July 2012

Bringing Strategic Planning & Value Engineering to Revenue Assurance

interview with Maged Fawzy

“If you are planning for one year, grow rice. If you are planning for 20 years, grow trees. If you are planning for centuries, grow men.”

-- Chinese Proverb

The Pyramids have lasted a few millennia, so it’s a safe bet that some great men — and engineers -were “grown” in Egypt when Ramses the Great walked this Earth around 1200 BCE.

But how about Revenue Assurance? Does an engineer belong in a 21st century revenue assurance department?

“Engineer, you say? We have plenty of accountants, MBAs, and customer care/billing pros on our team, but we’re kind of short on Engineers. . . ”

When it comes to having a deep seated understanding of systems, I think a certain humility is required of business majors, liberal arts graduates (like myself), and people with similar degrees.

For instance, what are the chances you can re-train an MBA to architect and plan the construction of a 50-story skyscraper? Think of the systems that need to be coordinated: design, construction, stress engineering, logistics, purchasing, architecture, HVAC, legal/regulatory, etc. It staggers the imagination. And yet, assuring tomorrow’s telecom services could certainly benefit from people with an engineering or architectural background.

While engineers are certainly rare in the RA business, I found one. His name is Maged Fawzy, a former Solutions Architect at a large telecom operator in Egypt. In our interview, he gives insights on how the revenue assurance practice needs to be improved, especially in terms of planning and continuous analysis of RA’s mission in light of today’s very fluid operator environment. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:

	Dan Baker: Maged, I was expecting to hear an Arabian accent, but instead you speak very natural American English as if you went to school in the States. Did you? And I’m curious how you landed in revenue assurance with a degree in telecom engineering.

Maged Fawzy: Actually I studied engineering in my home country of Egypt. The university program is very rigorous and is modeled after engineering schools in the U.S. As for my English, I had the good fortune of studying at an English school where all my teachers were American university graduates.

I wouldn‘t say revenue assurance is foreign to engineering. RA is a mixed-discipline of technology and risk assessment. Network knowledge is certainly needed in RA. When I worked in IT, my background allowed me to bring some scope and insights to other members of our team.

And now, as telecom engineering gets complicated with new disruptive technologies like LTE and WiMax, people are generally not familiar with some of the service risks of launching such networks.

	Tell me about your experience serving Middle Eastern operators. How do their operations differ from what you’d find in Europe?

There are wonderful growth opportunities in the Middle East, but their architecture is often flawed because the tendency is to buy, buy, and buy, then structure solutions alongside each other. In Egypt, most of the operators are simply doing vendor management. They offshore everything, so there’s not much in-house development.

However, given today’s economy, many of the operators are transitioning some of their department to in-house, especially in areas where it will have minimal impact on operations and achieve tangible cost reductions.

The staff expertise is very knowledgeable at the holding companies. For instance, Orascom [headquartered in Cairo] has top notch management. In terms of RA, they monitor and control several RA practices at a group level across Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia — even Canada.

	In your brief but busy career in RA, I know you have some thoughts on how revenue assurance departments can improve their game. What’s your idea?

I think the concept is to know your internal systems quite well and have an IT map. You also need to know your risk areas and have a sense of direction.

You need structure and flexibility at the same time.

Let me share with you a success story at an Egyptian mobile operator that called for RA software solutions. The project was in three phases: Phase 1 -- Network Traffic; Phase 2 -- Service & Subscriber Provisioning; and Phase 3 -- Roaming Provisioning.

Successful system integration was conducted during phase 1 and revenues were realized. But looking at the schedule I felt that Roaming was a high enough revenue risk area that it should be looked at sooner.

So we ran an ad hoc leakage analysis and spotted a $1 million leakage to recover from roaming revenue streams. To get that done, I proactively developed an in-house roaming tool to support the leakage quantification and impact analysis.

Armed with that data, we then made the case with Finance to proof-score the legitimacy of our findings and suggested initiatives to remedy the issue. In the end, we changed our long-term plan to make Roaming Revenue Risks our the next highest priority and went after that in phase 2.

