Well, that was the summer, that was. In much of Northern Europe it was the worst since meteorological record-keeping began, and whether the, (for some, the all too literal) washout was the result of El Nino, a recalcitrant jet stream, global warming or just sod’s law, it was a summer we should all remember to try and forget.

So, instead of looking back, let’s look forward to autumn hopefully being a quiet and warm season of mist and mellow fruitfulness. And, to help ease you into fall, here’s the latest Evolve newsletter. There have been a number of changes here since our last edition and I take great pleasure in sharing them with you.

To begin with, Cerillion is reaching out to the estimated 300million+ global Spanish speakers by launching a Spanish language version of our website. We have also enhanced our internet presence to include RSS feeds, providing an alternative method of receiving the latest company news direct to your computer.

Elsewhere in this edition of Evolve, our main feature is on the issue of Revenue Assurance.

Lots of people don’t know that the history of what we now call “revenue assurance” activities within telecoms long predates the emergence of the term. Although it is a broad, umbrella phrase, revenue assurance in telecoms actually refers to a niche sector that improves profits, revenues and cash flows without influencing demand.

Practically speaking, revenue assurance is a method of dealing with operational underperformance where that is attributable to order management, billing and revenue collection matters. After all, seemingly small errors propagating through a system can have a disproportionately large impact on revenues and on costs.

To put it metaphorically, revenue leakage is like water dripping from a pipe, where the lost water symbolises revenues or cash flows. Revenue assurance acts like an intelligent plug that stems the flow either before it happens or at the instant that it occurs, and ideally stops it happening again.

At the moment there is no professional body, no accredited qualifications, and no academic research to help form an industry consensus about the purpose or methods of revenue assurance. Things might, and hopefully will change but as things stand the main challenge for revenue assurance teams in the telecoms sectors is to obtain accurate and timely information to quantify and to reduce revenue leakage. It’s important and there’s a great deal of money at stake.

Complementing our feature article, we’re also conducting a Reader Poll – asking you to tell us about the last time you contacted your telecoms provider about billing errors. Your participation will be very welcome – and don’t forget to read the next edition of Evolve to see the results.

And last, but by no means least, we bring you news of another win for Cerillion in Africa. Following our earlier successes in Nigeria, Guinea and The Gambia, we have added Mattel in Mauritania to our growing customer base in the region, delivering our pre-integrated CRM & Billing solution plus a complete Interconnect system.

And until next time, stay warm.

Revenue Assurance – The Integration Challenge

Over the last three or four years, Revenue Assurance has become one of the most fashionable topics in the telecoms industry. It has attracted a whole new wave of companies offering revenue assurance products, solutions and services, and with it the eco-system of conferences and general industry hype that you might expect.

Revenue assurance is now rightly seen by communications services providers (CSPs) as a key part of their strategic armoury – by reducing revenue loss, revenue assurance enhances profitability and enables better use of existing network and system resources, improving Return on Investment (RoI) and often reducing capital expenditure.

We carried out a survey earlier this year which identified revenue assurance as one of the three most critical business issues facing CSPs today, with 15 percent of respondents identifying it as their most urgent concern. This is not surprising when you consider the scale of the problem. Latest estimates suggest that as much as 10 percent of provider revenue is lost due to leakages.

In today’s competitive telecoms environment, this situation is unacceptable. And to develop competitive edge, CSPs need to ensure they are tackling the problem aggressively. Considering the scale of the losses that many incur, it is vital that they identify the causes, quantify their magnitude and then set about addressing these leakages in a holistic manner.

Tackling the Integration Issue

One of the most significant causes of revenue leakage is poor systems integration. Unfortunately, this is often a characteristic of the popular best-of-breed approach to the development of business support systems. With this model, systems integrators are often tasked with implementing and integrating multiple heterogeneous systems to build a complete solution. Invariably, they run into two key problems which make effective integration difficult.

First, they typically discover incompatibilities between data models used in best-of-breed solutions. Synchronising data across different applications is a complicated business because of the need to align different ways of identifying the subscriber, service and orders. However, if these mappings are not carried out properly, the CSP will struggle to trace orders across the systems.

Second, the systems integrator may not have an in-depth understanding of all the best-of-breed components. Consequently, it may integrate the systems inefficiently and introduce data replication or unnecessary layers of complexity, all of which can result in holes where revenue leakage may occur.

Process Issues

Poor integration typically also results in a host of process problems. It may, for example, lead to the same data being entered in multiple systems, or result in incompatible configuration between solution components. The consequence of this may be, for example, rating or prepaid charging errors - essentially applying an incorrect price to a customer record, or not being able to price the record at all. These errors will result in usage that cannot be billed for, and ultimately revenue leakage.

