“Revenue Assurance spans across OSS and BSS because it requires a holistic view of the operator’s environment to encompass both OSS systems such as network management and BSS systems such as the billing and CRM systems. We saw a real need to create an industry standard and model for the way operators deal with RA. It was our service provider members that encourage us to take on the challenge and they have stepped up to support the technical work the Revenue Assurance team is doing.” Martin Creaner, TM Forum President & CTO

Revenue leakage is often considered a hidden and uncontrolled cost of doing business in the telecom industry. Reasons for revenue loss include, but are not limited to network provisioning, mediation and CDR errors, billing and interconnect inconsistencies, loss of data and corrupted files, fragmented support systems, incoherent databases, and manual or ill defined business processes. According to various Revenue Assurance (RA) research reports, the degree of exposure lies in the range of 3% to 15% of the Communications Service Providers’ (CSP) gross revenue depending on factors such as networks and services type, geography, carrier type, and Revenue Assurance maturity level.

Revenue Assurance is a well-known challenge in the Telecommunications sector, mainly rooted in the Telephony world as a set of techniques and methodologies to identify and fix revenue leakages and/or prevent or detect errors resulting in unbilled or uncollected revenues of the CSP. Today’s accelerated growth in the data, IP and real-time services market introduces additional complexity and exposure for RA due to dynamically evolving technologies, continuous demand for new services, more complex business processes, new value chains, additional external partnerships, new business models and an every increasing and more complicated operational and business systems infrastructure.

The above factors, coupled with the tumultuous economic climate that started with the slowdown in 2001 and the revitalization in 2004-5 and the current regulatory environment, provide evidence and compelling need for RA in more and more CSPs. This need, in turn, together with the acknowledgement of the strategic significance of RA for CSPs, resulted in the formation of organizational units to ensure the accuracy of financial reporting and revenue recognition. Given increased regulatory and competitive pressure and in order to remain competitive and profitable, CSPs are continuingly restructuring their organizations according to new business targets and priorities. These structural change and the response to market conditions suggest the benefits of the acceptance of a holistic RA process to optimize the business process, the usage of existing assets, the data integrity and as a result - maximizing revenues and in parallel - reducing costs and increase profitability.