Mediation is the starting point and the hub of all revenue assurance operations. Through this one system passes almost 100% of the revenue related information produced by a telecom. For this reason, Mediation is usually the starting point and major focus of most revenue assurance operations.

Conceptually, the mission of the mediation system is simple and straightforward and can be summarized by by the acronym FFESC which stands for:

Revenue assurance activities usually start with the mediation area and almost any revenue assurance investigation will involve a review of what the mediation system has to say. For this reason, revenue assurance expertise in the mediation area is critical.

Mediation assurance activities are concerned most with the following:

Our Case Study reviews include the following areas:

1. Mediation Requirements Review and Validation Case Study

2. Mediation Reference Table Reconciliation Case Study

3. Mediation Integrity Verification Case Study

The mediation system is the busiest system operating within the telecom environment.  Each day, hundreds of millions of CDRs are processed and forwarded to the billing, interconnect, roaming, fraud, data warehouse and other critical operational systems. Each of these systems submits an extensive and complex set of requirements to the mediation operational team specifying which records to format, filter or forward.

Unfortunately, in the hectic world that is modern telecommunications, the process of submitting and changing these requirements is often handled in a highly informal and unstructured manner. In many cases, a requirements change will be requested via a phone call, and input directly into the mediation system without any intervening documentation whatsoever.

The result is an environment where no one is really sure, authoritatively what precisely the requirements are that mediation should be following.

In many cases, significant leakage can be identified through the simple process of formalizing and rectifying misunderstandings between groups.

The basic steps in the process are simple and straightforward.

1. First, all formal target system specifications being used by the mediation group as control documentation is reviewed
2. Second, interviews are established with each of the target systems operational support groups
3. Each of these groups is interviewed, and a formal, comprehensive understanding of what is expected out of the mediation system is documented
4. The results of the interviews are compared with the formal specifications being utilized by the mediation group, and any inconsistencies are resolved.

Projects of this kind have yielded significant leakage reduction in the past, and the fact that it is:

means that it is usually the first step in any mediation assurance effort.

In a very real sense, a mediation system is nothing more than a record processing engine. It reads records in, categorizes them, reformats them and then writes them out.

There are two ways that mediation systems keep track of all of the different rules, conversions and conditions that it has to keep track of:

The only way to check up on the way that the hard-coded business rules are working is to either review the code, or run tests and samples to see how it performs.

Checking on parameter tables is much easier. In this case it is possible to gain copies of each of the reference tables and run programs that compare their contents against the "master tables" that hold the officially correct values.

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After the mediation requirements and reference table information are verified, the last level of assurance to be conducted is the verification of the mediation system operations themselves.

Verifying the integrity of the mediation systems operation can best be described as a painstaking and tedious undertaking. There are several approaches that we have developed over time, these include:

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