This need to plan up front and then flexibly adapt is a cornerstone of RA services companies, like PwC, Ernst & Young, and KPMG, who do that analysis as part of their engagements.

So I feel that consultancy and risk assessment should be the primer of architecture and design before rushing off to buy a software solution or do systems integration.

	And what about revenue assurance software. How well do you feel operators are employing those tools?

Operators are seeing mixed results. A revenue assurance tool is usually great in the beginning. It finds buckets of dollars, but over time the costs add up as you maintain the software year over year. The problem comes when an operator brings in new technology like LTE or new business models. When that happens, things go crazy and RA software doesn‘t adapt well to the changes.

Now my opinion comes from being connected with several RA vendors. For example, a hardware solution is good at certain points. If you are launching something with a high level of service risk — such as the movement from 2G to 3G, or 3G to LTE network, you need to utilize very good hardware for network performance management & end-point bill verification.

But if you need a tool with a larger scope, then you need to investigate a WeDo, cVidya, Subex or similar solution. And the good thing these days is I’ve seen a lot of fine consulting expertise surrounding that kind of software.

	The RA software vendors feel they need to overstate their solution scope just to win the business. After all, they may have only a hazy idea of where and how their tool will actually be used by the operator. This is why they promote broad themes like “revenue intelligence”, “revenue operations center”, and “business assurance”.

Don‘t get me wrong. Some operators are succeeding at implanting full end-to-end controls on revenue streams across your horizontal systems. So it can certainly be done. Yet the state-of-art practice should not be “One Solution Fits All”.

If you buy a bigger solution than you currently need, you will probably still break even in terms of ROI. The problem is value degradation over time.

When change occurs, you often lost track of what’s happening across the horizontal activities that are aligned for business success.

So you need to hone in on the revenue process controls on top of change management and utilize the specific purpose you bought the solution for. Don‘t buy broad revenue assurance software: buy software to get a certain risk area covered.

I came up with a little analogy I call “Magnets and Needles” to communicate the interplay between manual processes, software, and assessments.

The concept of needles in a haystack is a familiar one. So imagine your B/OSS systems and processes are several haystacks in a barn, and the needles are the revenue leaks you hope to find.

Now as a small or immature operator, your RA solution is to use your historical knowledge to select the most likely haystacks, then manually look for needles. In this case, there’s no need to invest much in tools: you simply rely on your trained sense of where to look.

However, if you’re a large or high-volume operator, you need more help. You need to buy a magnet [software]. And after some initial training, your ability to find needles is usually a function of how good you are at using the magnet. Now if there are only a few needles to find, the investment obviously may not be worth it.

But what the RA department really needs is a direction: it needs a compass pointing towards quantified targets.

So to extend my analogy one step further, I’m sure from your school years you learned that if you put a magnet too close to a compass, it will give you a distorted reading. Likewise, buying software should not influence your RA decision-making. You need to employ a gyrocompass, the kind used on ships at sea, that’s powered by a gyroscope whose movement is not affected by outside influences.

And the gyrocompass is akin to an independent RA risk assessment by a consulting firm.

	Your analogy is a good one! So what’s your prescription, Maged? How can operators extend the useful life of the software they buy?

Operators need to move to something more sustainable. Better planning and continuous analysis of the current situation is what’s needed, but operators don‘t have the right practice to do that effectively.

For example, when they buy software, most carriers conduct a thorough product cost-benefit analysis and evaluate software vendors.

Trouble is, the software purchase analysis is treated as a one-and-done type of thing. Ironically, the same diligence used to select the software is not continued. So what happens? In future years, the whole purchasing cycle must to be repeated to either upgrade the current solution or replace it with something else.

Typically the software companies promise end-to-end controls over all your revenue streams. But how realistic is that claim if there’s no forward-looking plan or upfront risk assessment?

Here’s where the notion of “value engineering” becomes key. As it turns out, the value actually doesn‘t reside in software products or the business controls themselves. The value comes from empowering the people with a sustainable model. Software needs to fit in with the dynamics of your company and your high priority activities.

