By TMNG Global

No matter what business they’re in, large companies with multifaceted customer relationships involving many pricing options across many product portfolios have much to gain by implementing the types of comprehensive data validation and revenue assurance solutions that have become essential to effective operations in telecom. These software systems can help companies of all stripes reduce revenue leakage and operations costs by uncovering missed opportunities at every stage of the revenue life cycle, from order initiation and validation through all tracking points to bill production, distribution and receivables management.

Specifically, an effective revenue assurance (RA) program will deliver these benefits:

• reduced time required to transform an order into revenue;
• improved cash flow from reduced invoice cycle times;
• reduced call center volumes as the result of fewer invoice errors;
• reduced revenue reserves required;
• reduced potential for negative publicity;
• single ownership of the process;
• increased customer satisfaction and retention.

These benefits are all the more attractive in situations where a company, through acquisitions or other means, has amassed several back-office systems which operate independently of each other. Without use of new RA technologies that can mediate across disparate systems, these companies would have to replace their legacy billing systems with a single system to attain the integration essential to maintaining robust company-wide revenue assurance.

But, no matter how attractive a highly automated RA program might be, building a program from vendor solutions that weren’t specifically developed for a particular company’s type of business requires a depth of understanding about how such solutions work and their adaptability to non-telecom applications. This knowledge is not typically resident in the core competencies of most IT groups. Moreover, knowing how to develop an RFP process that will produce easy-to-analyze results is a skill that often gets overlooked in corporate IT requirements. It’s relatively easy to create questions for vendors, but the way the questions are asked will determine whether the responses are framed uniformly around metrics that allow the responses to be quantified and compared.

This is why the best way to capitalize on the new RA opportunity is to obtain expert assistance from an outside party with deep experience in RA technology and best practices. By turning to an objective third-party for help, companies not only save money in the long run through significant revenue recovery; they save it in the short run by cutting the costs of instituting an RA program.

At TMNG Global, we have amassed many years of experience helping telecom companies to build RA programs, and now we are doing the same thing for companies outside the telecom industry. TMNG’s recent experiences assisting these clients with implementation of advanced RA programs demonstrate what such programs can mean to any company that needs to streamline administration and prevent revenue loss across an increasingly complex maze of customer relationships.

Building the program can be very costly with respect to the drain on a company’s IT staff time. Just to specify what the requirements are for these new systems, a company must be able to define its RA strategy in great detail, which requires a deep understanding of what these technologies can do.

Beyond staff time, the potential cost hit is even greater when it comes to what might be lost through poor choices of solutions that are made without expert assistance or with less-than-objective assistance from a business systems vendor with a vested interest in the outcome. Turning to a neutral third-party for assistance assures an IT department gains the fullest possible view of available options as well as an objective assessment of which options are best suited to the company’s needs.

In a recent example of the value of such objectivity, TMNG Global, working with a large international concern, was told by the company’s systems managers that they had identified the two vendors who could meet their RA needs and that finding a solution simply entailed choosing between them. But, as it turned out, the neutral evaluation process undertaken by TMNG led to an entirely different choice of vendors from a list that was much broader than originally assumed.

Building a highly efficient and effective RA program involves a tight mix of streamlined methodology and expert analysis. A well-designed framework for defining and analyzing requirements expedites the process; knowing how to look beyond vendor claims to size up whether a given functionality meets a specific requirement takes analytical skills that have been well-honed through years of work with RA technologies.

With regard to methodology, the proprietary TMNG Lexicon™ framework provides a unique combination of qualitative and quantitative measurement tools designed to efficiently and effectively evaluate the quality and competitiveness of a software system from a business, a technical and a functional perspective. Lexicon offers a template of over 4,000 requirements that can be applied across 43 functionality categories, representing a matrix for setting virtually any imaginable set of RFP parameters. And by allowing administrators to assign relative value to any given requirement, the framework automatically assigns weight to any vendor solution that addresses that requirement, thereby helping a company determine which vendor systems are most applicable to its operations.

TMNG Lexicon™ enables the client to:

• jump-start the identification, writing and prioritization of systems requirements;
• evaluate vendors' products and solutions;
• evaluate and compare existing software systems versus best-in-class requirements;
• identify future success requirements;
• assess Internet capabilities.

But, as thorough and efficient as the methodology might be, there’s no substitute for expert evaluation. The expert team must be able to ascertain whether a vendor solution can properly track transactions across billing policies that might be very different from the telecom billing policies the RA solution was designed to serve. Where a vendor might rate its product’s performance at a “5” on a 1-to-5 scale, an expert with a keen eye to the difficulties attending customizing that product to a particular RA program might assign the performance a “2” once all the requisite tinkering is taken into account.

Using the Lexicon, TMNG can quickly and easily incorporate the client’s scoring criteria, including the functional requirements, technical and usability capabilities, as well as vendor delivery time. At the same time, TMNG’s professionals can provide a summary of non-technical areas that must be factored into the vendor analysis.

The TMNG team enhances the analysis by being able to work with client IT teams to assess vendor prototype performances and weigh what is observed against vendor RFP responses. By consolidating prototype assessments with vendor responses, the TMNG team creates a single evaluation report using Lexicon scoring. Then, using its experience and knowledge of best practices in business case development, the TMNG team can develop the comprehensive business case and financial model that provides a strong framework for negotiating pricing, maintenance, liabilities, roles, responsibilities and other contract terms with vendors. By attaining a high level of revenue assurance across all systems the client no longer has to wonder whether its bottom line is a true reflection of its success in building its business.