Section 5 : Chapter 2

SECTION 5 : CHAPTER 2

BASELINE REPORTING

Monitoring reports are the heart and soul of any ongoing revenue
assurance activity. The obvious place to start is by making sure that
each of the operational systems is doing its job and not creating
leakage.

REASONS FOR BASELINE REPORTING

In many cases, however, ensuring the efficacy of each individual
system along the revenue management chain is not enough. For sev-
eral reasons, we also need to develop a series of reports that provide
us with a higher-level view of what is happening across the entire
revenue management chain.

Detecting Inter-Process Leakage

One of the major reasons for a higher-level system is because indi-
vidual systems themselves are not the only source of leakage. Many
times, the leakage we find occurs because of some kind of failure
in the handoff of information between one system and the next, and
there is no way an individual operational systems report will indi-
cate that to us.

In one case I remember, there was a huge problem with the registra-
tion of customer information. The customer activations system was
sending the registration information for 100 new customers to the
billing system, but only 85 were being processed. The rest were lost
in transit or mistakenly errored out. Only through review of a high-
er-level end-to-end report were we able to detect the problem and
its location.

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