Think simple! RA departments need to identify risk areas, quantify and put forward a suitable RA solution. This could be a process or tools (hardware, soft / managed service solution) but above all it must proactively embed future risk mitigation. This is where Value Engineering adds a sustainability dimension to RA models.

One interesting diagramming method I like is FAST (Function Analysis System Technique), which grew out of planning during World War II. It’s a simple way to track a sustainable model of RA.

Click here for a high resolution PDF.

Actually you need three things: an upfront risk assessment, a forward looking roadmap plan, and a way to keep track or monitor the solutions‘ value over time. When you create your roadmap, you evaluate your risks and quantify things. I can say: “I will earn $10 million USD in areas X, Y, and Z. And accordingly to my plan, I estimate a number and a target over the next 2 years”. It’s a number and a target that you commit to.

So the secret to longer lifetime value is be selective about which tool you choose for which RA job you have. You need to tie your software/hardware purchases to your forward-looking plan. Conversely, the software vendors will naturally try to maximize their scope to cover as much of your RA footprint as they can.

The biggest source of anxiety, of course, is coping with changes to your environment. That’s extremely hard in revenue assurance. You need to be agile and understand which of the different tools are best for the particular task at hand.

If you need to have manual audits, you do it. In settlements and general ledger, you may need some kind of audit. If you look into event generation and CDRs and mediation, you may need an automated revenue assurance management.

At some points you may need service activation and configuration. For instance, if you are launching new technologies like LTE, you need some provisioning. You may need to have subscriber profiling.

It’s the coherence or data integrity of these platforms that is a big issue for RA. The customer may be activated on the network but billing is missing something. In that case, something on the network side is not coherent with billing. So system coherence and tracking changes are other aspects of sustainability.

Maged Fawzy

Maged Fawzy is a former Solutions Architect at a large telecom operator in Egypt and a consultant who’s been helping Middle East operators for the past few years in CRM, data warehousing, but mostly revenue assurance. The 29-year old professional is a top graduate of the Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transport in Alexandria. Maged recently left WeDo where he helped establish that company’s practice in the region. He’s now collaborating with his academic colleagues on RA best practices. Contact Maged via

Black Swan Solution Guides & Papers

Expanding the Scope of Revenue Assurance Beyond Switch-to-Bill’s Vision — Araxxe — How Araxxe’s end-to-end revenue assurance complements switch-to-bill RA through telescope RA (external and partner data) and microscope RA (high-definition analysis of complex services like bundling and digital services).
Lanck Telecom FMS: Voice Fraud Management as a Network Service on Demand — Lanck Telecom — A Guide to a new and unique on-demand network service enabling fraud-risky international voice traffic to be monitored (and either alerted or blocked) as that traffic is routed through a wholesaler on its way to its final destinations.
SHAKEN / STIR Calling Number Verification & Fraud Alerting — iconectiv — SHAKEN/STIR is the telecom industry’s first step toward reviving trust in business telephony — and has recently launched in the U.S. market. This Solution Guide features commentary from technology leaders at iconetiv, a firm heavily involved in the development of SHAKEN.
Getting Accurate, Up-to-the-Minute Phone Number Porting History & Carrier-of-Record Data to Verify Identity & Mitigate Account Takeovers — iconectiv — Learn about a recently approved risk intelligence service to receive authoritative and real-time notices of numbers being ported and changes to the carrier-of-record for specific telephone numbers.
The Value of an Authoritative Database of Global Telephone Numbers — iconectiv — Learn about an authoritative database of allocated numbers and special number ranges in every country of the world. The expert explains how this database adds value to any FMS or fraud analyst team.
The IPRN Database and its Use in IRSF & Wangiri Fraud Control — Yates Fraud Consulting — The IPRN Database is a powerful new tool for helping control IRSF and Wangiri frauds. The pioneer of the category explains the value and use of the IPRN Database in this 14-page Black Swan Solution Guide.
A Real-Time Cloud Service to Protect the Enterprise PBX from IRSF Fraud — Oculeus — Learn how a new cloud-based solution developed by Oculeus, any enterprise can protect its PBX from IRSF fraud for as little as $5 a month.
How Regulators can Lead the Fight Against International Bypass Fraud — LATRO Services — As a regulator in a country infected by SIM box fraud, what can you do to improve the situation? A white paper explains the steps you can and should you take — at the national government level — to better protect your country’s tax revenue, quality of communications, and national infrastructure.
Telecom Identity Fraud 2020: A 36-Expert Analysis Report from TRI — TRI — TRI releases a new research report on telecom identity fraud and security. Black Swan readers can download a free Executive Summary of the Report.
The 2021 State of Communications-Related Fraud, Identity Theft & Consumer Protection in the USA — iconectiv — This 49-page free Report on communications-related fraud analyzes the FTC’s annual Sentinel consumer fraud statistics and provides a sweeping view of trends and problem areas. It also gives a cross-industry view of the practices and systems that enable fraud control, identity verification, and security in our “zero trust” digital world.

