Tier 1 South American Operator Implements WeDo Soft Revenue Assurance Software

São Paulo , October 2004 – WeDo Soft, a leading provider of software solutions for the communications & media markets, announced today the implementation of its Revenue Assurance product (RAID) at a Tier 1 Fixed Operator in Brazil, part of one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking markets. This company has a significant presence in 15 countries, but operations in almost 40. It boasts a strong presence in Latin America, with operations in eight countries following a clear growth strategy.

The implementation of WeDo’s software product, RAID, marks a new phase of the Operator’s aggressive Revenue Assurance program providing it with an important tool towards automation.

RAID enables the integration and automation of all Revenue Assurance control processes and is WeDo's answer to the difficulties experienced by both mature and start-up telecom operators in maintaining the coherency between their entire BSS, OSS and network systems portfolio, and identifying and controlling revenue leakage.

"Revenue Assurance is a very important area for us and this project marks another milestone in our improvement initiatives. The use of RAID as a highly configurable dedicated tool means that we can integrate our control mechanisms and assure data consistency between operational platforms. We can also monitor revenue streams in an automated way, thus empowering our Team to consistently deliver added-value to our business," said the Operator’s Head of Billing and Revenue Assurance.

João Valente , WeDo Brazil Country Manager added "RAID positions WeDo as one of the leading companies in the Revenue Assurance arena. This implementation of RAID marks yet another validation by the marketplace of WeDo’s current investments into RAID, a software product that complements the traditional approaches to Revenue Assurance."

About RAID

The RAID solution permits the definition and implementation of the Revenue Assurance processes most adequate to each technological infrastructure and business requirements allowing for Revenue Assurance teams to save effort on usually time-consuming task and to dedicate all resources to the performing root cause analysis.

RAID is an important tool for any telecom operator worldwide that wishes to prevent revenue loss due to data inconsistencies between their different systems – network components, operational systems and business support systems.

RAID is a modular solution comprised of:

• The Platform Integrity Assurance Module performs automatic verification of subscriber data consistency between different OSS and BSS platforms. This RAID module validates discrepancies through a process of comparison across systems, such as Switches, Billing and CRM systems, and generates divergence reports and alarms.
• The Revenue Flow Control Module audits the revenue chain, from event generation to the integration of these records in invoices sent to subscribers. This module monitors the exchange of information between the different systems of the revenue chain, identifying possible failures or deviations, which could lead to revenue loss, as is often the case.
• The Events Control module is used to monitor the event processing chain, by tracking a sample of events, individually, from CDR generation in the switching centrals and/or service platforms to their inclusion in the invoices sent to subscribers. It also measures the performance of the flow of these events contributing for determining levels of service. This module is highly complementary to standard Test Call Generators.

About WeDo Soft

WeDo Soft, a division of WeDo Consulting, is a leading provider of software solutions for the communications & media markets. With an international presence, WeDo Soft is an ISO9001: 2000 certified organization, and a member of the GSM Association, as a provider of applications and systems.

Customers include Orange, Vodafone, Telefónica, Amena, Optimus, Novis, Oi, Telemar, Telecom Americas and Cabovisão. WeDo Soft can be found on the World Wide Web at www.wedosoft.com

WeDo Soft launches Roaming Analytics to provide effective monitoring and control of the roaming business

Portugal , July, 26 th 2004 - WeDo Soft, a provider of software solutions for the global telecommunications market, announces its newest solution to provide a single and complete view of the roaming business across the organization – Roaming Analytics.

Roaming Analytics was designed to collect raw roaming traffic data and transform it into useful and reliable information and meet nearly every analytical need of several user profiles, from marketing and roaming to IT and engineering. Roaming Analytics gathers data from several sources, such as TAP (Transfer Account Procedure) files, Interconnection systems, Data Warehouse and Billing and presents it through pre-defined, customizable reports. These reports are intended to cover key areas of the roaming business, namely roaming partners, settlement, traffic, call patterns and special services, and to correlate roaming information with other customer related data, such as segments, products, and channels.

