VimpelCom: Revenue Assurance Program

The VimpelCom Group consists of telecommunications operators providing voice and data services through a range of mobile, fixed and broadband technologies. It includes companies operating in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Armenia, as well as Vietnam and Cambodia–territories with a total population of about 340 million.
 
As those countries developed healthy appetites for communications products and services, VimpelCom saw an enormous spike in the demand for its services and turned to Accenture for a new revenue assurance function and a cutting-edge switch-to-bill monitoring system.

Revenue leakage is particularly difficult to control during periods of robust growth. For example, as a communications company rapidly gains new customers and develops new products and services to serve them, tracking network usage and ensuring accurate billing becomes very complex. Indeed, a major contributor to the strong growth posted by VimpelCom in the past few years has been the broad array of plans the company has offered: pre-paid and post-paid services, short message services (SMS) and voice and mobile data, all delivered across a variety of technologies and on varying terms (with respect to marketing offerings, tariff plans and options).

While VimpelCom management was pleased with the company’s high rate of growth, it was also concerned the company might be losing revenue. Thus, it embarked on an initiative to develop the revenue assurance capabilities it needed to identify and eliminate sources of revenue leakage.

After carefully assessing VimpelCom’s situation in areas and revenue leakages, Accenture set out to help the company design and build its first revenue assurance function and implement both a set of effective quick-win solutions and a new cutting-edge switch-to-bill monitoring system.

Together, the new function and system would help position managers to detect, prevent, analyze and fix revenue leakages all along the revenue stream.

The joint Accenture and VimpelCom project team followed Accenture’s four-phase revenue assurance program. After studying four segments of VimpelCom’s revenue stream—order-to-delivery, order-to-bill, usage-to-bill and bill-to-cash—the team found 75 potential areas leading to leakage of several million dollars and a possible several million dollars in additional lost income.

In its finished state, the new tool automates and manages VimpelCom’s end-to-end revenue assurance processes, seeking out evidence of revenue leakages in large volumes of data from a wide variety of sources, including the company’s voice, SMS, roaming and interconnection traffic.

With its new capabilities in place, VimpelCom now can closely monitor the revenue chain from the point at which a new subscriber begins using the company’s network to the generation of accurate invoices for that usage. In fact, the new system achieves up to 99.8 percent reconciliation accuracy, despite processing more than 1 billion call data records (CDRs) in 26 different data formats per day.

The new switch-to-bill system also provides VimpelCom with more than 100 key performance indicators and 30 reports that enable the revenue assurance function to identify, analyze and fix revenue leakages.

VimpelCom’s revenue assurance capabilities are expected to be a major asset for the company as it looks to continue its strong growth and pursue high performance in the years to come.