With those kind of losses in this kind of market, it's no surprise several software and consulting firms are moving to capitalize on this opportunity.
Connexn Technologies, already a player in this arena for nearly 10 years, has acquired Telecomms Consultancy & Solutions Ltd. (TCS) in an effort to expand its product line in the revenue assurance space. Details of the transaction by the two privately owned companies were not disclosed.
TCS, founded in 1999 by principals from British Telecom plc, built a broad set of applications addressing revenue assurance and had 17 customers in South America, Africa, Asia and Western Europe.
TCS brings the usage data piece of the equation to the table, while Connexn has traditionally focused on the service activation aspect of revenue assurance. "So we've put those two pieces together, with a little spilling over into the billing part of the pie," says Gary Ross, vice president of product management with Connexn. "So we [now] address 50 percent of revenue leakage issues."
Connexn's existing revenue assurance solution would, for example, identify cases where DSL or another service is being provided for free to a particular customer because it was never set up correctly in the billing system.
The usage side of revenue leakage, meanwhile, typically has to do with an interface or a network element rather than a customer, explains Ross. For example, he says, an interexchange carrier trunk group might have been set up in a switch as a noncharge group, so it isn't generating access billing records. Another example of where usage-based revenue leakage might occur is if mediation equipment that collects network element records has a rule to drop a certain type of [call detail record] because that record is not a billable record. "Because of that rule, which is set up incorrectly, international calls from a company to France would be dropped, so there could be a whole region of France to which calls were free." TCS software would pick that up, he says.
TCS does that by looking for red flags such as discrepancies between minutes of usage, numbers of records being generated off network and those being collected by the mediation system and sent to the billing system. Red flags on the recurring charge side often would come up during Connexn's customer value assessment, during which the company takes a sample of one of the service provider's markets. "If we looked at 50,000 DSL lines and found 2 percent were provided free, we would project numbers across [the service provider's entire customer] base, so the service provider would know the size of the problem."
Randy Browning, partner with Pricewater-houseCoopers, says provisioning is one of the areas in which service providers are experiencing the greatest revenue leakage. That's because the information service providers have about their lines and network elements is often out of synch with carrier billing systems. Browning also has seen significant revenue leakage in cases where rate tables are incorrectly set up or not updated, creating underbilling errors.
PricewaterhouseCoopers helped a U.S. service provider capture revenue in excess of $45 million, says Browning. A key part of that effort was reviewing trunk streams at the switch and finding local private line circuits that were not properly provisioning and billed, he says. Browning's book about revenue leakage, "To The Max: Revenue Maximization, Capturing the Opportunity Within," will be published March 3.
John Caddell, vice president of marketing and business development at EUR Systems, which offers network operators licensed and outsourced solutions including end user billing, Web-enabled services and customer care, did some revenue-assurance work in 2001 and 2002 for Ionex Telecom, a Dallas-based CLEC/ICP. Ionex had acquired another company and inherited its systems, processes and people as a result, and many of those people ended up leaving, says Caddell. So Ionex had a bumpy transition in integrating the new company, he says. One of the big problems was that a lot of the new customers obtained through the deal couldn't be rated, he says, "so they asked us to help and we put a couple people on their team to help do some root cause analysis." EUR Systems found some customer information was entered incorrectly into the system when they initially were provisioned, so the billing system couldn't tell if there was a certain product tied to the accounts. In other cases, EUR Systems found services available in the network were not reflected in the billing system and, in certain situations, network elements weren't reflected in the billing system. "We found north of $1 million of unbilled revenue," says Caddell. "They paid us $300,000 for our services."
One of the key challenges for service providers in controlling revenue leakage is getting raw data from network elements, like IP routers and voice switches, and then transforming it and confirming it so the billing system can use it, says Becky Dancy, executive director of product management at Daleen Technologies Inc. "Trying to get all that information from the network or wholesalers is a huge spaghetti bowl, so there's lots of potential to lose events," she says.
Daleen Technologies offers an application called Event Management. Based on business rules, it transforms, validates and enriches raw data coming from network elements so downstream systems can use it. It can enrich the data, Dancy explains, by automatically looking into other databases to check the accuracy of information.
Where Revenue Leakage Happens
Source: Connexn Technologies
Billing Concepts Provides a Proactive Approach to Revenue Assurance
While most revenue assurance tools focus on how to find and stop existing revenue leakage, a new tool from Billing Concepts Inc. helps service providers avoid the problem in the first place by allowing them to prescreen end users before offering service.
Called BC BETI (Billing Concepts Billing Essential Transaction Information), the tool helps providers determine the likelihood they will be compensated for services they provide. It does this by enabling service providers to check end user information against information in the Billing Concepts clearinghouse database as well as against historical ANI-level information, name and address information. (Billing Concepts is the largest third-party provider of LEC billing clearinghouse and information services to the communications industry.)
BC BETI customers can use the service to look for Return Code 50 Rejects, which are the records bounced back by the RBOCs for accounts to which they no longer provide service. Don Philbin, COO of Billing Concepts, says ATIS put the fallout from Return Code 50 Rejects at about $1 billion. BC BETI also can help carriers identify which telco owns a particular 10-digit number and help service providers flag potential customers that have employed bill blocking.
Three access methods, all XML based, are available for the BC BETI service, which Billing Concepts bills service providers for on a per transaction basis. Providers can request and receive information for an entire group of ANIs via the batch method. Single requests can be made via the application method, which allows for system-to-system processing of requests on a real-time basis. The interactive interface, also working in real-time, provides a Web-based user interface screen that can be used to query the BC BETI service.
Billing by the SIP
By Paula Bernier
It's a given that the voice over IP world is moving from H.323 to SIP. However, SIP, a technology that pushes calling features to endpoints such as phones and PCs, creates new billing challenges for the industry, explains Bill Pearce, vice president of sales at VoIP vendor Cirilium.
"Everybody's talking SIP. But, SIP deployment is not significant today, but that's changing," says Pearce of Cirilium, which sells VoIP infrastructure such as gateways, softswitches and related Power~Suite OSS/BSS tools. "As that develops, how will you bill for that? How does my centralized feature billing server handle that? Normally endpoints just pass [call detail records] to a server, but now does a SIP gateway pass that CDR? There's no clear direction on that. It's not hard, but it just needs to be decided."
Pearce says no industry group has yet tackled this issue.
