Essentials of Network Cost Management

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Creative ways of looking at billing, customer and network data will help providers unlock the value within and develop the intelligence required to deliver enhanced, personalized services and ensure the revenue from them. This quartet of articles examines different approaches to assuring maximum revenue from your services today as well as the services of the not-so-distant future.

Table of Contents:

TRACKING THE EVENT LIFE CYCLE
	We’ve heard a lot about the service life cycle and life cycle management, but every event that happens in a switch or on a network has its own life cycle. Being able to track this life cycle and all the processes that touch it can have a significant effect on the ability to reconcile billing discrepancies and reduce the amount of revenue lost to unbillable events.
THE UNIFIED CDR
	Call detail records (CDRs) have been mined for business intelligence purposes for years. But working with CDRs alone is like working with half your brain. Computing power, correlation software and data mining appliances have now made it possible to enhance those billions of CDRs with data from other sources to create new levels of insight.
MANAGING YOUR MARGINS
	Cost management and revenue management are two pillars that support strong financial performance. But their full effect is in managing the margins. This article will look at how the output from both solution pillars should be viewed together to get a clearer picture of profitability.
THIRD PARTY BILLING
	There’s tremendous complexity in business relationships between telecom service providers and their third-party content providers and the efforts to reconcile them financially. The telecom world has evolved from relatively static and regulated to multiservice and on-demand, and that’s driving new billing requirements.
ADVERTORIAL: MARGIN MANAGEMENT: LEAST-COST ROUTING 2.0
	Automating switch translations is the cornerstone of least-cost routing, but it's only part of a total routing management solution. A more comprehensive approach extends beyond the network operations department to provide value across the service provider organization and ultimately delivers margin management. TEOCO Corp., through its recent acquisition of Vero Systems, is pioneering the margin assurance discipline with its Web-based routing management suite. The portfolio includes four modules that work in concert to provide a continuous feedback loop of critical information service providers need to optimize their routing by balancing cost and quality on a real-time basis.