• Assure relevancy and high business impact
• Identify and measure what is ‘important to measure’ as opposed to measuring what is ‘easy to measure’.  This will ensure that the work is continually relevant to the target audience - the Service Providers.
• Clearly define and describe the metrics to a sufficient level of detail to ensure “apples to apples” and not “apples to oranges” comparisons between participants.
• Align with other benchmarks to prevent unnecessary duplicated effort for data collection.
• Maintain absolute confidentiality of all information submitted by the service providers participating in this activity.

Business Purpose of the BusMet Project
The TM Forum has identified Lean Operations as a major industry direction toward improving business efficiency and competitiveness.  Although many Service Providers want to move closer toward Lean Operations, they are blocked by questions such as:

• What does it mean to be a Lean Operator?
• Are we already Lean?
• If not, what goals should be set for improvement?
• How can a business case be built for investment?

To overcome this, service providers need information about current business performance and how that performance stacks up against the best in the industry. It requires meaningful business benchmarks that measure line of business performance in the context of key operating processes and fiscal measures.

What the BusMet Benchmarking Effort Provides
To deliver a holistic business oriented benchmarking facility, the Lean Measures framework is based on a balanced scorecard approach. To this end, three major domains are defined:

• Revenue and Margin – Provides a view of fiscal performance
• Customer Experience – Provides a view of the measures that impact the end-customer’s reaction to the service offering, and thus drives loyalty
• Operational Efficiency – Provides a view of cost and expense drivers

Under each of these domains a set of topics were defined for driving development of specific metrics. The following illustration presents the topics under each domain and is followed by an explanation of the different topics:

1. Margin/Revenue – Ratio of Margin to Revenue, measuring service offering profitability
2. OpEx/CapEx – Ratio of Operating expenses to Capital expenditures
3. OpEx/Revenue – Ratio of Operating expenses to Revenue

Customer Experience

1. Preferred Access – What are the channels and touch points available to customers, such as real person, web or store.
2. Customer Time Spent – Amount of time spent on a process or activity that impacts the customer, such as length of time a system could not be used as opposed to fault repair time.
3. Usability – Customer perception of the applicability of an item towards solving a need, such as how easy service was to set up or usefulness of documentation.
4. Accuracy – Measure of the correctness of a work item completed such as trouble resolution or billing resolution. 
5. Availability – Measure of the accessibility of a service.
6. Security – Future work item.
7. Pricing Flexibility – Preferred pricing mode such as prepaid card, flat rate, by usage and related pricing functions.  This is a future work item.

Operational Efficiency

1. Unit Cost – Direct process costs.
2. Time – Total process time, including waiting time, wrap up time, elapsed time. 
3. Rework – A measures of defects such as amount of errors and/or rework.
4. Simplicity – Ease of use and customer perception of the lack of complexity (future work item).
5. Process Flexibility & Automation - Ability to accommodate change and the speed of change (future work item).
6. Utilization – Efficiency of workforce and the use of resources.

These are applied in the context of a set of business processes. The processes addressed in this framework include:

• Customer Management (Call Center portion of CRM)
• Fulfillment
• Assurance
• Billing

The decomposition of domains according to process is applied to Customer Experience and Operational Efficiency. Revenue and Margin maintains an overall, general view of the service offering, and is not broken down further.

In some cases, it has been appropriate to position the metrics with a lower level of granularity. For this purpose, modifying details have been defined for certain metrics. An example of modifying detail is addressing specific customer segments, i.e. Consumer & SME vs. Large Enterprise & Government.

While the majority of the Lean Operations Metrics may be used for any service offering, the data comparisons are only meaningful within a particular service. For example average time to activation will be very different for the installation of a DSL line than for the activation of a new mobile user.  Therefore, data collection will be undertaken for each service separately.  A library of service offerings will be built up over time and many service providers may find themselves participating in data collection for several services. To minimize effort, any metrics that are truly common across multiple services will be identified and asked only once. The services in the first data collection are:

• DSL (Phase 1)
• IP Services (Phase 1)
• Mobile Services (Phase 2)