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By
Tim Young
This issue is based around the central theme of standards in the telecommunications space. One way in which standards manifest themselves is within benchmarking studies that track key performance indicators (KPIs) within a given industry.
Recently, the results of just such a study were announced based on an initiative that emerged from within the revenue assurance working group in the TMForum. We took some time to speak to a few individuals intimately involved with the benchmarking study: Morisso Taieb, the Risk, Revenue Assurance & Carrier Relations Manager with Bezeq; Dr. Gadi Solotorevsky, Chief Scientist of cVidya and a member of the TMForum Advisory board; and Assaf Landau, Product Marketing Director with cVidya. Here's what they had to say.
Pipeline: Our issue this month is about standards and why they're important. Along those lines, why is benchmarking in the revenue assurance space important?
Dr. Solotorevsky: From what we've learned in our work with the TMForum on revenue assurance, about three or four years ago, there was a complete lack of standards. Nobody knew what revenue assurance was supposed to do or how it was supposed to do it. We got, from several operators, this request: "Tell us what to measure and how to measure it." It started by building a standard set of KPIs. The primary idea was to develop industry standards and have each operator use them internally. We were surprised because we didn't believe that people would be willing to show information about revenue assurance, even if it was done with a level of security. Several telecoms came to us and said, "Okay, now we have a sense of what to measure and how to measure it, but we want to know how well we're doing." That brought about benchmarking.
Pipeline: Morisso, from a service provider perspective, do you agree with Gadi, that SPs are craving a standard set of KPIs?
Morisso Taieb: I completely agree with what Gadi has said, but benchmarking gave us more than KPIs. At the beginning of the revenue assurance process, what we're doing is bringing a lot of money home. All of our reports to the management are about how much money we bring back. Still, we didn't know where we were going. Making money doesn't mean you're getting better. You can bring home money and still have bad processes. What we had to do was make a
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From what we've learned in our work with the TMForum on revenue assurance, about three or four years ago, there was a complete lack of standards. |
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judgment as to the quality of our revenue assurance. If you recover a million dollars, is that with 90% of the losses or is that 10% of the losses? Where are you now, and where are you going?
Let's say I find one million dollars potential loss, and am able to bring 700K back. Before, I wasn't checking for the actual money recovered, I was simply running after potential loss rather than actual recovery. Something that the benchmark process gave us, also, is the ability to see how fast we can get that money back. We're depending on other departments in the company, and they have other priorities. We actually can find leakages, leakages, leakages, but nobody moves, so nobody brings the money back. We were able to explain this to the company. At a board meeting last month, one of the members asked us, "You have five people in your department. Do you want ten people? If you're currently bringing in six million shekels a month, what would happen if I doubled your staff?" For the first time, we were able to prove to them that the limit was not the capability of the revenue assurance team, but that what we need is to get the other supporting departments to actually bring the money back. We can find the leakages, but that isn't instantly bringing the money back.
Pipeline: What was the benefit of approaching this project through the TMForum, rather than cVidya approaching this project individually?
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