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Prepaid Assurance
No single technological innovation has done
more for the explosion in the growth of wireless technology than
prepaid. The prepaid model
makes telecommunications services available to an incredibly broad
range
of customers that could not be serviced in the past.
The bad news is that the prepaid
business model can only work using an architectural approach
completely contrary to the standard telecommunications industry
approach to tracking and billing revenues.
Revenue assurance for prepaid
services is an incredibly challenging and profitable area for most
telecoms.
There are several areas where
revenue assurance can be done for prepaid services. These include:
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Assurance of the Physical Distribution of Vouchers
One of the most interesting and challenges things about prepaid, is
the way that it changes around the entire revenue management
process. With pre-paid, you have 2 additional factors, one positive
and one negative.
On the positive side is the fact that
customers pay before they use the service. This means that you have
the potential for realizing the revenue sooner, and you greatly
reduce the risk of not being paid.
On the negative side is the fact that
you now how to create, purchase and manage the distribution of
vouchers. Vouchers which have a value built into them and can be
stolen easily.
Equally difficult is the fact that
most telcos find that managing their own distribution channels is
too expensive and limiting. This means that you have to work with
retail distribution channels. Channels that might not pay you on
time, thereby duplicating the cash flow risks associated with
postpaid.
Providing assurance on the
distribution and management of vouchers is a process that is best
borrowed from the retail industry. Retails have been buying and
distributing small items of high value for many years. Some of the
techniques employed to assure this revenue stream include:
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Voucher Tracking and
Audit- many times, organizations need the help of an outsider, to
simply review their voucher management operations, and determine if
there is a problem or not. In order to accomplish this, the auditor
needs to understand how the entire voucher management process works,
and where the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in that process might
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Inventory and
Distribution Management Systems- these systems are created to track
vouchers across their entire lifecycle, from creation, purchase,
distribution until their ultimate activation by the customer. This
type of inventory management can provide an incredible increase in
confidence regarding voucher management, and has resulted in the
identification of many leakage points for customers in the past.
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Assurance on the
Workings of the IN
Prepaid operations create a series of special challenges for the
revenue assurance analyst. One of the biggest is the fact that the
"normal" post-paid CDR mediation based "check & reconciliation"
process is
bypassed by the intelligent network. In these cases the accounting
operations are executed in real time by a system with no manual
intervention possible. This means that one of the biggest jobs of
the RA analyst is to make sure that this software is functioning
properly.
While it is possible to perform a check of CDRs (see the
reconciliation of MSC and IN section below), there are also several
levels of assurance that need to be performed in order to assure the
working of the IN itself.
The biggest vulnerabilities in the
operation of the IN include:
| The possibility of fraud
(employees entering invalid vouchers, or programmatically altering
voucher balances). |
| The possibility of programming
errors that fail to accurately decrement the voucher database.
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There are several ways that
assurance of these areas can be accomplished. These include:
| Voucher Balance Reports-
Voucher balance reports, are reports that
take a snapshot of what the starting balances for all customers at
the beginning of a specified time period (daily, weekly, or
monthly), and then reports on all of the additions voucher balance
that have been made, and then keeps track of the sum total of the decrements(phone calls) that were made against those balances. This
kind of independent audit report can greatly reduce the chances of
fraud and program error. |
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Customer Audit Reports-
Similar to the voucher balance reports,
these reports perform the same kind of reporting, but on an
individual customer basis. |
| Test Calls- The other way that the operation of the IN can be
checked is through the performance of test calls. Under this
approach, particular accounts are singled out, and specific phone
calls, to predetermined phone numbers, of predetermined duration are
made. The voucher management database is the consulted to see if the
appropriate accounting occurred within the system.
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Reconciliation of MSC and IN (CDR Reconciliation)
Ultimately, the real challenge of prepaid revenue assurance is
making sure that all of the calls that are completed for customers,
are accurately accounted for the the IN. There is really only one
way to do a comprehensive job of accomplishing this, and that is
through the reconciliation of the CDRs created by the MSC and
checking those against the CDRs generated by the IN.
While the
job may seem difficult at first, it is requires nothing more than
making some slight modifications to the way things are currently
done. The steps in this process include:
| Establish a mediation feed that
will identify, filter and prepare all of the prepaid CDRs coming
from the MSC. (This is not always easy since many network managers
have disabled the generation of these CDRs at the switch in order
to minimize CDR traffic. |
Note:
In the cases where the network operations group will not do this on
a permanent basis, it is often possible to convince them that a
limited number of feeds, for a limited period of time can be done.
This will create more than enough input to perform the
reconciliation required.
| Establish an IN feed that will
spin off CDRs from the IN itself. (as is the case with the MSC - it
might not be possible to get a full time feed from this source, but
a limited feed for a limited timeframe should suffice. |
| Create a pair of parrallelly
aligned databases, one to hold IN CDRs and another to hold MSC-CDRs.
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| Create a serious of
reconciliation reports that match up between the two sources, and
identify situations where one system has transactions that the other
does not. |
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Revenue Assurance Library
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