Revenue Management

Managing revenue intra- and inter-service provider includes billing, rating and revenue assurance. The current TM Forum view of Revenue Management involves extensions to eTOM, a Billing Process Benchmarking annual survey, Revenue Assurance and other collaborative projects to further the use of best practices and standards in Revenue Management.

Charging
While charging has historically been a static function, convergence around prepaid and postpaid technologies and the emergence of real-time services have transformed the charging function into a more dynamic tool for service creation and enablement.
Convergent Billing
Fraud Management
Technology developments have led to a new level of sophistication in fraudulent activity, driving the need for next-generation fraud management solutions.
Interconnect Billing
Interconnect billing is the settlements made between service providers for transporting each other's traffic, including content services.
Margin Management
Margin management enables CSPs to gauge the overall profitability of their network, based on factors such as routing costs, network buildout costs and customer profitability
Mediation
Mediation systems collect usage data from network elements--both PSTN-based and NGN-based--and converts it for delivery to upstream OSS and billing systems.
Payments Management
Payment management refers to the range of billing activities, including retail billing, interconnect billing, content billing and bill dispute management.
Profitability Management
Not every customer is a profitable one; in fact, some subscribers may actually be an expense to their service provider. Profitability management solutions enable CSPs to identify a customer's relative profitability in order to determine how that customer should be handled, what product and services he should be offered, or whether he should simply be encouraged to churn away.
Rating
The rating system collects mediated usage data and applies appropriate rates to each transation.
Revenue Assurance
As telecom networks become increasingly complex, the opportunity for revenue leakage has increased. This has created the need for revenue assurance tools and process improvements to identify and correct those revenue "holes."
Value Chain Management
Today's communication services include a variety of players, from the content and application provider to the service provider to the network operator. Value chain management refers to the end-to-end oversight of all of these players.