A Tale of Tools

I was recently part of an eminent panel of evaluators that was looking at various RA tools. [I am important, after all. In Africa, there is a saying that if a child washes his hands, he can eat with kings]. The exercise entailed going through vendor responses on hard-copy and soft-copy. I hasten to add that this is not a task I would wish upon my worst enemy, but endless cups of gourmet coffee made it bearable. Everything was fine until it became clear (from some of the questions being asked around the room) that different people (drawn from Procurement, IT and Finance) had either very little knowledge of what we were looking for (hence very little clue as to some of the key functionalities that the system should deliver or they had other things to handle hence as much as they were busy on their laptops, they were doing other office work. However, I noticed people suddenly lightened up when the subject of site-visits came up. Globe trotting is attractive :)

Two problems:

i) An evaluation panel for a multi-million dollar system yet some of the members of the panel are unclear on what they are looking for, mostly because they either lack the theoretical and practical background in RA and Fraud Management but even when they have this background, there is lack of clarity on the strategy being pursued by the RAFM team.

ii) A busy team which views the selection of the tool as just another to-do.

Two risks:

i) CSP could end up with a system that nobody wants, nobody understands and nobody knows what went wrong. Blame-game ensues between vendor and CSP. Vendor thinks he delivered what the CSP wanted.CSP thinks vendor did not deliver what he wanted. Vendor wonders if CSP really knew what he wanted. CSP thinks vendor is over-rated and a hawker of BS. (Suddenly the hero of the moment, in complete disregard of the motto: pat-a-pet, draws a gun and shoots both vendor and CSP, sparing the rest of us the agony of seeing two wet dogs chasing their tails on the dinner table?)

ii) Arising from the above, millions of dollars down the drain in the form of CAPEX and OPEX, revenue leakages and frauds are still happening. Not to mention the two wet carcasses that we now need to furtively dispose of and the risk of having to answer annoying queries from the Society for the Protection and Care of Animals.

TMF's GB941 Revenue Assurance RFx Guidelines has some gems three of which I found worth rehashing. CSPs should especially go through this document before engaging in procurement of RA tools. Basically, there are some things that one should be looking for:

Phased Solution: Aim for a nicely comprehensive solution but be realistic that you won't achieve all at one go. If you promised the CEO complete RA automation in the next 2 months, good luck to you.  It won't happen.

Solution Description: rather than a product description, what solutions are we seeking? This is critical. Vendors employ good marketers. If you don’t know what you want, i.e. the solution that you are seeking, then you will be lost in the bells and whistles (great sounding features which may be good for another CSP but not appropriate in your case)

Growth Potential: need to be clear on transitions between the defined project phases, evolution to reflect changes in the operator's circumstances and maturity enhancement. Consider how the tool is supposed to help your RA team move up the maturity levels. With regard to revenue assurance strategy, the solution obtained must fit in and support it.

Is it any wonder that the 2009 KPMG survey on revenue assurance found that a significant number of CSPs are unhappy with their RA tools? The report states that approximately 43% of RA heads and senior management indicated they were either only partially satisfied or were not satisfied with the application of RA tools. Granted, every report from Big4 needs to be read with a BIG question mark but that is a topic for another day. Maybe they should have asked how many of the RA heads and senior management had been on a site-visit to evaluate a system in the last 3-years…I am sure the figure would be >43%:)