Revenue Assurance Study Reveal High Losses, High Hopes

Convergence and lack of visibility across an ever-expanding value chain are causing growing revenue losses for service providers, as evidenced in a one-of-a-kind benchmark study conducted by The TM Forum.

"This study demonstrates how important managing the integrity of revenue streams is to Service Providers," says Martin Creaner, TM ForumÃ's President and CTO. "If you canÃ't measure it you canÃ't manage it, and this report is a breakthrough in the measurement of actual revenue leakage. Every service provider needs to be aware of this and join into the next round of measurement."

The most surprising breakthrough was the tangible proof that Service Providers incur an average of one-percent revenue leakage with a maximum recovery of 50 percent. "For multi-billion dollar organizations, that adds up to substantial losses," says Tonia Graham, program manager for the TM Forum Business Benchmarking Program.

All is not gray, as data collected from the 14 Service Providers spanning five continents indicated that prevention really works. For example, Service Providers that validated a large a percent of their data records saw significantly lower revenue leakage.

The efficacy of preventive measures came out in many metrics in the study. The relationship was especially evident in the percent of data validated and the percent of customers reconciled.

"This study is a considerable breakthrough in the field of Revenue Assurance measurement. The findings are the first benchmark of actual leakage and recovered amounts relating to information from live Operations," says Dr. Gadi Solotorevsky, cVidya's chief scientist, the leader of the Revenue Assurance Modelling team within TM forum. " These findings provide a clearer view of the correlation between, for example, identified revenue leakage and recovery of leaked revenue, " says Solotorevsky.

"The Study's findings provide concrete evidence that preventive measures taken by Service Providers saved them millions, if not billions in revenues," summarized Martin Creaner.

Posted to the site on 23rd September 2008