Revenue Assurance

Revenue Assurance

Our revenue assurance solution is designed to process large volumes of detailed records and deliver new insight into revenue data by taking advantage of data warehouse appliance technology. This data warehouse appliance technology captures, loads, and enriches data for querying at exponentially faster speeds. Additionally, our revenue assurance solution consolidates all types of usage data from all types of networks with customer and product information for a centralized view of your business.

The power of our Revenue Assurance solution lies in its flexible technical architecture, which features:

• Industry-leading hardware – At the core of the solution are data warehouse appliances which provide 50X-1,000X query performance gains over traditional database solutions
• Exceptional scalability – We offer a scalable solution that will fit your needs and grow over time
• Online archiving – keep your less recent information readily accessible for analysis without slowing query responses on current data
• Intuitive analysis and reporting tools – We utilize web-based tools from Business Objects to let you tailor outputs to your business requirements

The days of relying on summarized data or samples for revenue assurance studies are over. Today’s data warehouse appliance technology can load, enrich, and match billions of records in a few hours.

Data warehouse appliances use parallel processing techniques to deliver the following benefits:

• 50-1000X performance gains over existing solutions
• Open, standard access for BI, ETL and other tools
• More than 1 billion CDRs loaded and enriched in an hour
• More than 500 million CDRs scanned/minute

All of this allows us to provide you with unprecedented insight into every element of every CDR and EDR to help you identify revenue leakage and spotlight potential fraud.

Identify Revenue Leakage
Through switch-to-bill reconciliation, our revenue assurance solution allows you to identify revenue leakage. Switch-to-bill reconciliation allows you the ability to:

• Track the life of every network event from the switch to inclusion on a bill
• Ensure that usage is accurately processed from initialization point until it is reflected on customer bills
• Account for every event

The Switch-to-Bill Process

At any step along this process there is potential for revenue leakage. Here are just a few of the possibilities:

Collection - At the collection stage a call detail record (CDR) may not be produced by the switch, local storage failure at the switch could cause a loss of CDRs, and inaccuracies in the network configuration could lead to loss of traffic or invalid traffic.

Mediation – At the mediation stage data may be lost during the file transfer between the switch and mediation, the duration of the call could be incorrectly recorded due to rounding rules, daylight savings time, etc., events could be incorrectly identified as duplicates, and suspense files could build up, age, and overflow.

Rating – At the rating stage stale or inaccurate reference data could be in the rating system, non-usage charges may have been entered incorrectly in the billing system, and incorrect international country zones may have been assigned.

Billing – At the billing stage stale or inaccurate reference data in the billing system could lead to errors in contract discounts, customer features, or bundle allowances, a bill could fail to be produced, or the bill could be lost in transmission to an outsourced biller.

Spotlight Potential Fraud
The increased visibility into your revenue chain provided by our revenue assurance solution can provide you with early identification of traffic pumping, arbitrage situations, and other fraudulent behavior. Our solution can help you uncover missing or incomplete CDR and EDR to pinpoint costly phantom traffic, analyze cost volumes to identify arbitrage scenarios, and detect suspicious service utilization or traffic patterns. 

Potential fraud can be detected by profiling your customers outbound usage patterns (call counts and call durations). This helps you to identify anomalous or unexpected behaviors. Additionally, our revenue assurance solution can be used to:

• Identify “black routes” operating on your network
• Identify suspicious inbound & outbound usage patterns
• Identify where you are exposed to arbitrage
• Correlate inbound & outbound call records

Reciprocal Compensation
Understanding the cost, revenue, and margins associated with your reciprocal compensation agreements can help you determine if these agreements are financially sound. Our revenue assurance solutions can provide you with the advanced reporting capabilities to do just that type of analysis. Additionally, we can provide you with a detailed understanding of the viability of your existing bill and keep relationships. 

By capturing all local and long distance usage data, enriching that data with industry reference data, and applying proprietary business rules, we can help you:

• Determine the true jurisdiction of your local calls
• Apply rates by provider to your Intra-LATA or Intra-MTA calls
• Generate EMI files for processing through your billing system
• Understand the cost, revenue, and margin related to your recip comp agreements
• Analyze the viability of your bill and keep relationships