5 Questions to consider before starting RA activities

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.