Ascertain Usage Assurance for a Digital Cable UK Operator

Executive Summary

Working closely with the UK’s first “quadruple-play” telecoms operator Cartesian’s Ascertain Usage Assurance Solution met the challenges the client faced in ensuring the integrity of its telephony, interactive gaming, PPV and VoD revenue streams.

Key elements of the challenges the client faced included:

• working with a complex network of OSS and BSS systems from which not all requisite information was not easily available
• dealing with record latency from the source systems, particularly with a view to aggregated monthly reporting the following month
• exception classification and prioritisation through categorisation into appropriate buckets
• large volumes of data to be processed during narrow overnight windows
• case management workflows to fit in with and around existing business functions

Cartesian’s Ascertain Usage Assurance Solution met these challenges by delivering a comprehensive source-to-billing reconciliation for the client’s telephony, interactive gaming, VoD, and PPV offerings. This solution included:

• modelling the OSS/BSS nodes, edges and interfaces
• calculation, monitoring, and presentation of key performance metrics
• definition and monitoring of thresholds, tolerances and alarms
• audit checks to verify file processing completeness, and event and record tracking
• issue management for failures and events outside thresholds, filtering and raising alarms as required

Background

The UK’s first company with a “quadruple-play” service offering of television, broadband internet access, and both fixed and mobile telephony draws more than 80% of its revenue from residential customers subscribing to such services; its business offerings cover both conventional voice and data services for commercial customers, and also wholesale network service provision for telecoms customers including ISPs and mobile operators.
Like many large telecoms operators it depends on a complex network of a wide variety of OSS and BSS systems, and one of the key challenges for any Revenue Assurance department in such an environment is providing comprehensive reconciliation of the usage revenue stream.
In particular, they sought a usage assurance solution to monitor not just telephony, but also their interactive gaming, pay per view (PPV) and video on demand (VoD) offerings and to provide comprehensive source to billing reconciliation for these services.
Ascertain Usage Assurance Solution helps solve these problems by providing automated, end-to-end analysis of event record files, detecting anomalies in usage data such as missing files, excessive suspense, or records out of sequence. Further, it provides data on volumes and trends for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and reports key information through the user dashboard.

The Challenge

The client’s network architecture had developed over many years through both organic growth and the acquisition of other telecoms operators. Consequently, they had an extensive, diverse, and intricate network of OSS and BSS elements spanning all of mediation, rating, and billing.
As they rationalised and redeveloped their network architecture many data sources were changing, including the systems used for rating their telephony, Interactive Gaming, PPV and VoD events. The usage assurance solution they sought needed to receive data from more than 100 switches and 20 other sources, and new interfaces needed developing for the proprietary systems.
Key elements of the challenge include:

• a large, complex, and diverse network of OSS, BSS and related systems that would itself require analysis and interfaces designing for several bespoke systems
• key information not easily available from the source systems, necessitating sophisticated data pre-processing
• record latency from the source systems impacting on aggregated monthly reporting at the start of the following month
• large data volumes to be processed during narrow overnight windows in order for the data to be available to RA teams the next day
• exception classification and prioritisation through categorisation of events into manageable case buckets
• case management workflows that must fit in and around the existing internal and external business functions handling issue management and resolution

Thorough event reconciliation is vital not just to revenue assurance, but also for complying with regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Effective usage assurance can very quickly provide high value returns both through identifying revenue leakage and by finding under utilised network resources.

The Solution

The Ascertain Usage Assurance Solution provides support for feeds from not just industry standard systems such as SABS, ICOMS, and Singl.eview, but can also be readily configured to support interfaces to any new or proprietary systems in use – such as were needed to support the Interactive Gaming, PPV, and VoD usage feeds, collect usage events and additional data from the VoD nodes and servers, and the PPV servers.
The ability to mach records relating to the same event in different systems, and to track records for an event as they progress from one system to the next in the switch-to-bill chain is vital to such reconciliation work; revenue leakage can quickly to detected, identified, and quantified through such monitoring.
The monitoring of key performance metrics – such as call volumes, bill run totals, adjustments – can highlight both broad trends and unexpected anomalies, particularly in conjunction with the specification and monitoring of thresholds, with tolerances specified on any key element of the data – such as the percentage of records entering suspense, or the total duration of traffic per day.
When problems are detected, or thresholds exceeded, prompt alerting of the RA team – by email, SMS, or through an alarm management system – ensures appropriate resources are directed to resolving appropriately prioritised issues. Issue management assigns cases to buckets, manageable by the type and priority of the case.

Summary

The client’s challenges centred on assurance of their telephony, interactive gaming, PPV, and VoD revenue, and required working with a complex network of OSS and BSS systems, managing large volumes of data, and processing such within narrow windows and to tight deadline.
This work would require quickly and thoroughly obtaining a broad and deep understanding of their OSS and BSS systems, modelling the structure of their network elements, understanding how events and usage data flow around their network. Understanding the systems thoroughly enough to accurately develop the corresponding interfaces and the internal logic to model the flow of data around the network would require not only a thorough understanding of the technology involved, but also comprehensive subject matter expertise in billing and mediation, and the close customer skills needed to quickly build the relationships with the different groups within the client organisation with which we would be working closely
The solution delivered enabled the client to define and monitor performance metrics and thresholds across their network, detecting revenue leakage early on and helping manage the resolution of issues.

If you would like more information about this case study, Cartesian’s capabilities or how we might be able to help you, please contact Bill Hill by phone on: +44 20 7643 5555 or by email at bill.hill@cartesian.com.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under Case Studies.