Featured Case Study

The Problem

A general statistic by the TMF is that all Telcos lose approximately 5% of gross revenue through leakages - this is a large problem for all Telcos. With an annual revenue of around 1bn C&W International estimated that this amounted to 50m per year over across the 33 business units worldwide and went in search of ways to reduce this.

The Solution

C&W identified 120 touch points across the billing chain that were potential areas for leakage - these are points that should have controls but C&W needed a way to force people to use a common methodology for recording revenue leakage. In addition to this each month reports were required by the CEO and CFO of each operating country so that remedial action could be undertaken to ensure leakage is reduced

How Symbox made this Possible

1) A consultant from Symbox was engaged to help define C&Ws Statement of Requirements (SoR) along with the head of Revenue Assurance and Price Waterhouse Coopers. This early engagement is a typical model for Symbox and demonstrates our ability to add value to projects in a consultative capacity and to work with and compliment existing teamsduring the process design and project definition stages. We use our experience of process automation to ensure that SoRs and Project Definitions are accurate and achievable and that maximum benefit can be derived from the automation of workflow.

2) Symbox was deployed rapidly as a web based system with a user self-registration process reducing administrative requirements to a simple Approval stage by authorised managers (no IT or system admin input required which was important as users were all over the world). The system is simple to use and all training was provided over the web.

3) Symbox is the tool that records all of the leakages and manages the actions required to resolve them. Incidents and their associated leakage data is gathered from all the toolsets deployed by the client and recorded against a leakage points framework

4) Symbox also provides a reporting framework for the leakages across many levels i.e Country reporting, consolidated reporting for the UK , financial controller report, FD & CEO report per country. Web-based reports have been designed for individuals at each level of thee organisation from RA Analysts, to Business Unit Managers, Regional managers and Head Office RA management. Users of the system are setup against an organisational hierarchy to ensure they can only report on specific levels of information

5) Being a process based system the solution is based on the way C&W wished to work to implement their RA strategy, including the Incident Management Process, Monthly Report Submission from Business Unit Managers, Improving Business Controls Analysis, Setting up of the properties of each business unit by its own manager and user self-registration and password management.

Benefits

The monthly report submission process for each Business Unit manager proceeds in a structured workflow to ensure that due diligence is applied by the BU owner to each of the leakage points relevant to his/her business unit or region. The Controls Analysis Process is used to regularly gather data from each Business Unit about the type, quality and effectiveness of the controls they have in place to monitor each leakage point in the framework.
One of the benefits of using Symbox as a workflow tool is that as the scope of project requirements increase over the period of the project which they did in this case, it was possible to add in additional workflows and reports easily.
Symbox was able to provide consultants that not only fully understand the problems around a global deployment of revenue assurance but who have delivered a solution that was in and working in the required timescale.