“ QoS & Revenue Assurance: from post-event (post-mortem) analysis
to real-time business improvement “
Michel Leber
Deputy Marketing Director, Strategy
STELEUS
For years, rapid growth of revenue has prevented Telecom Operators from combating revenue
leakage, and very often cost has increased in parallel to revenue. The telecom collapse has led
Operators to low margin operation. Access to capital has become limited, along with the need to
reduce operational costs.
Revenue leakage is thought to represent between 3 to 12% of revenue. Quotations from analysts,
reactions on the stock market, ARPU decrease, competition differentiation, churn, pressure from
shareholders have brought CFOs into troubles. Today, Revenue Assurance is a key issue i.e.
identifying and reducing the main leakage sources are needed steps for survival. Poor processes
and procedures, billing errors, fraud are recognized by several research analysis to be the main
loss causes. But there are many others. Because of a lack of easy access and correlation of
multiple critical data, many operators were not able to have a clear idea of their revenue leakage.
From order management to service activation and through the entire traffic management and
billing process, organizations became aware of the need to handle a cross-cultural end-to-end
business process improvement. Thinking in term of Return of Investment per single activity is not
enough any more. Everybody now agrees that benefits come from improving a global process, not
just adding a new feature to a single activity. The work of the TeleManagement Forum, which
involves the entire Telecom Industry, has greatly contributed to formalize the processes and
actions to be carried out.
The challenge consists in moving from post-event analysis made through audits with data from old
legacy systems, to real-time management with the right data collections and generation of on-line
executive dashboards based on key KPIs & KQIs.
Increased complexity in networks, value chains and business models will bring additional
challenges to QoS & Revenue Assurance teams. Accuracy, completeness and timeliness of data
is required…Real-time is mandatory: post-mortem analysis has only little benefit.
The world has changed a lot over the last two years. The whole telecom industry has changed too.
SLAs become ubiquitous. ROI via process improvement is King. And probably for a long time to
come.