As the economic situation in the Telecom industry worsened in the 2000-2004 period, many companies looked to ways to minimize costs and retain earnings.

This trend, led by Revenue Assurance, started a new wave of initiatives in the Telecom system management industry. Furthermore, accounting issues, such as WorldCom, have also focused attention on this area.
 
Revenue Assurance (RA) is essentially Quality Assurance focused on the revenue stream.
It includes processes designed to detect, correct and ensure that all billable activities are accurately captured, rated and billed in accordance with customer agreements. It often also includes Fraud and Bad Debt Management.

Reducing Revenue Leakage
One of the key benefits of this is that it analyzes the quality of the customer-to-cash stream and suggests process improvements to avoid revenue leakage. This is a problem that typically can result in a 2-10% revenue loss, an area businesses are always keen to resolve!

Within Atos Origin, I head up a small team which has developed a Revenue Assurance methodology for the telecom market. This is based on four pillars: fraud management, business intelligence, application monitoring, and database reconciliation. We have also established a contact network within the Revenue Assurance world with alliance partners such as cVidya, Subex, and HP, and with global organizations, like the TeleManagement Forum. This initiative has seen Revenue Assurance mature and grow significantly within Atos Origin, becoming an important solution area with a growing client list including Equant, ntl, Orange, TIM and Swisscom.

Global Expertise
Today, we are actively in contact with revenue assurance experts in various countries, sharing ideas and best practices as well as helping emerging countries, like Morocco and Greece, incorporate revenue assurance elements into their pre-sales and bid processes. This enables us to bring considerable knowledge and expertise to the process and it goes without saying that there are tremendous benefits for the customer.

Jean Francois Eon
Bid Manager - Fraud/Revenue Assurance Consultant
Jean-François Eon is charge of promoting Atos Origin’s Revenue Assurance and Fraud solution for all major international operators and the company’s service portfolio. He has around 10 years experience in the IT industry and combines a broad technical knowledge with sound business and management experience.

A graduate from ENST(Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Télécommunications) de Bretagne, he has worked for BT in the UK in the R&D laboratory and Compaq. He also spent 2 years as a consultant for SFR to design, write the RFP, select partners, and manage the deployment of their new Fraud Management System.