HP CentralView Revenue Leakage Control

A communications, media and entertainment solution brief from HP

Utilize end-to-end monitoring and analysis of leakage for better revenue assurance and achieve revenue intelligence.
Revenue leakage hurts companies where today they feel it mostthe bottom linedraining monies that could be re-invested in revenue-generating activities. And the leakage problem is expected to become more challenging as conditions align for a perfect storm. New revenue streams are rapidly emerging, such as those stemming from next-generation networks (NGN) providing quadruple play services and so forth. Concurrently, on going implementations of new billing and operations support systems (BSS/OSS) are the norm, and the maze of complex partner relationships continues to grow. Communications, media and entertainment (CME) companies must be able to pinpoint and correct revenue leakage and its underlying root causes, regardless of where in the revenue chain the leakage springs. With todays intensely competitive industry environment, companies business survival hinges on gaining a clear view of revenue processes and areas of weaknessswiftly, holistically and cost-effectively. Operators and content providers that are able to monitor all revenue streams, react quickly to changing business directions and better understand where and why leakage is occurring will have a competitive edge for revenue realization. Armed with the right tools, CME businesses can mitigate the thorny problem of revenue leakage while gaining revenue intelligence throughout their revenue chain. Operators and content providers can turn their revenue leakage challenges into opportunities to improve internal processes and the customer experience.

Technology for better business outcomes

The HP solution
The HP CentralView Revenue Leakage Control solution provides end-to-end monitoring, identification and investigation of revenue leakage, enabling CME entities to enhance their revenue flows and safeguard their revenue earned. The solution helps prevent future losses and presents new insights into a companys revenue streams, delivering a rapid return on investment. It monitors and analyzes the subscribers activities flows, rating engines, billing systems, collection programs, business processes and more to help CME businesses achieve revenue intelligence. The solution incorporates technology from cVidya, a revenue assurance market leader, including graphical user interface (GUI)-driven configuration reconciliation mechanisms, user-friendly dynamic dashboards, rootcause analysis capabilities and an optional rating and billing verification module. These are strong complements to the scalable and flexible aggregation, usage reconciliation and reporting capabilities HP has provided in helping companies detect and prevent revenue leakage. The HP solution, integrating cVidya, is a best-of-breed joint offering and includes the knowledge both companies gained from extensive fraud and revenue assurance implementations, successfully proven in all corners of the globe and currently protecting hundreds of millions of customers. Solution features include: Flexible data collection and correlation The Revenue Leakage Control solution collects, correlates, normalizes and enriches event data from sources such as switches, mediation devices, billing network databases (including home location register [HLR]) and from other business and operational support systems (e.g., order system, financial systems). This allows the subsequent efficient summarization and reconciliation of data to help ensure integrity throughout the entire revenue chain. Revenue leakage detection The HP solution offers a flexible, powerful and highly scalable reconciliation module for uncovering leakage. Via a GUI, users easily can build graphical process views spanning all revenue streams. Reconciliation of data occurs both continuously on event flows and on a snapshot basis as configuration changes are made. Inconsistencies in metrics such as number of calls, charge/revenue, duration volume and so forth, as well as suspect configuration changes, trigger reports and alarms.

Rating and billing verification With the optional Rating and Billing Verification (RBV) module, operators and content providers can improve control over price plans by validating, on a sample basis, the accuracy of customer charges. Also, proposed price plans can be modeled and tested before being made widely available. The improved billing accuracy enhances the customer experiencepromoting a companys brand imagewhile reducing customer service cost, churn and regulatory compliance exposure. Automatic case generation and investigation support With the HP solution, users can define key performance indicators (KPIs). Violations of KPIs activate alarms and result in the generation of cases for investigation. KPIs can be set, for example, to highlight significant discrepancies between systems or between expected and actual activity with a given system, changes to a rate plan without pre-approval, occurrences of meeting or exceeding thresholds or unusual deviations from trends. Cases can be categorized in terms of severity, with notifications sent to the appropriate functional contacts. Using the solutions Case Management capabilities, users can drill down to specific data for investigation and resolution of the leakage concern. Predefined and dynamic dashboards With advanced technologies from HP and solution partners cVidya and Business Objects, the HP CentralView Revenue Leakage Control solution enables users to trace revenue loss back to root causes so preventive measures can be taken. For example, drill-down might expose a system issue or process breakdown or reveal the need for more training of personnel. In addition to supporting case investigation, the solutions dynamic, fully configurable dashboards provide a comprehensive view of the revenue chain to enable better-informed business decisions. Companies can look broadly at revenue behavior; track KPIs; analyze trends and segment customers, switches, rate plans and more. The HP solution is exceptionally user-friendly, flexible and scalable to meet CME companies existing and expanding needs.

Figure 1. The Revenue Leakage Control solution, which is part of the HP CentralView portfolio, places customers at the center of a CME companys information universe and can be implemented stand-alone or in combination with other HP CentralView solutions for cost savings, efficiency and improved business decision making.

