Jan Abrahamsson, Head of Ericsson Consulting, says that in recent years operators have started to focus on the importance of taking a holistic, end-to-end approach to revenue assurance.

“Networks have become more complex and as a consequence so has the service provisioning flow. An operator today has many more touch points in their own network environments where revenue leakage can occur and the emergence of new business models, involving content providers and third parties, is adding to this challenge.” Abrahamsson says.

A great portion of revenue is lost because users are not rated correctly, prepaid calls are not debited and discounts are overextended,” Abrahamsson says.

“Revenue assurance and leakage detection needs to be dealt with from an end-to-end perspective, including business processes and technology aspects, to address everything from set-up parameters in the radio-base-station switches, core network nodes and service layer application platforms to the billing and customer-care systems.”

Abrahamsson says that revenue assurance and leakage detection has the potential to recover between 2 to 4 percent of an operator’s rightful income. There are up to 15 areas where leakage can occur, including network management, service provisioning, interconnection of the network with external equipment or facilities, roaming and tariffing. Revenue assurance has also expanded into ensuring that agreements with content providers do not wind up being money losers, he says.

Abrahamsson says that revenue assurance has evolved from a niche service to a major, high-stake industry. Ericsson’s success in the market builds on its depth in a range of telecom areas, from network technologies, to systems integration and charging and billing.

“Operators are choosing Ericsson as a revenue-assurance partner because we have this end-to-end capacity across technology, IT, operations and business management,” he says. “We bring a history with operators and intimate knowledge of telecoms’ systems and processes.”

Abrahamsson says that revenue assurance is becoming a strategic challenge for customers.

“And that’s how Ericsson approaches the issue. You can’t just address it from a technology or IT perspective,” he says, adding that revenue assurance is increasingly becoming a focus area for telecom CEOs and CFOs.

“Just 24 months ago, revenue assurance was usually handled as a tool issue in the IT department,” Abrahamsson says. “But now, because operators realize there is so much money at stake and it’s an area that involves the business processes, it’s driven across the operator’s departments and with high visibility to the top management of our customers.”

In some cases, operators already have revenue-assurance departments, but limited strategy or targets. “We help them coordinate their efforts and build a strategy around aggressive targets,” Abrahamsson says. “Target-setting is key because it enlists the whole organization to understand the complexity and to realize the potential of addressing revenue leakage. The experience we have with our customers is that with the cooperation between the customers’ organizations and our consultants and solution experts we’ve been consistently able to realize or surpass the revenue assurance targets defined.”