CenterView® - Process Driven Revenue Assurance
CenterView is much, much more than just another CDR analysis and reporting tool. Of course CenterView contains an extremely flexible, rules-driven analysis engine with user definable reports, dashboards and alarms. But CenterView also provides integrated software support for every stage of a structured methodology to design and deploy an enterprise-wide "Control Framework" which automatically monitors your end-to-end revenue chain.
To achieve this CenterView comprises five integrated modules each of which is focussed on a particular phase of the revenue assurance process. These components are shown in the diagram below.
CenterView not only allows you to pro-actively monitor the state of your entire revenue chain, but it also provides a clear view of the effectiveness of the "Control Framework" itself. Based on the priorities identifed during the Plan process and feedback from the Evaluate module, CenterView guides you into focussing your limited resources at those areas most likely to generate the maximum return from your investment. This allows you to build the most effective "Control Framework" in an iterative fashion as a series of manageable projects each of which has a clearly defined business case.
CenterView’s Plan module enables you to record all known revenue risks from across the entire enterprise. For each risk you can identify the likely causes of the risk and the controls that could be put in place to identify, and ultimately prevent, its occurrence.
Risks can be grouped into logical sets and assigned to responsibility groups allowing you to build a structured, easily navigable "Control Framework".
Using information on the likely financial impact and frequency of each risk, together with the expected cost of each control and inputs from CenterView’s own self-audit process, Plan enables you to prioritise control implementation based on net recoverable revenue.
CenterView’s Design module provides a set of drag and drop configuration screens to enable your analysts to easily define the business rules which control how source data is collected, stored, combined, analyzed and displayed to implement the Control Framework specified within the Plan module.
User definable thresholds and associated alarms keep you pro-actively informed when there are issues which require attention.
CenterView’s Monitor module continually processes the business rules configured in Design – loading data from source systems, performing the defined analysis, calculating the KPIs and the status of the associated controls and raising alarms where necessary. Monitor supports an unlimited number of user-definable dashboards enabling each user to view the status of the control framework relevant to their daily work as well as graphical reports of any alarms that have been raised requiring action.
When Monitor raises an alarm the ownership of the underlying problem is tracked within Resolve. Using CenterView’s “Root Cause Analysis” capabilities, the user can drill down through the underlying layers of analysis logic and reports to the set of source data that resulted in the original problem. Resolve records the conclusions of the investigation process, the corrective action taken and the revenue recovered by responding to the alarm.
Evaluate provides the revenue assurance group with the ability to take a holistic view of the effectiveness of their control framework in covering the revenue risks within their organisation. Evaluate achieves this through automated self-audit combined with user-definable “balanced scorecards” to assess and report on each control. This information is fed back into CenterView’s Plan module to guide further iterations of improvements to the control framework. Evaluate also provides detailed reports on the revenue recovered by solving both one off problems and systematic issues.
Complete Revenue Assurance - Switch-to-Bill and Beyond
You will often hear companies talking about "Switch-to-Bill" revenue assurance. Usually this means monitoring usage traffic to ensure that records are not lost as they are processed by internal systems. True revenue assurance however requires much more than that.
There are typically four inter-related disciplines for revenue assurance, as shown in the diagram on the right, and equal attention must be paid to each.
CenterView's data collection and analysis engines allow you to gather and compare data from across the enterprise and from any point in the revenue chain. This allows CenterView to monitor a wide range of KPI's within each of these assurance disciplines.
Click on an area of the diagram for examples of the types of KPI that CenterView can monitor in each case.
Future-Proof Revenue Assurance - Configure not Code
CenterView has been architected for maximum flexibility. Nothing is assumed, nothing is hard coded. Simple, straightforward GUI's allow the operator to define any aspect of their business model.
The following items can all be configured using the standard product with no external coding.
- Structured, hierarchical models of all known revenue risks and the controls that could prevent them
- The frequency and content of data streams to be extracted from external systems and loaded into CenterView
- The expected relationships between data streams from multiple points in the enterprise model
- Any transformations to be applied to the data after it has been extracted
- Business rules, including timing considerations, to consider when analysing revenue flow
- Specific views and dashboards for groups of users according to preferences & security levels
- Unlimited alarms and the automated actions to be taken when the alarms are triggered
- Report content and formats: no reliance on 'canned' reports
This degree of configurability and flexibility means that new services, business relationships and IT systems can be brought under revenue assurance control within CenterView in a structured, step-by-step fashion.
Operators can focus initially on those areas considered to represent the greatest risk and so achieve early "quick-wins" thereby shortening the return on investment and payback timescales. Additional areas can then be brought under CenterView control, allowing a comprehensive, hierarchical revenue assurance model of the entire business to be built over time.
To find out more about CenterView's architecture please click here.