cSwans of a Feather

LATRO’s Tips for Launching a Successful Revenue & Fraud Assurance Program for Mobile Money Operations in Developing Countries — interview with Don Reinhart — A company building mobile money RA/FM tools and managed services gives a concise, but detailed tutorial on how the Mobile Money Ecosystem works. Revenue assurance pros will get tips on what to look for in analytics/assurance tools, controls, and professional services.
PrologMobile’s Simple and Brilliant Plan to Save US MNOs Billions a Year in Recovered Phones & Retained Customers — interview with Seth Heine — An expert in the mobile phone reverse supply chain explains how MNOs — via a neutral third party information exchange — can recover their original phones on the used market and save huge sums in multi-year customer retention.
MTN Agility: Mastering Exponential Technologies in Revenue/Fraud Assurance and Beyond — interview with Danie Maritz & Tony Sani & Luke Taylor — An in-depth look at RAFM operations and innovation at the MTN Group. Topics discussed include RA/fraud control challenges, strategies, and MTN’s journey to exploit exponential tech (AI, robotics, and ML) in its RAFM program and support of internal non-telco businesses.
From Byzantine Software Contracts to Simple & Flexible RA Managed Services — interview with Philippe Orsini — Is the way B2B/enterprise software is sold and delivered today progressive — or is it Byzantine in the age of cloud? An expert lays out the case for managed services in RA and billing verification.
WeDo Hosts Revenue Assurance & Fraud Management Conference in Washington DC — by Dan Baker — Black Swan is pleased to announce what looks to be a first class revenue assurance and fraud management conference being put on by WeDo Technologies, on October 1st and 2nd in beautiful Washington DC.
Migrating systems or launching LTE next year? Don‘t forget transformation assurance & optimisation — by Efrat Nissimov — System transformations and network migrations are major revenue impacting events and they should raise a big red flag. Why? Because data integrity issues are bound to crop up as CSPs move vital data from a legacy system to something new. It’s time for transformation assurance.
Make Business Assurance Progress Every Day: How to Set Goals, Automate, and Energize Your Team — interview with Kathleen Romano — Business assurance (BA) skills have wide applicability outside the revenue assurance and fraud mangement domains. In this article, a telecom executive explains how she’s applying her BA skills in the Payments area. In addition to discussing the key operational challenges in Payments, the interview also provides keen insights on setting goals in business assurance, leading a team, and making critical decisions.
LTE Rollout: Make it a Smashing Success with Risk Assessment, Controls, and Marketing Offer Analytics — by Gadi Solotorevsky — LTE brings splendid new capabilities to mobile users. But like 2G and 3G deployments before, operators can only make money if they successfuly plan, coordinate, deploy fast, and pay attention to pricing plans and the customer experience. This article lays out a 3-phase tactical guide on how revenue analytics professionals can add value in LTE service risk assessment, controls, and marketing offer analytics.
Precision Clockworks: How Revenue Assurance Synchronizes with the Business at Swisscom — interview with Marco Pollinger — An expert revenue assurance department is one whose work dovetails well with the lines of businesses it supports. In this interview you’ll learn how Swisscom manages its revenue assurance function for maximum effect. The article discusses: the operator’s innovative RA organization, the screening and RA approval of new services, its pre-production bill audits, and its coordination with corporate risk management.
Bringing Strategic Planning & Value Engineering to Revenue Assurance — interview with Maged Fawzy — Engineering and architectural techniques have a role in revenue assurance. This interview with a top Egyptian RA consultant explains how continuous risk assessment and long range — yet flexible — RA planning can sharpen a carrier’s RA program and lead to better use of revenue assurance software and integration services.
Forensic Fossils: Is Your Revenue Assurance Shop Fit for Display at a Natural History Museum? — interview with Jim Marsh — Without the continuous guiding light of seasoned revenue assurance leaders, even the best teams of RA professionals, technology, and business processes can fossilize and lose their vitality.
Revenue Assurance: The Magical Market Cap Multiplier — by Van Howard & Curtis Mills — Many operators today consider revenue assurance yesterday’s opportunity. But this article shows why significant revenue and cost leakage can still go undetected, even in companies with dedicated RA departments. Also discussed are the benefits of a broader or more “forensic” approach to revenue assurance, an approach that boosts the bottom line regardless of the automated tools already in place.

