Traditional revenue assurance is moving beyond billing audits and fraud detection to encompass network and service assurance as well, while emerging telco value chains are bringing the concept of partner assurance to the forefront

For service providers, one of the best – and cheapest – ways to fight the bottom-line impact of the economic downturn may be to focus on clutching ever more tightly the revenue they’ve already booked and plugging the holes where revenue could slip out of the enterprise.

So-called revenue assurance (RA) – basically, the systems and processes to ensure that the bills get paid – isn’t new. In fact, many of the more formal RA groups and processes at service providers actually were formed around the time of the last downturn, a little less than a decade ago.

What is new is that those groups are now morphing – and the current recession will only accelerate the trend – into more ambitious and formal efforts to track and control not only revenues but costs, margins and profitability as well, and to do so in a much more automated way across back-office OSS/BSS systems and the (increasingly IP-based) network as well.

“Both in technology and in best practices, revenue assurance has progressed significantly from the last major downturn,” said Elisabeth Rainge, analyst and director of NGN operations for IDC. “Some of it is simple economics - cheaper computing power, etc. But there have also been the beginnings of an important shift to a business mindset by the people who are implementing systems -- the idea of keeping costs down is seeping into the culture.”

The requirement to contain costs and to do so as a built-in function of managing OSS is one of the key drivers leading to an expansion of the concept of revenue assurance.

“Typically, revenue assurance was just about the billing stack. It was seen as an audit function, a couple of people, part of the CFO office or the billing group, just doing spot audit on certain operational functions,” said Mark Nicholson, chief technology officer of OSS/BSS vendor Subex. “Now it’s evolved into a fuller governance process and a focus not just on revenue but on maximizing margins and full-scale business optimization. With the downturn, there’s an increased priority to check the costs that are leaking out of the business through inefficient systems, inaccurate data and processes that are not working the way they are supposed to work.”