Floundering Financials? Check Revenue Assurance Model

Service providers struggling to figure out why their bottom line isn’t matching up to their sales numbers might have to look no further than their revenue assurance tools — if they have any, that is. According to a new survey conducted by the nonprofit TM Forum and vendor cVidya Networks, the lack of certain resources is the biggest contributor to floundering financials.

The Revenue Assurance Maturity Survey, released June 23, found that of the five factors considered — organization, people, influence, tools and process — “tools” lagged behind all others. And of the survey’s participating operators — wireline, mobile, ISPs and cable — wireline providers are the least advanced, while mobile carriers are the most. That’s because mobile operators tend to introduce new services and standards more quickly than their rivals, which means their rivals could learn a lot from them, too. And of the regions surveyed, Europe stood out as the most mature.

For the TM Forum, the answer lies in adopting the association’s Maturity Model.

“Once providers determine their own position in the model, they are to use the road map included in the model to identify the next steps for improvement,” said Gadi Solotorevsky, cVidya's chief scientist and leader of the Revenue Assurance team within the TM Forum.

To that end, providers in North America, the survey found, apparently need to do the most such determination. And accomplishing that takes work.

“The first goal of the model is for a company to be able to evaluate itself,” Solotorevsky told Billing & OSS World in 2006. Areas to analyze include network provisioning; mediation and CDR errors; billing and interconnect inconsistencies; data integrity; corrupted files; fragmented support systems; and manual or fuzzy businesses processes.

Next, providers can decide whether they need to overhaul their entire revenue assurance system, or just parts of it. Often, trying to fix problems within the whole organization can backfire, so experts recommend tackling one section at a time with the aim of turning a cost center into a profit center. Some operators say the TM Forum model has helped them do just that.

Successful revenue assurance strategy “should have a wide organizational coverage and the TM Forum maturity model enables us to analyze all organizational aspects,” said Alexander Nelles, who heads the back-office department at Vodafone Germany, one of the operators that took part in the survey. “The ability to compare our status to the industry average as appears in the survey helps us in defining our revenue assurance investment in the future.”

The TM Forum’s survey included 33 participants representing 26 countries with a subscriber base ranging from less than 500,000 to more than 10 million.