AcuMaestro’s BASE Application for
Revenue Assurance

Today’s market velocity is far too rapid for an ex post facto management approach to revenue assurance. The shrinking prices and margins demand real-time solutions that can seek out revenue soft spots and eliminate them before they can have a serious effect on the bottom line. In a complex service deployment, even a seemingly trivial failure in a critical business process can have a significant cost impact. For example, a failure that results in a conflict in time-of-day synchronization across multiple network elements can result in massive data conflicts that corrupt billing records and result in extra costs for reconciliation. In some cases, corruption may be so extensive that it is cost effective to reconcile at all. Either case may potentially cause significant loss of revenue for the period of time that synchronization was broken. In general, revenue can be lost through four basic areas: 

1). Lost or incomplete data records due to human or machine errors, or any process based or other inefficiencies that result in excessive and unnecessary costs. In many instances, provisioning errors have become a huge factor in customer churn and revenue leakage. For instance, subscribers’ CDR’s may contain incorrect or incomplete information due to a configuration error in the switch. If such a problem is not detected or corrected, the company can unwillingly create frustrated customers or permit customers to get free service..

2). The Internet era has created a new breed of revenue thieves that are constantly finding new ways to defraud service providers. Explicit frauds may come from the following causes:

• End user fraud and abuse - using stolen or false credentials and/or handsets.

• Technical/network fraud - using equipment or technology to gain access to a service without paying.
• Insider fraud - individuals inside the provider providing fraudulent access to networks or manipulating charging logic.

3). Failure in the collection process due to errors in co-relation of intricate deployment configurations, bad accounts, abandoned services, etc. In a complex value chain, not all the application services and network nodes are located in or controlled by the providers’ operations center. If one service provider partner adjusts or changes its data structure or aggregation intervals, it may subject the network or service to revenue loss.

4). Poor Resource Utilization. Industry experts claim that more than 70% of CPU cycles and 80% of server resources are wasted in the application service area. For 2.5G and 3G mobile services, the providers tend to over-engineer capacity in order to allow for future expansion. This strategy can be a significant cost and efficiency disadvantage if the baseline numbers are not available for them to justify the right upper bound limits.

The above soft spot descriptions suggest that efforts to improve results for service quality assurance, credit risk management and fraud control should be integrated. This strategy requires an end-to-end approach to manage a broad set of provider’s business and technology areas. “End-to-end” means pulling together network management and functions of operations, marketing, sales, product development, fraud, security, distribution, billing and customer service. It requires the companies to dynamically integrate fragmented bits of information to break down their overall business processes, identify areas that are not compliant with the business plan, and make quick and accurate decisions to correct any situation that has a negative affect on revenue and operating margins.