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post-pay and complex price-plans in this dynamic world in which "each transaction is unique."
Supporting all this is a SOA-based billing environment that separates the billing process (or business logic) from the billing functions. In Henk's world, systems will evolve to enable cooperation with multiple partners where "no single company owns every link in the value chain." This version of the future sounds much more likely, in my view.
Keep All of the Money
Another well attended conference track focused on Revenue Assurance. With margins growing ever slimmer, attention on Leakage, Fraud, and Bad Debt remain hot topics. Typically, RA programs tend to be cyclical: in favor one year and budgets cut the next. According to Bahear Shankiti of Zain in Kuwait, this might be because the RA teams fail to integrate themselves into the day to day business. She took an entirely different approach and had some very positive results to report. Zain has tightly connected the Revenue Assurance program to their new service launch program. This rather novel approach enables the RA team to work from the initial concept stage with the Marketing group to identify the likely areas of risk. The service description can either be modified (easily at this early stage) to minimize risk, or the RA program can be tuned and ready to manage the new service when launched. Cross company collaboration is another critical success factor. By working closely with each department, the RA team is able to benefit from each group's expertise, improve its controls and business rules, and deliver better results with each iteration. Ms. Shantiki provided more advice for RA team leaders who would like to be seen as valued members of the organization: When anomalies are found, don't just report on them - go around and fix the problem.
Other great advice included from this track included:
- Get every group involved in User Acceptance Testing. For example, make sure that Finance, Accounting and Marketing all have a chance to test the system for the results they expect, in addition to the usual "users" Network Operations, Customer Service, and Billing
Test each process from end-to-end and from many different expert perspectives to stop leaks before they start.
- The ever popular, simple, and still overlooked: Always look in your Suspense Bucket!
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When competitors complain to the regulator, you know you've made an impact. |
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- Monitor your content partners closely to ensure that they don't "spam" the system, generating lots of transactions to make it appear that the service is more successful than it actually is. This raised a rather frightening specter of a new kind of fraud: content partners who not only try to beef up their numbers, but bill you for their fake usage too!
This made the presentation by Andy Harrower, Head of Licensing at MCSP-PRS (the alliance of the UK Mechanical Copyright Protection Society and the Performing Rights Society) even more important. As telecom operators increasingly look to content to boost revenues and hopefully margins, they need to build lasting and mutually beneficial relationships with partners who own and manage the content their customers want to buy.
Andy provided a timely and highly relevant overview of the intricacies of copyright, royalties and licenses related to recorded material distribution over carrier networks: downloads, streaming, or web casting. To handle the special requirements of online distribution, the industry needs to create new licensing models and Andy provided examples of these licenses, including arrangements for accounting, usage reporting and audit. Finally he provided a brief account of current developments in pan-European licensing arrangements.
Convergence: Here and Now
Sabri al Yahya of Etisalat gave the first presentation of the convergence stream, with an account of a converged solution for prepay/postpay mobile voice/data in Egypt. Converged billing was fundamental to Etisalat's aggressive entry strategy to enter the Egyptian market. Although Sabri mentioned a number of business drivers that influenced the decision to adopt a converged solution, clearly the big payoff came from the ability to implement a wide range of imaginative marketing programs to grab attention, and therefore market share.
The presentation by Rupert Berger of Telekom Austria could hardly be more different. A long-established incumbent, exclusively post-pay, with a converged billing objective to provide a single invoice for fixed voice and broadband, mobile voice and broadband, and IP-TV. Integrating the rated billing streams from five existing systems took
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