Roaming Analytics was designed to provide short implementation timeframes and low risk project deployments. It can be placed on top of WeDo Soft’s Roaming Management Solution (RMS), a solution that manages the complexity of the roaming business and automates the process of TAP and RAP generation and management, and provide the analytical capabilities that the roaming team requires to support their decisions. Additionally, it may be included in WeDo Soft’s business intelligence framework CKS (Customer Knowledge Solution) as new information domain to provide a unified view of the customer base. Alternatively, it can be deployed as standalone and fully integrated with the existing information systems’ environment.

“Roaming Analytics is the result of our extensive experience in dealing with marketing, roaming, and IT users in Telecom Operators. We truly understand their needs as well as the importance of the roaming business to the overall performance. Therefore this solution is able to provide the ability to monitor the roaming business performance, correlate roaming usage with other services usage, and effectively control costs and revenues and understand their contribution to the overall business.”, states João Faisca, WeDo Consulting’s International Marketing and Sales Director.

About CKS (Customer Knowledge Solution)

Implemented at the most innovative providers in Europe and Latin America, CKS provides a world class business intelligence framework specifically designed to meet the needs of the Telecom business. CKS covers the complete information cycle - from collection to storage and exploration – that is relevant for the decision making process. Its modular and scalable architecture integrates several information domains: Customer, Traffic, Supply Chain, Financials and Churn, which complement each other to allow for a unique and integrated vision of the customer and its value.

About RMS (Roaming Management Solution)

RMS is a central Roaming system, uniquely positioned to provide Mobile Operators with an effective tool that supports advanced services, covers the entire life cycle of a Roaming Agreement and manages all processes related to Roaming Services.

With RMS, it is easier to produce and process TAP files, make TADIG tests, re-price and manage the entire operational process and it is also possible to produce HUR, and many different functional and operational alarms giving more control to the operator.

About WeDo Soft

WeDo Soft is a leading provider of software solutions and services for the communications & media markets in Europe and Latin America. With an international presence, WeDo Soft is an ISO9001: 2000 certified organization, and a member of the GSM Association, as a provider of Billing applications and systems. WeDo Soft is a division of WeDo Consulting and can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.wedosoft.com/Site/en/default.htm

Tips for launching an efficient revenue assurance project

Today is unquestionable the opportunity that lies in the African market. It is an emergent market that is clearly leapfrogging some of the challenges that more mature markets faced in the last couple of years.

Revenue assurance has become a very hot topic and operators are showing, more and more concern on how to tackle this problem. With revenue leakage running as high as 10% of all the company revenues, it is time to act.

This concern is addressed differently in the several regional African markets. For example there are countries more advanced not only on the detection of the revenue leakage in the revenue and activation chain but also deploying tools. Other operators are addressing revenue assurance through small projects, manual and home made solutions to address pain areas and others are still in a stage of learning what revenue assurance is and it can help to stop the revenue leakage.

Regardless the stage that the different operators are in, one aspect is sure, by addressing the revenue leakage issue today, when there is still so much potential growth, operators are creating the conditions to control their systems infrastructures in the long term.

Before launching a Revenue Assurance project, operators must take in consideration that there are a certain number of aspects that should be taken in consideration.

First of all, it is absolutely critical to start by performing an independent internal audit in order to identify and understand where the problems are. The lack of reliable data can be a barrier to truly understand the dimension of the problem; operators must have in place mechanism to overcome this situation, the IT organization has a very important role in providing the necessary resources to support the internal audit.

This assessment phase can also help the revenue assurance manager or whoever is in charge of the project to build a strong and compelling business case to present to top management and justify the investment in this type of initiative. A pilot, with a specific scope, in conjunction with the audit and process definition can also be a very interesting choice to help build the business case.

After this initial effort, the organization should have a clear picture of what needs to be done. The true change starts now.

A revenue assurance project is transversal to the organization, it touches all departments, especially IT and engineering, and there is a need to define new process and change the culture in order to be align with this new reality and strategy. Due to its global approach and top management support this type of projects has a very high visibility within the organization, so extra care and attention should be dedicated to it.

A tool can help the operator to proactive tackle the revenue assurance issue. By automatically tracking and analyzing the revenue flow and platform integrity it can prevent problems from happening and when they do happen the time that takes to detect and solve is substantially smaller.

These are just some issues that operators, that are considering and launching projects to tackle revenue leakage, must consider. WeDo Soft has a strong offer, experience and references to help operators address this critical challenge.

Nuno Periquito
Product Manager and Alliances
WeDo Soft, October 2004