| Q1 2011 | ATS Network & Billing Update |
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ATS Finds Money in Your Network: SimCall™: Revenue & Service Assurance at the Switch™ ROI Estimator Dashboard & Metrics - Turn Data Into Actionable Information MTP™: Automation at the Switch™ AMADEUS™: CDR Mining and Analysis for Recip Comp/CABS
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The ATS Network & Billing Update is published by Advanced Technologies & Services, Inc. (www.atso.com), a revenue and service assurance solutions provider. This free newsletter is a guide to telecommunications OSS, billing, and revenue assurance news and other telecom industry analysis. To unsubscribe, contribute an article, or for offbeat news, please scroll to the end. Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends and co-workers! In this issue:
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Carrier Sit-Down: Kathy Romano - Executive Director of Revenue
Assurance at Verizon Telecom By: Ryan Guthrie, Director of Network Integrity, ATS |
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ATS is excited to announce a brand new feature to our quarterly newsletter. Each quarter we will be sitting down with a revenue assurance, billing, or network expert from carriers around the world. We'll ask the questions and bring you the answers. Would you like to submit a question for the next interview, or would you like to be the person we interview? Email us at info@atso.com. In the first installment of Carrier Sit-Down, we got the opportunity to spend a few minutes with Kathy Romano, Executive Director of Revenue Assurance and Billing at Verizon Telecom. Kathy has 30+ years of telecom experience including central office engineering, marketing, HR, IT, billing, and finance. Guthrie: How important is revenue assurance to the senior management at Verizon? Romano: Our senior leaders take Revenue Assurance very seriously. We review the outcomes and challenges of our program with them periodically through the year. We are often asked to do a deeper dive into trends and risk areas that they are seeing emerge at their level. Guthrie: As we close out 2010, where have your greatest successes come this year? What have your greatest challenges been? Romano: I would have to say that our greatest successes have been the many issues that we have identified and prevented from impacting customers. Our greatest challenges have been the ones that got away - the times that we were not able to get in front of things and customers were impacted. Those numbers are getting fewer all of the time, due to the incredible partnership that we have with our IT team and our Marketing and Sales Channel teams. We have achieved as a team what none of us could have achieved as an individual team. Guthrie: What areas do you plan to focus on in 2011? Romano: We intend to continue what we are doing and work to get better and better at what we do. The network operates at five 9s. I would love to get there eventually. Guthrie: What role does data analytics play? Romano: Data analytics is at the core of Revenue Assurance. There is an astonishing amount of data required to isolate issues and do so early enough to positively impact the customer experience by preventing the customer from seeing the issue. Tools to analyze and create intelligence out of the data are critical. Guthrie: With an increasing number of services offered, how do you prevent revenue leakage from escalating? Romano: With every new service, package or promotion, we require that Revenue Assurance controls are in place at launch. And even if a control finds nothing, it is left in place to insure that nothing ever breaks in that area. Our controls run on a regular basis and are actively monitored to assure that we identify emerging issues very quickly. Guthrie: What will your company be doing to improve the customer experience? Romano: The customer experience continues to be at the core of what we do. Without the customers, we have no reason for being. Every part of our company continually looks for ways to improve the customer experience. Guthrie: What role do vendors play in helping you with revenue assurance solutions? Romano: Vendors are critical to deliver us the tools that will allow us to gather, analyze and obtain intelligence from large volumes of data. Without our vendors, we would have extreme difficulty in fully executing our mission. Guthrie: Thank you very much for your time Kathy. Romano: Thank you. |
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ATS Unveils Revamped Website |
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Earlier today, ATS unveiled a newly
revamped website with a new look and enhanced functionality.
The improved site layout and navigation is intended to make it
easier for visitors to locate their area of interest faster.