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Features at a glance Flexible data collection and correlationcollects event data from various components, devices and systems for comparison of revenue flows and identification of inconsistencies Revenue leakage detection provides a highly scalable module, uses a GUI for defining needed reconciliations and enables checks and analyses throughout the entire revenue chain Rating and billing verification helps improve control over existing price plans and enables improved evaluation of proposed price plans before they become widely available Automatic case generation and investigation supportenables immediate and cost-effective response to user-defined alarms, helping to maintain revenue chain integrity Predefined and dynamic dashboardsprovide a userfriendly, comprehensive view of revenue flows including specific events, KPIs and trends to enable better-informed decisions

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HP CentralView Revenue Leakage Control solution

Benefits
Safeguard revenue earned. With the proliferation of new services, third-party content providers and new business models, todays communication, media and entertainment companies need to have smarter, more flexible revenue leakage detection tools that reach beyond the traditional boundaries of revenue assurance and are remarkably easy to use. The HP CentralView Revenue Leakage Control solution gives operators and content providers the most advanced capabilities for readily detecting, analyzing and addressing anomalies and possible leakagepromoting integrity throughout the entire revenue chain. Take immediate, cost-effective action. The volume of information revenue assurance teams must track is expanding exponentially as customer bases grow and businesses launch innovative initiatives to meet market demands. Such teams need intuitive, easily modified, highly scalable tools for keeping pace. The Revenue Leakage Control solution supports the highest volumes of information streams and provides user-defined alarms that can be aligned with anticipated trends, KPIs, specific events and more. Users can then use the solutions robust Case Management functionality for prioritizing and investigating possible leakage areas. With the HP solution, revenue assurance teams can efficiently and rapidly restore profitability.

Gain revenue intelligence. The value of revenue assurance programs goes beyond monitoring revenue flows for identification and correction of leakage to include an understanding of why the leakage occurred and mitigation of future risk. The HP CentralView Revenue Leakage Control solution makes pinpointed analysis possible through fully configurable, flexible and comprehensive means. With its dynamic dashboards, the solution gives users the ability to slice and dice data into the actionable information that is most meaningful for their specific responsibilitiesand enables optimal decision making for better business outcomes. Network bottlenecks are revealed, process breakdowns uncovered, errors with new services exposed and a companys team empowered to act for maximum revenue benefit.

The HP CentralView portfolio

The Revenue Leakage Control solution is part of the HP CentralView portfolio of tightly integrated, businessfocused applications that quickly and accurately transform under-exploited data from disparate sources into competitive opportunities for revenue protection, optimization and generation. Supported by a common framework designed for flexibility, extensibility and efficiency, these solutions are aimed at unlocking the power of operators and content providers data to solve business problems.

With its modular and pre-integrated structure, the HP CentralView portfolio evolves with a companys needs and growth. A CME company can choose to focus only on select areas or to start with critical areas and progress to other business challenges as circumstances and available resources mandate. The portfolio incorporates best-of-breed partners including Oracle, cVidya and Business Objects. With the HP CentralView portfolio, accurate, consolidated and right-time actionable knowledge is made easily available across a CME companys organization. Data and functional silos are broken down, enabling rapid achievement of business goals and keeping customers at the center of the companys information universe.

Building upon a foundation of people, processes and technology, HP Consulting and Integration can manage the complete design, global delivery and deployment of critical adaptive infrastructure solutions for todays communications and media services marketplace. HP delivers solutions, technologies and services arrayed across network infrastructure, network services, operation and business support, mobile and rich media solutions, and end-user access. These innovative capabilities, including the class-leading HP OpenCall, HP CentralView Fraud Risk Management and HP Software product suites, have made HP a major player that is leading change in the communications, media and entertainment industries.

The HP advantage
Increasingly complex and rapidly evolving communications solutions force service providers to deliver evermore innovative services to the market while keeping customers loyal and insulated from the complexities behind the services. To achieve this, communications and media service providers need strategic partners that can do more. HP offers targeted and seamless services and solutions, integrated with partners and delivered quickly and efficiently. HP services and solutions are open and flexible, empowering operators and content providers to customize or create value-added services. HP service capabilities provide the expertise to analyze, design, develop, implement and support the most complex solutions. This one-stop shopping approach allows providers to focus on customersnot suppliers. HP focuses more than 30 years of expertise into a powerful integrated team, the Communications, Media & Entertainment (CME) organization, which along with 500 valued solutions partners, assists the worlds top service and equipment providers, as well as media, entertainment and cable operators, in meeting their customer needs.

HP Services
Every HP solution leverages proven global experience that spans people, processes and technology. HP Services consultants understand the communications, media and entertainment marketplace, and can help companies get the most from their IT investments. HP Services can help in these critical areas: Application Modernization ServicesHP offers a full range of current and future business need assessments, strategic and technological roadmaps for change, infrastructure transition services and monitoring services for the evolved application environments. Mission-Critical SupportOnsite consulting and technical support is available at whatever level of service the organization desires, including Operational ITSM to help benchmark IT processes against others. Outsourcing ServicesHP offers a comprehensive portfolio of innovative and scalable sourcing options, so company personnel can focus time and resources on their core business. Security ServicesHP has developed a detailed methodology for secure evolution of the IT environment. Risk is minimized and both the data and the network are protected. Financial ServicesHP Financial Services offers a range of creative and flexible financing options that can remove the final obstacle to network evolution. Across the globe, enterprise customers rely on HP Services to design, build, integrate and manage the IT systems that run their businesses. HP Services capabilities cover consulting and integration, outsourcing, support and education services, all delivered by more than 69,000 services professionals in 170 countries. As the marketplace continues to evolve, HP Services will be there to help communications, media and entertainment companies adapt and compete.

To learn more, visit www.hp.com/go/cme

Copyright 2008 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. Oracle is a registered U.S. trademark of Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, California. Printed in the USA. 4AA1-7796ENW, January 2008