“ 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.