There is additional functionality as well such as an automated
translation tool for visitors coming from other countries. Visit the new site at www.atso.com. Questions or comments, email us at info@atso.com. |
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Revenue Assurance, as an industry, has always been in a bit of a Catch-22: You're only great if you find a lot of (otherwise) lost revenue, but your tools and processes aren't worth much if you keep finding the same kinds of errors year after year. By definition, then, (and much to the chagrin of many an RA consultant) a good RA tool is one that finds less and less as time goes on. At ATS, we've been fortunate to have implemented the most widely used RA tool in North America: SimCall. For 15 years, the tool's been finding routing and charging errors for virtually all of the big NA carriers. If you've used a phone in the last 15 years, there's a good chance SimCall has "pre-tested" your routing and charging even before you placed the call. Now, for most of these 15 years, we've been asked a question that's a variant of: "If SimCall is so smart as to know what's wrong with the switch, how come it can't correct it?" Granted, the people asking this were never the network engineers or translators. They had seen or read "2001", and it chilled them to even contemplate a HAL 9000-like computer going into their network and making changes! But, the notion that SimCall could probably - hopefully! - do more than just find errors after-the-fact persisted, and we've finally figured out what that is: Network planning and real-time low-volume, live testing. First, a word about network planning. Given that SimCall has always had to know almost everything about a carrier's network (how else to spot an actual/expected discrepancy?), it followed that SimCall might be able to predict what change "X" would have on the network in the future. A simple example, which we're in the midst of implementing at a carrier right now, is forecasting what a new code opening's impact will be on the wider network: Which switches will use direct-end-office routing to the new code? Which ones will use a Tandem? Which ones won't care about the new code because they already route that code's entire NPA upstream? Which switches will route the codes 6 digits, but will need to be segmented within the switch by Line Class Code or Rate Area? It turns out that our simulator is the right tool to model and forecast these changing conditions, and output the list of transactions that will need to be made on the network. Having made these changes to the network, one could await the next SimCall run to catch any actual/expected discrepancies. But, we are working with carriers to speed up the feedback-loop that ensures the transactions were correctly implemented. That's where our "just-in-time-live-check" is useful. Rather than waiting for a test-call, or even a full SimCall run (overkill if only a few transactions are being checked), we are using carriers' existing switch connectivity platforms to login and execute commands (traver, vfyofc, etc...) that will verify just the transactions of interest. The output is sent back to SimCall, which can then parse the output and give the transaction a green or red light. The 'feedback circuit' is complete. We've moved SimCall out of the "testing arena" alone, and into the network modeling, work assignment and live troubleshooting arenas. It's far from being HAL but, then again, our customers deserve to have the lights and oxygen left on. Peter
Mueller |
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ATS Launches New Usage Analysis Suite - EMC |
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This week, ATS has announced the launch of a new usage analysis suite - Event Management Center (EMC). The EMC is comprised of 4 modules that work together to ensure the network is operating and billing as expected. All data and analyses are available 24/7 via online dashboard with notifications/alerts triggered automatically based on pre-defined rules and thresholds. The EMC modules include:
EMC is capable of handling various data types such as wireline, wireless (including SMS), VoIP, and others. The EMC is currently in use some of the larger carriers in North America. For additional information, please visit the EMC Overview or contact us at info@atso.com. |
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Worldwide Telecommunications Industry Revenue to Top $25.6 Trillion Over Five Years Courtesy of PR Newswire |
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Despite the unsteady state of the domestic US economy, the worldwide telecommunications industry is expected to continue expanding over the next five years as continued spending by consumers and businesses for wireless services, especially in emerging markets, drives industry revenue growth, says a new market analysis report from Insight Research Corporation. According to the new industry market study, telecommunications services revenues on a worldwide basis are expected to grow at a compounded rate of nine percent over the next five years, bringing the sum spent globally on telecommunications to $25.6 trillion by 2016. "The 2011 Telecommunications Industry Review: An Anthology of Market Facts and Forecasts" notes that wireless makes the strongest showing while wireline follows a distant second. Nearly all of the growth in both sectors is expected to occur in broadband services, with wireless broadband service revenues expected to grow at a compounded rate of more than 45 percent over the forecast period, while wireline broadband services grow at almost a 14 percent compounded rate over the same forecast horizon.
Click Here for the full story. |
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