Mediation As The Basis For Service Provider Revenue Assurance

BY JONJIE SENA

In today's fiercely competitive telecommunications marketplace, communications service providers are struggling amid high debt loads, churn, and a baffling array of network usage record formats and types that can often lead to billing errors and revenue leaks. Usage levels are not growing at the rate that was anticipated when all that network build-out was financed over the past few years, and competition is squeezing billing rates downward.

To stay afloat, service providers need to increase revenue -- but how, under such tight circumstances? One solution is to extract more revenue from ongoing business. Service providers have turned to revenue assurance strategies for exactly this reason.

Revenue Assurance: What, Why, And Where
Revenue assurance in the telecommunications world refers to the processes that ensure all revenue associated with delivered services is billed, that the charges for services used are correct, and that costs associated with delivering the services are justified. It also includes attempts to recover service records that are otherwise non-billable due to errors, and the ability to dispute erroneous charges. When these items are not recovered and billed, the revenue assurance function needs to explain why.

There are a number of different ways to approach the revenue assurance process. In many cases, service providers use a revenue assurance system that relies on usage records derived from an existing operations support system (OSS). However, most OSSs receive only a subset of the usage data, or are interested in only certain types of data. For example, billing systems rarely care about unanswered calls or unsuccessful connection attempts. Thus, the capacity planning system may see five million calls per day, but the billing system may report only three million billable calls. These inconsistencies exist because the different systems are deployed to solve different and distinct accounting functions. At a higher level, however -- such as revenue assurance -- these inconsistencies can lead to missing, erroneous, or incomplete data.

Revenue assurance should be done as close to the network as possible. For this reason, the network's mediation system -- which collects data from the various network elements and facilitates communication and information exchanges between them and the downstream systems -- provides the ideal platform for this activity. In its role as the collector and dispatcher of usage information, the mediation platform is frequently the only system to see all the data that comes from the network.

By having a single logical platform responsible for all capture, validation, and routing of usage information, the mediation system performs an implicit revenue assurance function. Inconsistencies may be better understood and dealt with by keeping track of how much data comes from each network element, how much is sent to the different downstream systems, and how much is rejected due to errors. In addition, the mediation system is able to report the reason why the errors occurred.

Mediation-based revenue assurance is consistent with the philosophy that usage data from the network should be collected once and only once. This virtually eliminates errors of omission and duplication that may occur with multiple-source analyses, and allows for revenue assurance in real time (or near real time) because the analysis occurs "live," direct from the source. Mediation solutions that interface directly with the network are ideal for revenue assurance activities, as they allow for extended analysis and quality factors such as data validation, data repair, inter-carrier accounting, profiling and credit limit checks, as well as network performance management.

Revenue Assurance Processes
Data Validation
Central to the ability to perform revenue assurance is the ability to validate usage information by applying error checks against the data capture process, the file structure, the block structure, the record structure, and the field structure (both syntax and semantic).

Data validation ensures that the usage data is secured correctly, is not incorrectly duplicated, is formatted correctly, and is not corrupt. Bad data is one of the leading causes of revenue leakage, so detecting errors early in the process allows for it to be repaired before being submitted to the billing system or being rejected outright.

Data Repair
Repair of incorrect billing information should be performed before it is sent to the billing system. This eliminates delays, as repaired items may otherwise be delayed until the next billing cycle. Also, it reduces the bill processing cost for service providers who outsource their bill processing.

A good repair system allows both automatic and manual correction of data in a supervised manner to ensure data integrity, with full user audits.

Inter-Carrier Accounting
Inter-carrier accounting is a critical application of the revenue assurance function. Call detail records taken directly from the switches are analyzed for service type, direction, and jurisdiction, and the inter-connected carrier is identified and augmented into the detail record. If the record is for a transit call, then both the incoming and outgoing carriers are identified.

Wholesale rating can be performed for each call, and a dollar value associated with the transaction. Transit calls are rated from both directions and are summarized by time, service type, carrier, direction, and jurisdiction, and other dimensions as required. The summarized values represent the number of call attempts, call answers, conversation duration, seizure duration (both actual and rounded), and any other resource utilization metrics such as bytes, packets, etc.

This information is used to validate invoices from partners who terminate the carrier's traffic by comparing it with the totals generated by originating calls. Similarly, it can be used to verify the bills produced by the Carrier Access Billing System (CABS) by comparing it with the totals generated by the terminating traffic. Even if no money changes hands, this analysis is useful for calculating margins and determining whether or not a "bill-and-keep" agreement is fair.

Profiling And Credit Limit Checks
Customer profiling involves the rating and summarization of traffic generated by end users. By rating each call in real time and summarizing the results, metrics can be applied and value attributed at the customer level. This information is useful for identifying both top-tier and high-risk customers. At the very least, it allows the carrier to estimate its liability for any given customer. In addition, the real-time nature of the process drastically reduces the window for the carrier's liability -- normally only available after the billing cycle is complete.

While it is possible to profile down to the individual level, it is usually done for large (i.e., corporate) customers who have several sub-accounts and the potential for running up large balances.

Performance Management
The activities and processes that maintain a network at a level considered acceptable is called performance management. This process is considered a revenue assurance function because it can highlight network failures that affect revenue. It can also help identify underutilized facilities and services that can be exploited or diverted to where they are most likely to add revenue.

Conclusion
Revenue assurance is more than just checking data against lookup tables and inter-carrier records. Quality revenue assurance begins earlier than that -- with reliable single-source collection, data validation, and data repair. The best strategy is to ensure that every usable record is indeed used, and then to ensure the most revenue return on each record. Therefore, a mediation system is the best source of revenue assurance for communications service providers.

Jonjie Sena is director of product architecture, Convergent Mediation Technologies for ACE*COMM. ACE*COMM is a global leader in advanced Convergent Mediation products and Enterprise Telemanagement software applications. The company's solutions are employed in wired and wireless networks that deliver voice, data, mixed media and Internet communications.