The TeleManagement Forum has released a new Revenue Assurance (RA) guidebook aimed at creating de-facto standards in the area of RA for telecom operators. The handbook is the industry's first step-by-step guide for RA, delivering both definitions of RA business processes and leakage points, as well as strategies for solving today's most significant new RA challenges - fraud, regulation (e.g. Sarbanes Oxley) and content/advanced services. Because revenue leakage problems typically span multiple departments within service providers' organisations, having a common language for defining problems and solutions saves substantial time and money in execution of day-to-day RA processes and in procurement of RA applications. Between three and 15% of service provider revenue is generally lost through revenue leakage. To assist RA practitioners in finding revenue leakage in their organisations, the RA guidebook outlines and classifies a comprehensive set of RA definitions, consisting of a checklist of 77 revenue leakage points and walks through 10 real world examples of RA problems from service providers and how they were solved. In addition, a definitive set of business processes for RA are summarised in the guidebook. These processes provide a blueprint for how to build RA into a service provider's organisation. The detailed version of these business processes are being integrated as part of the TM Forum and ITU standard Enhanced Telecom Operations Map(r) (eTOM).
www.tmforum.org