How can the CEO Use Revenue Assurance?

Hi, this is Rob Mattison, the president of GRAPA, the Global Revenue Assurance Professionals Association. This week, we will be presenting the next edition in our series “The Beginners Guide to Revenue Assurance”.

In our previous presentations, we covered some of the basic questions that the stranger to telecoms might ask. We established that revenue assurance was a function unique to telecommunications, and that the need that telecoms have for revenue assurance is usually caused by several factors, all concerned with the incredibly fast rate of change that telecom managers must face:

In this, our second session in the “beginners guide to revenue assurance” series, we will tackle one of the biggest and most pressing questions that managers have when it comes to revenue assurance: “Why should the manager choose to use revenue assurance at all?”

As we have already established, the telecom industry is unique. While other industries like banking, manufacturing and retail naturally seem to integrate the integrity of revenue streams into their operational models only telecoms seems to need to make a specialized function out of it.

What is revenue assurance? What kind of question is that to ask? Especially, what kind of question is that to have as a topic for a blog? In recent months, GRAPA and Revenue Assurance as a whole, has been getting some pretty exciting press coverage. It seems that Revenue Assurance (as promoted by GRAPA at least) is becoming more and more a “top of mind” issue for a lot of C Level executives and even telecoms board members.

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)

Batman, Superman, Aquaman or The Flash: What Kind of Revenue Assurance Hero do You Want to Be?

During our annual Cape Town Revenue Assurance and Fraud Management certification event, we enjoyed the company of participants from across Africa.  Participants included people from MTN, Vodacom, Zain, Net One (actually two different Net Ones – from two different countries,) as well as Mobiliy (Saudi Arabia) and others. It is always such a great experience when revenue assurance and fraud professionals from so many different operators come together and compare notes on the state of their organizations.

I don’t know how many of you have been following politics in the US the past couple of months, but there is a new “revolution” happening called the Tea Party movement. Now, what the “Tea Party” stands for in the US is open to a lot of debate, and we certainly don’t want to talk about that here, but the concept that these people are building on is one that I think is very appropriate for revenue assurance and GRAPA.

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.

I’ve been in the telecommunications industry for a very long time. My first job after university, back in the ancient times, was with ATT in Chicago. Since then, I have been privileged to work for many different telcos in a lot of different capacities.

What most people don’t know is that even though I have degrees in Statistics and a Masters Degree in Telecommunications, my original career was in IT. For more than half of my career, although I was working for telcos, I was doing that work as a telecoms IT guy. I am a true IT geek.

Once again, we finished another great week of running our Core Xtreme Revenue Assurance training class in Cairo. With fifteen people from Africa and the Middle East, it was another fantastic session for everyone involved.

A I have mentioned before, it always amazes me how each time we teach this class, we end up focusing on different issues than in previous sessions. This week, it seemed that the biggest issues were surrounding issues of margin assurance, specifically in areas of content and interconnect margins, as well as the margins for BTS’s and MSCs. We also had some in-depth discussions about the roles of regulators, and their stake in revenue assurance issues (due in no doubt to the fact that we had three regulators attending the class).

As many of you know, I am American. And as many of you know, in America, we in general do not really appreciate what the rest of the world knows as football, or what North Americans call soccer. As most who know me personally know, I am not a typical American. For years,I have been an avid follower of “real football “ through my loyalty to a couple of German teams (Dortmund BVB and Bayern Munchen), both cities where I have lived and have family connections.