Rater

With the increasing complexity of tariffs, promotions and discounts, rating has become one of the key risk points in maintaining quality Revenue Assurance. Revenue leakage, regulatory requirements, reputational risk, customer satisfaction and operational costs are all significant reasons to ensure that your rating is done with the highest degree of accuracy.

Rater is Ascertain’s rating solution. It can provide independent verification that rating undertaken is correct or identify inaccuracies that must be addressed. In some instances, Ascertain’s Rater has been used as a tactical rating solution during periods of migration. Additionally, end to end metering and validation can be achieved with Ascertain Test Event Management (TEM) using Rater in combination with the Ascertain EDR Generator and Ascertain Matcher. Cartesian can also undertake an in-depth analysis of identified rating discrepancies and provide a detailed written report of the analysis performed, issues identified and any recommended actions.

Ascertain Rater’s in-built billing engine can also replicate cycle billing, generating a bill output that can be automatically reconciled to actual bills

Features and Benefits

Rater can be deployed very flexibly.  It can be configured for either tariff verification (proving the integrity and accuracy of tariffs) or rating verification (proving the accuracy of rating, bundling and discounting).

Tariff Verification

• Rater can operate as a stand-alone product for tariff verification – in this deployment, Rater acts as the “master tariff”source.  The intuitive GUI can be used to maintain tariff data efficiently
• tariff data is imported in a variety of formats (including multiple tables and tree structures) from all of the rating and billing systems for reconciliation against the master tariff
• summary reports provide drill down to detailed discrepancies allowing tariff integrity problems to be investigated and rectified

Rating Verification

In this scenario, Rater is used to rate and discount a set of event records, for example an entire bill run or event records for a particular day.  Sampling criteria can be set to determine an appropriate set of records to verify.  The Ascertain Generic Data Loader (GDL) is used to capture both the events and the reference data that are required for the verification of the selected event records.  This data includes:

• tariff data tables copied from an electronic master or from the operator’s website, which increases the independence of the re-rating
• reference data about discounts, inclusive amounts, promotions, and supplementary items available to customers, including virtually any of the complex tariffs structures used by today’s operators
• a copy of the customer information – this is referenced during rating and discounting.  Information needs to be held regarding each customer’s particular package of discounts, rolled-over minutes, etc.

Reports are provided analysing the results of the rating run.  These include:

• summary reports identifying errors in the rating results and quantifying the financial impact
• detailed mismatch reports with the ability to drill down to individual EDR level if required
• user defined reports such as an analysis of original reference data

Tariff Verification Screenshots

Users can drill down to view detailed information on tariff mismatches.

Essential reference data as tariff price plans, packages and discounting rules can be easily configured and maintained through the GUI.

Graphical views of discrepancies between systems are provided.

Rating Verification Screenshots

A summary of discrepancies for each re-rating run is made available for investigation and analysis.  The user can drill down into the detailed exception items for investigation and analysis.

Management dashboards report the overall situation including financial impacts and priorities for fixing.  The control summary dashboard provides the user with status indicators to ensure that all steps have been undertaken successfully and results are validated.