CVidya MoneyMap charts C&W Panama success

Monday, 27 February 2006 12:43  |  C&W Panama

Cable & Wireless Panama first started providing GSM services in 2003. By 2005, it was catering to 64,000 mobile subscribers and seeing a 35% increase in GSM service revenue from the previous fiscal year. C&W placed great emphasis on revenue assurance maturity as a factor in its Panama unit's success, and found a solution to the challenge of revenue assurance with the MoneyMap suite from cVidya. Panama thus became the first C&W market outside the UK to deploy MoneyMap.

The scope of cVidya’s project covered several services, including ADSL and mobile. Mobile came first and this is where MoneyMap's configuration-based techniques were used to find revenue leakages. C&W Panama maintained a sound knowledge of how to estimate an average revenue leakage size. Most revenue assurance solutions, for example, use a statistical approach to ensure the flow of call records from the network to the customer’s bill. This approach, however, is flawed as it cannot disclose discrepancies in configuration and reference data between different systems.

C&W Panama’s criterion was to achieve the following goals:

• ensure all services were billed;
• quickly identify mismatches between service requests, delivery and billing;
• verify data integrity;
• provide management of the resolution process; and
• provide overall confidence in customer billing accuracy.

cVidya offered a solution that incorporated the following two critical aspects:

• MoneyMap Configuration, a product-based solution that enables the operator to perform highly configurable deep data integrity checks between the network, the operational support systems (OSS) and the business support systems (BSS); and
• thorough knowledge and domain expertise in the area of mobile communication services and provisioning processes as well as their implications on revenue assurance.

Initial stage

As proof of concept, cVidya deployed an initial assessment project prior to the deployment of the comprehensive revenue assurance solution. The initial stage of the project included:

• deployment of the revenue assurance solution with a focus on the provisioning and billing processes for GSM pre- and post-paid subscribers, as well as for GPRS and roaming services;
• demonstration of MoneyMap capabilities and integration of MoneyMap with the HLR and Unicorn billing platform systems;
• bringing C&W Panama’s revenue assurance team up to speed on the MoneyMap application;
• reconciliation between the HLR and the Billing (Unicorn) platform across both pre- and post-paid subscribers, taking into account subscription reconciliation (GSM, GPRS, Roaming), billing reconciliation and stranded assets.

Highlights

Several problems were identified during the project.

First of all, a reconciliation of the customer information as it appeared in the billing as against how it appeared in the HLR system revealed that 0.3% of the customers were not billed at all for the ser vices they consumed. The unbilled cases, based upon average revenue figures, translate to more than US$100,000 annually.

Next, some customers, who appeared in the billing system but not in the HLR, highlighted the cases of paying customers who could not use the service a factor which most likely left them less satisfied and at a higher risk for churn.

The amalgamated team of cVidya’s Professional Services and C&W Panama’s Revenue Assurance Department conducted the initial stage of the project, successfully meeting their objectives within a three-week time window. The activities that were carried out within the time frame included the supply of source data, subsequent analysis, and system configuration for the specific needs of C&W Panama. Based upon these initial results, C&W Panama has put processes in place to prevent the continuation of revenue leakages.

Leveraging upon the success of the initial stage of the project, the next stages will expand coverage of the MoneyMap suite to include additional integrations with BSS and OSS, and will also incorporate usage-based Revenue Assurance controls and rating verification.

More info:

• http://www.cvidya.com/

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