BASE/Revenue Assurance

The AcuMaestro, Inc. Business Assurance Solution Environment (BASE) Revenue Assurance (RA) Manager monitors the spectrum of technology independent end-to-end business operations metrics by mediating business intelligence from all relevant sources, including business processes and deployed services. The BASE system has a powerful rules engine that offers an open formula definition interface that permits complex rule definition and calculation for the correlation and aggregation of business intelligence. The BASE calculation engine acquires information from other management systems and/or operational environments, allowing the BASE system to perform valuable information collaboration both vertically and horizontally. These specific real-time measurable information components are assembled into Business Behavior Indicators (BBI) that provide an accurate picture of the current state of the business. Data is presented in sufficient detail to drill down to individual customer services. The collection of BBI’s is then compared in real time against service objectives in order to verify internal (service and operational quality), external (with 3^rd party vendors), or customer service level commitments and compliance with Business Performance Objectives. The BASE/RA offers the following four areas of value:

1) Improved Customer and User Intimacy : The primary goal of today’s service companies, regardless of the market they serve or the technology they use, is to delight their customers. The BASE/RA can ensure the reliability and integrity of your services as well as your billing processes to obtain maximized customer profitability. This goal can be realized by virtue of the following BASE/MS capabilities:

• Achievement of increased customer confidence by proving that the committed Quality of Service (QoS) level is actually delivered. Based on QoS specifications (e.g., bytes vs. packets or set time parameters) BASE/RA correlates and aggregates usage data from bundled services to assure a cross-domain end-to-end quality for subscribers. End users are ensured that problems are resolved before their business is affected.

• BASE/RA’s real-time tracking of billing errors and record fallout can proactively monitor the performance of service offerings.

• BASE/RA supports rapid resolution of service affecting troubles, thereby reducing call failures and increasing the availability of services.

• Measurement of the propensity of customers to churn and identification of the most likely candidates to purchase additional services.

• Support of per-subscriber, real-time analysis to assist providers in developing business cases to induce positive behavior and prevent leakage.

• Assists providers to classify customers by allocating risk factors for revenue impact calculation according to community and customer profiles (e.g., roaming and calling cards, network activity, payment information regarding collections or billing) across customer life cycles. Thus, providers can create and allocate a value across functions to each subscriber.

2) Business Intelligence: BI can be defined as the accurate accounting and monitoring of customer, product (service) and channel performance and profitability. The increase in use of QoS indicators has driven the need for flexible applications that can reformat and reroute information with a business emphasis so that companies can easily focus their efforts on the appropriate service resources. In order to effectively conduct business in the future, providers will have to exchange business information with strategic partners in the value chain on a global basis. This vast external communication requires that all of the industry participants be able to reciprocate intelligence that is fair and understandable among the trusted community members. BASE/RA offers the following advantages in BI management:

• Provision of systemic health checks that capture, describe and quantify fallout, so providers can see what part of leakage is meaningful and what is not.

• Enhancement of the intelligence available from providers’ billing systems, so billing is no longer a process but an analytical tool that can assess the characteristics of services sold, e.g. how many times consumers access a service and how often they pay.

• In 2.5G and 3G mobile services, a single interrupted activity will disrupt the service and incur lost revenue. BASE/RA effectively manages a complicated chain of events using state of art computing architecture to expose potential financial and service impacts.

• Adding value to the billing process in order to positively reinforce providers’ promotion efforts and new services in a more integrated way.

• BASE/RA’s data warehouse and analytical engine can maximize the capabilities of the multi-dimensional database based on the customer/community information, the offerings used and the geography involved. The multi-dimensional view and analysis are accomplished by gathering information from the billing and network traffic systems, as well as from customer care.

• Unlike the existing bandwidth consumption monitor scheme for service abuse management, BASE/RA is capable of collecting information that reflects network utilization in the same terms as those used in the service agreement—in terms of allowed applications, application usage and restrictions. Using deep analysis of the service traffic, BASE/RA users can collect application-specific usage metrics as statistical profiling of application consumption, making it possible to identify subscribers who employ excessive access sharing or use access for unauthorized activities.

