Monthly Archives: July 2012

5 Questions to consider before starting RA activities

General, Revenue Assurance
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In my last post, I tried to highlight the “revenue” aspect for RA and the way KRA’s should be worked on. In continuation to that post, here are 5 questions that should be considered before starting of the RA activities:

  1. Who is responsible for RA?  It has to be a collective responsibility across the organization where every team/department has their role to play. Being in the Revenue Assurance department, is almost as good as being a Product Manager- where the individuals do not have a lot of control on the rest of the organization, yet they are suppose to own and be “solely responsible” for the role/product in the company. Hence, aiding in RA activities is as much a responsibility of Marketing and Network departments as it is for the core RA team.
  1. What should be viewed as the tactical task for the RA department?  All actions/activities that has the ability to allow the operator to generate revenue needs to be monitored to make sure there are no leakages.
  1. What is the ideal number of controls that should be worked on by the RA teams? This depends on the maturity of the organization in terms of organization, influence, people, process and tools. Hence it is always preferable to perform a quick maturity analysis, based on which primary focus areas would be identified and controls created. Not all controls would necessarily impact revenue. Understanding the maturity enables the creation of a roadmap for improvement across the organization. Typically there is NO need to have hundreds of KPIs to monitor each segment or process. This is because of the 80-20 rule. 80% leakages can be found by 20% of appropriate controls. Hence it is essential to work on controls/KPis that have maximum impact, rather than trying to monitor hundreds of them.

 

  1. 4.       Is Cost Management a part of RA activities? Only when the RA team is capable enough to secure the top-line for the organization, should they focus their activities on more strategic objectives like cost and margin assurance and management. Revenue maximization should ideally not be a part of RA department activities.  Most RA teams should venture into this area solely to ensure they provide ample Business Intelligence for marketing and sales departments to take the information to the market to generate more revenues.

 

  1. 5.       What are the most important parameters to report on?  RA departments should look to quantify the findings from data analysis to provide view of
    1. a.       leakage detected
    2. b.      leakage corrected and recovered
    3. c.       leakage corrected and recovered as percentage of detected
    4. d.      leakage detected as percentage of revenue
    5. e.      leakage detected as percentage of EBIDTA
    6. f.        time to recover from detection of leakage.

In a nutshell, RA is not rocket science, but it is an extremely important and challenging aspect of business- not only telecoms but across other industry verticals as well. The effect in telecoms is much more because of the complexity of operations.

In following articles, we would talk more on RA, scope, new horizons and verticals for RA. Stay tuned.

Managing Product Performance Using Advanced Analytics

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It seems there is an endless array of products being offered to mobile customers every day.  Prepaid plans, postpaid plans, new bundles, new handsets, movement to services on tablets, increase bandwidth offers for data streaming, etc.  As operators load the consumers up with more and more choices, understanding what is being bought, who is buying it, is the product making money, when does it start making money, will a new plan rob my bottom line accidentally, etc, are all questions operators must be able to answer, and on an almost daily basis.

As an operator, you should be asking a series of daily questions that need to be answered to protect your business and identify significant revenue opportunities and risks:

1.  What are your product margins today?  Which products are generating positive returns?  Which programs are missing their business plan?  By how much?

2.  When a new product is proposed, do we understand what the impact will be from our existing customers that migrate from their current product to this new product?

3.  When a competitor responds to your new offer with a comparable offer, how fast can you see that impact to your market?

4.  What is the right product offer, the right price, for the right customer segment, in the right section of the network that we should be focusing our marketing resources around?

Many of these questions require much, much more than simple metrics and reports generated by mining activities.  They require advanced analytics that allow operators to predict behaviors and successes (and failures) before those events come to pass, and most importantly, before budget and resources are focused in the wrong areas!  Advanced analytics offer predictive, detailed analysis about what an operator should do, why they should do it, when they should do it, and what the expected outcome should be.  Unlike simple forecasting, analytics is based on science, and offers a proven methodolgy for establishing successful strageties in the business in a near real time environment.

ROCware Product Performance Management (PPM) addresses these (and many other) issues, in a near-real time, high performance analytics environment.  Using ROCware’s advanced analytics technology, PPM is able to provide operators with a full view of their products, margins, and a highly robust future-view into margins, customer and product behaviors, and many other factors that are crucial to properly track and manage your product portfolio.

It is very common today for an operator to have access to limited product data.  Looking more closely at what the operator actually does have access to, it is really often based on excel spreadsheets, with limited information around sales metrics, with some segmentation.  This is not set up as a repeatable process, and thus the requests are completed manually, and most commonly with 4-6 week latency.  This doesn’t help an organization understand margin and profitability; it doesn’t help an organization understand competitive impacts, or the impact of a proposed plan on your existing market.  ROCware PPM does all of this automatically, every day.

There was a time when a monthly performance report was adequate.  That was before products became far more complex, and competitive pressures were measured in days (sometimes hours).  An operator without daily views into their product health and threats is vulnerable to risks that could cost the business millions of dollars in just a single month.  ROCware PPM, along with the other ROCware suite of advanced analytics solutions, takes this worry off the table, allowing operators to quickly and confidently mange changes in their business.

For Media Queries:
Swagata Bhar
E-mail : swagata.bhar@subex.com