Tokopedia, Indonesia’s E-Commerce King, Partners with 11 Million Merchants; Adopts Multi-Cloud to Drive Innovation — interview with Warren Aw & Ryan de Melo — Indonesia’s Tokopedia, founded in 2009, has grown to become one of world’s leading e-commerce players. Read about its success, technology direction, and multi-cloud connectivity adoption.
Bridge Alliance: Knocking Down Regional & Mobile Connectivity Barriers so Connected Car Markets Get Rolling in Asia — interview with Kwee Kchwee — The CEO of an Asian consortium of mobile operators explains how they help simplify and harmonize their members‘ operations in support of multi-national corporations. This integration is enabling two huge industries to come together in Asia: auto manufacturing and telco.
Epsilon’s Infiny NaaS Platform Brings Global Connection, Agility & Fast Provision for IoT, Clouds & Enterprises in Southeast Asia, China & Beyond — interview with Warren Aw — Network as a Service, powered by Software Defined Networks, are a faster, more agile, and more partner-friendly way of making data global connections. A leading NaaS provider explains the benefits for cloud apps, enterprise IT, and IoT.
PCCW Global: On Leveraging Global IoT Connectivity to Create Mission Critical Use Cases for Enterprises — interview with Craig Price — A leading wholesale executive explains the business challenges of the current global IoT scene as it spans many spheres: technical, political, marketing, and enterprise customer value creation.
Senet’s Cloud & Shared Gateways Drive LoRaWAN IoT Adoption for Enterprise Businesses, Smart Cities & Telecoms — interview with Bruce Chatterley — An IoT netowork pioneer explains how LoRaWAN tech fits in the larger IoT ecosystem. He gives use case examples, describes deployment restraints/costs, and shows how partnering, gateway sharing, and flexible deployment options are stimulating growth.
ARM Data Center Software’s Cloud-Based Network Inventory Links Network, Operations, Billing, Sales & CRM to One Database — interview with Joe McDermott & Frank McDermott — A firm offering a cloud-based network inventory system explains the virtues of: a single underlying database, flexible conversions, task-checking workflow, new software business models, views that identify stranded assets, and connecting to Microsoft’s cloud platform.
Pure Play NFV: Lessons Learned from Masergy’s Virtual Deployment for a Global Enterprise — interview with Prayson Pate — NFV is just getting off the ground, but one cloud provider to enterprises making a stir in virtual technology waters is Masergy. Here are lessons learned from Masergy’s recent global deployment using a NFV pure play software approach.
The Digital Enabler: A Charging, Self-Care & Marketing Platform at the Core of the Mobile Business — interview with Jennifer Kyriakakis — The digital enabler is a central platform that ties together charging, self-care, and marketing. The article explains why leading operators consider digital enablers pivotal to their digital strategies.
Delivering Service Assurance Excellence at a Reduced Operating Cost — interview with Gregg Hara — The great diversity and complexity of today’s networks make service assurance a big challenge. But advances in off-the-shelf software now permit the configuring and visualizing of services across multiple technologies on a modest operating budget.
Are Cloud-Based Call Centers the Next Hot Product for the SMB Market? — interview with Doron Dovrat — Quality customer service can improve a company’s corporate identity and drive business growth. But many SMBs are priced out of acquiring modern call center technology. This article explains the benefits of affordable and flexible cloud-based call centers.
Flexing the OSS & Network to Support the Digital Ecosystem — interview with Ken Dilbeck — The need for telecoms to support a broader digital ecosystem requires an enormous change to OSS infrastructures and the way networks are being managed. This interview sheds light on these challenges.
Crossing the Rubicon: Is it Time for Tier Ones to Move to a Real-Time Analytics BSS? — interview with Andy Tiller — Will tier one operators continue to maintain their quilt works of legacy and adjunct platforms — or will they radically transform their BSS architecture into a new system designed to address the new telecom era? An advocate for radical transformation discusses: real-time analytics, billing for enterprises, partnering mashups, and on-going transformation work at Telenor.
