) will often embark on revenue assurance projects in an effort to improve product line margins https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

7. Revenue assurance - Overview 1 However, there is significant disagreement about the ultimate aims and legitimate scope of revenue assurance teams https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

8. Revenue assurance - Overview 1 (4) the difficulty in reliably measuring the value added by revenue assurance as separable from underlying performance. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

9. Revenue assurance - Overview 1 For example, in decreasing order of frequency, revenue assurance may cover: https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

10. Revenue assurance - Overview 1 The rationale for why revenue assurance has come to be considered particularly important in telecommunications, unlike other industries, is disputed https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

11. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

12. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

13. Revenue assurance - Overview 1 There is some debate about the relative merits of the different techniques that can be employed in revenue assurance. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

14. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

15. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

16. 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) https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

17. Revenue assurance - The value of revenue assurance 1 (2) All the research was conducted by businesses wishing to promote their revenue assurance products; https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

18. 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; https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

19. 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]. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

20. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

21. Revenue assurance - Revenue Assurance in Telecom 1 Revenue Assurance in a telco environment covers a wide range of technical and business aspects https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

22. 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 : https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

23. Revenue assurance - Revenue assurance discipline 1 Among the disciplines in revenue assurance are: https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

24. Revenue assurance - Revenue assurance discipline 1 1. The CORE functions of a revenue assurance group: Monitoring, Baselining, Auditing, Synchronizing, Investigating and Compliance. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

25. Revenue assurance - Revenue assurance discipline 1 2. Decomposing an organization's revenue assurance scope (The Revenue Management Chain). https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

26. 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

27. Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance 1 At this stage there is no formalized Revenue Assurance strategy in place https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

28. Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance 1 People are still learning the skill set of revenue assurance https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

29. Revenue assurance - Maturity of Revenue Assurance 1 There is a formalized and approved Revenue Assurance charter and strategy in place https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

30. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

31. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

32. Revenue assurance - RA Process Categories 1 The Revenue Assurance processes in many ways can be regarded as an auditing process https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

33. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

34. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

35. Revenue assurance - Detective Processes 1 Every Revenue Assurance audit has a list of specific objectives which may come from management, regulations or industry standards https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

36. Revenue assurance - Detective Processes 1 By focusing on correction of root causes, revenue assurance problem recurrence can be prevented. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

37. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

38. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

39. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

40. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

41. Revenue assurance - Preventive Processes 1 Preventive activities lead to effective risk management around Revenue Assurance https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

42. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

43. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

44. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

45. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

46. 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. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

47. 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: https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

48. Revenue assurance - Reconciliations 1 Given below are some of the requirements (not exhaustive) which a Revenue Assurance Reconciliation side of the product should provide. https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

49. 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): https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

50. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

51. 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 https://store.theartofservice.com/the-revenue-assurance-toolkit.html

52. For More Information, Visit: https://store.theartofservice.co m/the-revenue-assurance- toolkit.html https://store.theartofservice.co m/the-revenue-assurance- toolkit.html The Art of Service https://store.theartofservice.com