All over the world competition is increasing. This stimulates both innovation and price competition while requiring you to differentiate your offer. To sustain speed of innovation and lower price points while remaining profitable, you must find ways to enhance operational efficiency. In this context, you should evaluate all the opportunities to create operational cost savings, including the examination of all the options, like Managed Services.
While you are trying to do this, your current business activities have your resources tied up in 4G rollouts activities, or in next generation broadband networks, or focusing on meeting the evolving needs of your customers or improving customer experience, etc. You have to find a way to do more with a flat, or even shrinking, budget.
On top of all this, but certainly not less important, your shareholders demand business growth and profitability.
With these business drivers, customers ask themselves what should be kept in-house and what should be outsourced. The following questions are likely to be on Service Providers minds.
- Which functions differentiate me from my competition?
- Which functions (even critical ones) are well understood and just need to work more efficiently?
- How can I free up resources in order to speed up innovation?
- How can I fund, manage, and benefit from new technologies?
- How can I make costs more predictable?
- Where can costs savings are derived from in order to free up budget to fund new initiatives?
In order to appropriately answer all of these questions we must consider three axes:
People
Having highly trained revenue assurance analysts is critical to taking a proactive approach to business monitoring and control to reduce the likelihood of revenue leakage and to quickly identify root cause of issues, resolution, and reporting. A workforce highly skilled in finance, information systems, networks, and management of business processes are a key differentiator in Revenue Assurance context.
Processes
There should be knowledge of business processes and experience in delivering revenue assurance engagements for CSPs of all sizes all over the world based on outsourcing and co-sourcing of business monitoring and process controlling. A team of managed services processes incorporating this depth of experience as well as real life operation of Revenue Assurance activities is fundamental for the success.
Tools
Understanding processes allows them to be improved through a systematic approach and leveraged by tools to achieve automation during proactive monitoring and control.
With Revenue Assurance Managed Services, customers can manage the complexity of its business, in particular control and support activities, and direct their energies towards expansion and innovation activities that can enhance new revenue generation.
A Revenue Assurance team should have at its disposal the business processes expertise and technology know-how for identifying inconsistencies and deviations during the implementation of a corporate strategy. Outsourcing revenue assurance operations partially or integrally not only increases the internal of auditing skills but also allows to extend roles and the skills that are part of these teams without having to hire more employees.
A Revenue Assurance Managed Services team should be flexible and multidisciplinary and should work consistently to detect, investigate and analyze the defined and implemented controls, proposing corrections and appropriate corrective actions to ensure prevention (and avoid recurrence) of inconsistencies. A partnership between managed service supplier and the CSP is critical to develop a culture of healthy business during the development of new offers, services, and/or products.
Service providers typically support Revenue Assurance Management through business processes, procedures, integrity data tools such as RAID, reports for management, and agreed SLA with the client. It is possible to determine, at any time, whether the goals set are being achieved in accordance with the expectations of customers. An integrity data tool offers faster systems and platforms monitoring, proving to be an extremely useful working tool, not only for monitoring but also for the production of reports and indicators compared to pre-established objectives.
It thus becomes effectively possible to verify the results obtained by identifying savings from both revenue recovery cost optimization. It is also evident that medium- and long-term corrective actions and improvements lead to procedural optimizations and more efficient and effective processes, which usually translates into a decrease in lost revenue and a reduction of costs.
Revenue Assurance Management by a service provider can be and should be a center of excellence with regard to the sharing of knowledge and skills, supporting the sales core business scope to sell products and services. Experience in the operation and the use of the RAID system, for instance, in the telecommunications business offers an advantage likely to be disseminated and used to potential, or even current customers that wish to outsource their Revenue Assurance Services.
Managed Services is surely one of the best ways to ensure your business for the future.