3) Product Leadership: Increased speed and efficiency in managing existing solutions plus the incorporation and marketing of new products are keys to providing leadership. Efficient and high quality processing increasingly requires the movement of business data across different technology, corporate and industry domains. An increase in use of data has driven the need for a flexible infrastructure that can reformat and redistribute the various data and data structures so that they can be read by the appropriate business entities and systems.

• BASE/RA’s technology Infrastructure incorporates flow-through functionality that will be increasingly important in building block architectures because of its ability to provide virtual centralized processing flows and direct interaction with end users.

• BASE/RA can leverage available processors, allowing applications to seamlessly distribute workload whether dedicated or underutilized, resulting in performance improvement. Business applications can benefit by providing superior decision support and process their workload faster across numerous machines.

• By using automated analysis, reporting, audits and controlling processes, BASE/RA can synchronize data circuits, provisioning, billing and network components to improve the service provider’s competitive advantages—e.g., having greater billing accuracy as a strategic advantage.

• BASE/RA’s real time QoS alerts can enforce resilient application architectures and achieve a near-fault-tolerant environment with minimum investment. Its self-managed and proactive monitoring approach allows the providers’ solutions to run faster with more reliability, liberating IT staff from support tasks, allowing them to focus on revenue-driven activities.

• To remain competitive, providers are sometimes forced to rush new services to market before they can actually bill for them. Lag time such as this means loss of profitability. BASE/RA can accelerate the maturing time for new services based on their actual cost to the operation and can enable activation of the billing process in a reduced interval.

• The business intelligence generated by BASE/RA makes a flexible charging model a possible business practice. By charging customers based on their actual usage, not only can providers increase their revenues by creating various tiers of service, but they can also avoid flat rates that are a root cause of service abuse. Additionally, the providers can offer flexible service and price matrices as their marketing differentiator.

• BASE/R enhances brand image of providers by protecting subscribers from erroneous bills.

4) Improved Business Efficiency: BASE/RA automatically manages Business Objectives from all aspects of the provider’s operations, in real time and historically, across the technology domain and organization's grid. The result establishes a new level of information management and analysis that allows more efficient operations and enables significant improvement in service and overall customer experience. Through a highly customizable web-enabled interface, system users can monitor service resources, change task priorities and check bottom-line business performance. The BASE/RA Web Service Interface provides an open means for easy integration with existing solutions and OSS. This allows flexible extension and optimization of their assets and provides additional intelligence to help succeed in an increasingly real time world.

• In conjunction with the control and compliance techniques of measurable process management methodologies, such as Six-Sigma, BASE/RA’ users can focus on defect rates and true root cause in order to accelerate the results of identifying revenue-impacting process and system issues and to provide a method to correct these issues.

• BASE/RA features a plug-in architecture, providing the ability to integrate/adapt a variety of business and technology solutions quickly, minimizing payback periods.BASE/RA can identify nonproductive pieces of capital by giving discrepancies “personality,” which means defining their financial meaning, enabling providers to take action in billing or provisioning, or any area of leakage.

• BASE/RA’s ability to provide real time assessment for QoS can ensure successful flow control with sophisticated, rules-based processing. It is capable of guiding workload components to be distributed to appropriate processors for execution. If for any reason a given processor fails or becomes unavailable, BASE can respond to the problem and help the system to redirect this workload component to another processor, ensuring overall task completion.

• BASE/RA’s “dashboard view” of credit collections can lead to more concentrated operations where the system identifies priorities, allowing reductions in operating hours and staff committed to analysis of data.

• As the volume of CDRs in a 2.5G mobile network environment is estimated to be 15 to 50 times higher than in a traditional mobile world, BASE/RA’s real-time calculation engine can effectively accommodate all the incoming records while performing mediation and correlation of all the incoming events.