I love Karate movies. Like many people, my memory of Ninja, Kung Fu, Karate and Taekwondo movies goes back for decades. When I was growing up, it was Bruce Lee in “Enter the Dragon”, and most recently my current favorite is Jackie Chan. Who wouldn’t love to be a Ninja, flying through the air breaking bricks with your head and disarming the bad guys faster than they can blink? (ZZT7BZ7FMHT8)

I recently had one of those “million dollar moments”. You know, when something happens that just makes you feel good about yourself. A moment that validates all the work, pain, and struggle that we go through and sometimes question; is it worth it? What happened?  Simple. We were putting on a Revenue Assurance training event for an incumbent wire line telco in South America.

How many times have you heard conversations like this?

“Are you going to the IMAZ Conference this year?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“Oh, it’s being held in IBIZA, great beaches, super suntans”

“Yes, but what are they going to be talking about?”

“Oh, you know the usual. A couple of software companies will be trying to sell the same old stuff. Jim is going to give that same speech he gives every year”

GRAPA staff writer Katherine B. and I sat down recently to discuss the new Revenue Assurance to the Extreme program that we here at GRAPA have just finished developing. Kathy interviewed me, and let me explain what this exciting new revenue assurance training program is all about.

K. Rob, tell us all about this new program, what do you mean by “Revenue Assurance to the Extreme” and why have you put it together?

R: Well Katherine, we have been very heavily involved for the past six months in conducting training programs, workshops and interviews with revenue assurance professionals, CFO’s, CIO’s, CTO”s and Regulators and we discovered several interesting things.

In the previous post I talked about the "un-conferences " we are thinking of holding. While that is a big and exciting thing, a more fundamental shift is occurring with development of a new GRAPA certification program. Specialist certificates will now be awarded for two to three day trainings in specific functions and technologies such as post-paid, pre-paid, interconnect, roaming, churn management, margin assurance, new product development assurance, 3G and WiMAX. We have talked to a lot of people and found that though they want certification, it is difficult to pack it all into one time frame. Revenue Assurance Professionals are busy people after all!

Are you assuring your mediation systems well enough? How can you tell? GRAPA benchmarks help members learn how to:

• How other carriers manage their mediation
• Who typically is responsible for the checking of mediation activity
• How often alarms are generated
• What typical levels of filtration, suspension, error and consolidation are utilized
• How compliance and reporting to top management is handled

How does benchmarking work?

• Log onto the GRAPA Benchmark Page Click Here to take the Mediation Benchmark
• Answer the questions
• When the benchmark is completed, you will get a copy of the report summarizing the answers provided by participants.