Incomplete or incorrect usage data is another primary cause of leakage. This problem typically occurs when network switches produce erroneous information that prevents identification of the type of service used by a customer or the customer using that service. In either case, the result is an inability to bill for usage incurred.

Poorly integrated systems with no common workflow can also lead to delays in billing. Manual set-up processes for new services may cause a delay of several days before the CSP can start invoicing the customer, inevitably resulting in revenue loss. In contrast, a fully automated process with flow-through provisioning enables the CSP to begin billing for service use immediately.

Invoicing system errors are another potential issue. Traditionally, this problem is thought to be primarily one of under-billing, however over-billing can be just as significant. This typically occurs when a service is terminated but the CSP continues to bill for it, in error.

It will often result in costly customer disputes and the requirement to generate refunds or provide credit as a goodwill gesture. Valuable time and resource may be required to fix the process and additional revenue leakage can occur indirectly as a result of growing customer dissatisfaction and increased rates of churn.

Launching new products and decommissioning old ones are two other areas where a badly coordinated system can cause further revenue assurance problems. Businesses often leak money both by providing incorrect tariffs for new services and by not taking older, more costly products out of service quickly enough.

Reactive Versus Proactive

In a best-of-breed solution, CSPs often react to revenue leaks by putting additional systems and checks in place. In essence, this is a ‘sticking plaster’ approach to plugging system gaps. Rather than dealing with problems at source, it focuses on putting processes in place which track where revenues are being lost and then try to correct these errors retrospectively.

As a result, problems can stay hidden for some time and their source can remain obscure. CSPs may initially believe that they have billing issues or that they are suffering from credit management problems. In fact, when they carry out thorough ‘root cause analysis’, they often discover that their problem is order management related.

If the system is not proactively managed, a mistake made in this initial order process will not be discovered for a month or six weeks, when the customer receives their first bill and finds they have been placed on the wrong tariff or are being billed for a service they never received, for example.

Ironically, by implementing additional systems for revenue assurance, there is also a danger of creating more leaks in the revenue chain. Rolling out new products and services means updating and configuring more systems, slowing down time-to-market and introducing more potential points of failure.

In contrast, the best end-to-end pre-integrated solution suites reassure CSPs that all elements within the product suite will work together in harmony. The holistic approach of these systems is clearly in line with CSPs’ increasing desire to address and monitor the whole lifecycle from initial order placement through to billing and cash collection.

These solutions also enable CSPs to be much more proactive. Rather than merely reacting to problems as they occur, their seamless connectivity helps to prevent ‘gaps’ in the system appearing in the first place. In other words, they treat the root cause of the problem rather than the symptoms.

The tight integration of these solutions helps eliminate data replication and synchronisation problems, and allows key business information to be proactively tracked, detailed reports to be generated for each process, revenue leakages quickly identified and revenue losses minimised.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that ever greater numbers of CSPs see end-to-end pre-integrated solution suites as a vital weapon in their ongoing battle to achieve genuine revenue assurance.

Dominic Smith
Dominic.Smith@cerillion.com

MATTEL chooses Cerillion for Billing and Interconnect Solutions in Mauritania

London, 18 July 2007 – Convergent billing specialist, Cerillion Technologies, today announced the completed implementation of its CRM and Billing solution for MATTEL, a GSM network operator in Mauritania, West Africa. Based on the CRM Plus, Revenue Manager, Mediator, Output Streamer and Information Manager products in the Cerillion suite, the new system provides a complete end-to-end solution for MATTEL’s business support systems needs.

In addition, Cerillion also implemented their Interconnect Manager product to support billing, settlement and least cost routing for all MATTEL’s interconnect agreements.

“Building on our earlier success in nearby Guinea and The Gambia, we are delighted to add MATTEL to our growing African customer base” commented Cerillion’s CEO, Louis Hall.

Spanish Website and new RSS Feeds

The Cerillion website has recently gone through some enhancements making it more accessible to a global audience and now easier than ever to stay up to date on the latest developments at Cerillion.

As part of our expansion into Latin America, we have launched the Spanish language version of our website. At the moment a subset of the main site content is available in Spanish, however this will be expanded in the coming months. By clicking on the British or Spanish flags in the site header or footer it is easy to switch between languages and access information in the language of your choosing. Alternatively, if Spanish is your preferred language, then simply bookmark www.cerillion.com/es in your favourites.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has now become a mainstream method of pushing new web content to subscribed users, making it an ideal method for distributing company news. Consequently we have integrated our own RSS feeds directly into www.cerillion.com, allowing delivery of the latest company information straight to your favourite RSS reader.

Look out for the RSS icon on the website header, and also under News & Events, where you are able to subscribe to Press Releases and Evolve using RSS or email. If you find the RSS feed becomes your preferred method of receiving Cerillion updates, then let us know and we can remove you from our email distribution list(s).