But for employees to support the Revenue Assurance Team and act responsively in fixing leakages detected in their units, they have to undertake commitment for these actions. This is the only possible solution to turn a request from the Revenue Assurance Team from a “favour” into “a duty” and thus ensure that that request is addressed as thoroughly and quickly as necessary. To commit key employees in all business functions, Revenue Assurance has to be incorporated in their yearly objectives. This is definitely a decision that has to be supported by the organization’s management, and for which the involvement of top executives in Revenue Assurance plays an important role.

Rule#4: Save resources in creating internal synergies and sharing knowledge!

When setting up a Revenue Assurance business function, organizations tend to believe that this new infrastructure requires major investments. In fact, experiences have shown that most resources performing the Revenue Assurance process can easily be made available to the organization in creating internal synergies as well as participating in the exchange of knowledge.

Most of the non-human resources required for Revenue Assurance, e.g. the workflow management system, are already avail­able in other business functions and can be used for the leakage escalation process. Data reconciliations can be carried out in partnership with the IT team. Further similar initiatives can help reduce the overhead costs and minimize the investment required for Revenue Assurance activities.

Tracking and rectifying leakages are very knowledge-extensive activities. Looking for leakages is pointless unless you know what areas must be investigated with priority. Time and ­effort can be saved when rectification measures applied have been ­tested and proven to be successful beforehand. To optimize its Revenue ­Assurance activities, an organization largely ­benefits from a knowledge database, recording specific ­Revenue ­Assurance-related scenarios – detailing real leakages cases – and their associated implemented controls and rectification ­measures. As scenarios are very likely to be similar for different organization, the database can be quite quickly expanded in ­actively participating in a regular knowledge sharing with external parties. Similarly, participating in industry benchmarking can not only provide good indicators of the organization’s Revenue Assurance performance with that of its peers, but can also provide updates of the current controls and KPIs used to monitor operations in the industry. Also, participating in the establishment of industry standards often reveals to be beneficial to organizations, as it provides a platform for discussing practices with other organizations, most likely facing the very same issues, and enables them to closely follow the latest developments within the RA community.