Paradigm Shift in OSS Software: Network Topology Views via Enterprise-Search — interview with Benedict Enweani — Enterprise-search is a wildly successful technology on the web, yet its influence has not yet rippled to the IT main stream. But now a large Middle Eastern operator has deployed a major service assurance application using enterprise-search. The interview discusses this multi-dimensional topology solution and compares it to traditional network inventory.
The Multi-Vendor MPLS: Enabling Tier 2 and 3 Telecoms to Offer World-Class Networks to SMBs — interview with Prabhu Ramachandran — MPLS is a networking technology that has caught fire in the last decade. Yet the complexity of MPLS has relegated to being mostly a large carrier solution. Now a developer of a multi-vendor MPLS solutions explains why the next wave of MPLS adoption will come from tier 2/3 carriers supporting SMB customers.
Enabling Telecoms & Utilities to Adapt to the Winds of Business Change — interview with Kirill Rechter — Billing is in the midst of momentous change. Its value is no longer just around delivering multi-play services or sophisticated rating. In this article you’ll learn how a billing/CRM supplier has adapted to the times by offering deeper value around the larger business issues of its telecom and utility clients.
Driving Customer Care Results & Cost Savings from Big Data Facts — interview with Brian Jurutka — Mobile broadband and today’s dizzying array of app and network technology present a big challenge to customer care. In fact, care agents have a hard time staying one step ahead of customers who call to report problems. But network analytics comes to the rescue with advanced mobile handset troubleshooting and an ability to put greater intelligence at the fingertips of highly trained reps.
Hadoop and M2M Meet Device and Network Management Systems — interview with Eric Wegner — Telecom big-data in networks is more than customer experience managment: it’s also about M2M plus network and element management systems. This interview discusses the explosion in machine-to-machine devices, the virtues and drawbacks of Hadoop, and the network impact of shrink-wrapped search.
The Data Center & Cloud Infrastructure Boom: Is Your Sales/Engineering Team Equipped to Win? — by Dan Baker — The build-out of enterprise clouds and data centers is a golden opportunity for systems integrators, carriers, and cloud providers. But the firms who win this business will have sales and engineering teams who can drive an effective and streamlined requirements-to-design-to-order process. This white paper points to a solution — a collaborative solution designs system — and explains 8 key capabilities of an ideal platform.
Big Data: Is it Ready for Prime Time in Customer Experience Management? — interview with Thomas Sutter — Customer experience management is one of the most challenging of OSS domains and some suppliers are touting “big data” solutions as the silver bullet for CEM upgrades and consolidation. This interview challenges the readiness of big data soluions to tackle OSS issues and deliver the cost savings. The article also provides advice on managing technology risks, software vendor partnering, and the strategies of different OSS suppliers.
Calculated Risk: The Race to Deliver the Next Generation of LTE Service Management — interview with Edoardo Rizzi — LTE and the emerging heterogeneous networks are likely to shake up the service management and customer experience management worlds. Learn about the many new network management challenges LTE presents, and how a small OSS software firm aims to beat the big established players to market with a bold new technology and strategy.
Decom Dilemma: Why Tearing Down Networks is Often Harder than Deploying Them — interview with Dan Hays — For every new 4G LTE and IP-based infrastructure deployed, there typically a legacy network that’s been rendered obsolete and needs to be decommissioned. This article takes you through the many complexities of network decom, such as facilities planning, site lease terminations, green-safe equipment disposal, and tax relief programs.
