Revenue Assurance for Utilities
A number of activities contribute to revenue leakage. These include incorrect customer accounts and contracts, faulty metering, inaccurate billing, ineffective collections, theft, etc. Studies reveal that leakage accounts for 1% to 5% of utilities revenues in developed countries and as high as 20% in developing countries.SymSure enables disparate silos of information to be linked in order to provide a comprehensive ‘meter to bill’ view of the business, and to allow all stakeholders to access information in a common portal. This gives visibility into the business processes and fosters greater efficiencies resulting in revenue assurance.
Preventative Controls
The focus of the solution is to automate the monitoring of the company’s service and billing processes. Detecting anomalies and alerting the relevant persons will prevent and/or minimize revenue leakage. Most errors that result in revenue losses occur in advance of the actual loss. For example, a customer whose account is incorrectly rated will not result in a loss until billing is done but if detected early, the loss is preventable.
SymSure Revenue Assurance Solution
The utility company is allowed to define an end-to-end control environment including creation of customer accounts, commission of service, metering, billing, payment and collections. Once completed, SymSure’s monitoring framework examines all electronic activities to detect control breaches and alert the relevant persons automatically.
In most instances these processes are managed by multiple systems. However, there are no “blind spots” in SymSure’s approach because there is a virtual consolidation of the systems to create a single view of the business. This solution is deployed to all the relevant stakeholders; assigning them revenue assurance tasks and ensuring that they are addressed in a timely manner.
Revenue Assurance
Revenue assurance generally refers to a methodology to increase a company’s income by identifying where revenue gets lost, and minimizing such losses by eliminating revenue leakage and lowering operating costs.
Utility companies generally face mounting difficulties in safeguarding their revenues. In times of increasing data volume and complex systems, finding methods to detect revenue leakage and implementing an infrastructure to address it is challenging.