Revenue Assurance Software

TRI: So when an RA software vendor comes calling and wants to show you its fancy dials and slick bar charts, what do you say?

Romano: I say, you need to sell that capability to someone else. What I need is a strong correlation capability so I can drill down for further analysis.

Now we're using Subex's Moneta for a lot of what we do. It allows us to create buckets of customers who all have a certain symptom, and that allows us to be very targeted in investigating business problems.

Think of it as a set of automated queries. Once the buckets are created, we send them off to an internal analyst who looks at the issue, then it goes back to IT for correction. We decide whether or not we correct the issue and do that all in Moneta. Our long range goal is to keep all the workflow within Moneta and not have to offload data onto other systems.

Going forward, we're eager to get out of the product-centric mindset. That's tough to do because order flows are unique to products -- each product has its own work order processes because they get provisioned differently.

Yet we think the secret to good RA practices is to aggregate at the customer level first, then aggregate up.