Migration Success or Migraine Headache: Why Upfront Planning is Key to Network Decom — interview with Ron Angner — Shutting down old networks and migrating customers to new ones is among the most challenging activities a network operators does today. This article provides advice on the many network issues surrounding migration and decommissioning. Topics discussed include inventory reconciliation, LEC/CLEC coordination, and protection of customers in the midst of projects that require great program management skills.
Navigating the Telecom Solutions Wilderness: Advice from Some Veteran Mountaineers — interview with Al Brisard — Telecom solutions vendors struggle mightily to position their solutions and figure out what to offer next in a market where there’s considerable product and service crossover. In this article, a veteran order management specialist firm lays out its strategy for mixing deep-bench functional expertise with process consulting, analytics, and custom API development.
Will Telecoms Sink Under the Weight of their Bloated and Out-of-Control Product Stacks? — interview with Simon Muderack — Telecoms pay daily for their lack of product integration as they constantly reinvent product wheels, lose customer intelligence, and waste time/money. This article makes the case of an enterprise product catalog. Drawing on central catalog cases at a few Tier 1 operators, the article explains the benefits: reducing billing and provisioning costs, promoting product reuse, and smoothing operations.
Virtual Operator Life: Enabling Multi-Level Resellers Through an Active Product Catalog — interview with Rob Hill — The value of product distribution via virtual operators is immense. They enable a carrier to sell to markets it cannot profitably serve directly. Yet the need for greater reseller flexibility in the bundling and pricing of increasingly complex IP and cloud services is now a major channel barrier. This article explains what’s behind an innovative product catalog solution that doubles as a service creation environment for resellers in multiple tiers.
Telecom Blocking & Tackling: Executing the Fundamentals of the Order-to-Bill Process — interview with Ron Angner — Just as football teams need to be good at the basics of blocking and tackling, telecoms need to excel at their own fundamental skillset: the order-to-cash process. In this article, a leading consulting firm explains its methodology for taking operators on the path towards order-to-cash excellence. Issues discussed include: provisioning intervals; standardization and simplicity; the transition from legacy to improved process; and the major role that industry metrics play.
Wireline Act IV, Scene II: Packaging Network & SaaS Services Together to Serve SMBs — by John Frame — As revenue from telephony services has steadily declined, fixed network operators have scrambled to support VoIP, enhanced IP services, and now cloud applications. This shift has also brought challenges to the provisioning software vendors who support the operators. In this interview, a leading supplier explains how it’s transforming from plain ol‘ OSS software provider to packager of on-net and SaaS solutions from an array of third party cloud providers.
Telecom Merger Juggling Act: How to Convert the Back Office and Keep Customers and Investors Happy at the Same Time — interview with Curtis Mills — Billing and OSS conversions as the result of a merger are a risky activity as evidenced by famous cases at Fairpoint and Hawaiian Telcom. This article offers advice on how to head off problems by monitoring key operations checkpoints, asking the right questions, and leading with a proven conversion methodology.
Is Order Management a Provisioning System or Your Best Salesperson? — by John Konczal — Order management as a differentiator is a very new concept to many CSP people, but it’s become a very real sales booster in many industries. Using electronics retailer BestBuy as an example, the article points to several innovations that can — and are — being applied by CSPs today. The article concludes with 8 key questions an operator should ask to measure advanced order management progress.
NEC Takes the Telecom Cloud from PowerPoint to Live Customers — interview with Shinya Kukita — In the cloud computing world, it’s a long road from technology success to telecom busness opportunity. But this story about how NEC and Telefonica are partnering to offer cloud services to small and medium enterprises shows the experience of early cloud adoption. Issues discussed in the article include: customer types, cloud application varieties, geographic region acceptance, and selling challenges.
Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model — interview with Scott Swartz — Facebook, cloud services, and Google Ads are examples of innovative business models that demand unique or non-standard billing techniques. The article shows how flexible, change-on-the-fly, and metadata-driven billing architectures are enabling CSPs to offer truly ground breaking services.
Real-Time Provisioning of SIM Cards: A Boon to GSM Operators — interview with Simo Isomaki — Software-controlled SIM card configuration is revolutionizing the activation of GSM phones. The article explains how dynamic SIM management decouples the selection of numbers/services and delivers new opportunities to market during the customer acquisition and intial provisoining phase.
A Cynic Converted: IN/Prepaid Platforms Are Now Pretty Cool — interview with Grant Lenahan — Service delivery platforms born in the IN era are often painted as inflexible and expensive to maintain. Learn how modern SDPs with protocol mediation, high availability, and flexible Service Creation Environments are delivering value for operators such as Brazil’s Oi.
Achieving Revenue Maximization in the Telecom Contact Center — interview with Robert Lamb — Optimizing the contact center offers one of the greatest returns on investment for a CSP. The director of AT&T’s contact center services business explains how telecoms can strike an “artful balance” between contact center investment and cost savings. The discussion draws from AT&T’s consulting with world class customers like Ford, Dell, Discover Financial, DISH Network, and General Motors.
Mobile Broadband: The Customer Service Assurance Challenge — interview with Michele Campriani — iPhone and Android traffic is surging but operators struggle with network congestion and dropping ARPUs. The answer? Direct resources and service quality measures to ensure VIPs are indeed getting the quality they expect. Using real-life examples that cut to the chase of technical complexities, this article explains the chief causes of service quality degradation and describes efficient ways to deal with the problem.
Telco-in-a-Box: Are Telecoms Back in the B/OSS Business? — interview with Jim Dunlap — Most telecoms have long since folded their merchant B/OSS software/services businesses. But now Cycle30, a subsidiary of Alaskan operator GCI, is offering a order-to-cash managed service for other operators and utilities. The article discusses the company’s unique business model and contrasts it with billing service bureau and licensed software approaches.
Bricks, Mortar & Well-Trained Reps Make a Comeback in Customer Management — interview with Scott Kohlman — Greater industry competition, service complexity, and employee turnover have raised the bar in the customer support. Indeed, complex services are putting an emphasis on quality care interactions in the store, on the web, and through the call center. In this article you’ll learn about innovations in CRM, multi-tabbed agent portals, call center agent training, customer treatment philosophies, and the impact of self-service.
21st Century Order Management: The Cross-Channel Sales Conversation — by John Konczal — Selling a mobile service is generally not a one-and-done transaction. It often involves several interactions — across the web, call center, store, and even kiosks. This article explains the power of a “cross-channel hub” which sits above all sales channels, interacts with them all, and allows a CSP to keep the sales conversation moving forward seamlessly.
Building a B/OSS Business Through Common Sense Customer Service — by David West — Delivering customer service excellence doesn‘t require mastering some secret technique. The premise of this article is that plain dealing with customers and employees is all that’s needed for a winning formula. The argument is spelling out in a simple 4 step methodology along with some practical examples.

Bringing Strategic Planning & Value Engineering to Revenue Assurance

Maged Fawzy

Black Swan Solution Guides & Papers

cSwans of a Feather

Related Articles