Today’s converged communications environment, with its increasingly high volume of inter-connected services, third party operator and content partner agreements, and disparate OSS/BSS systems across all functional areas in a Communications Services Provider’s (CSP) business, carries a much greater risk of revenue leakage, cost overruns and customer dissatisfaction. And with the impending explosion in end-user bandwidth requirements and Cloud services stressing their existing systems and processes, the need for more sophisticated business assurance and financial controls is of paramount importance for CSPs to weather the storm.
Benefits To You and Your Customers
With Cartesian’s Ascertain® Business Assurance Suite, CSPs can monitor, analyse and reconcile data from the myriad of network elements, OSS/BSS systems and 3rd party content and network providers that exist within their company. By having access to this all-important data, CSPs are able to assure their business and optimise their revenue, costs and customer satisfaction by:
- Minimising revenue losses
- Minimising incorrect billing
- Reconciling network inventory
- Reconciling 3rd party charges
- Mitigating fraud
The award-winning Ascertain® Business Assurance Suite includes the following solutions, each designed to provide assurances, and solve operator business problems, within distinct functional areas:
| Ascertain® BA Solution |
Operator Benefit |
| Reference Data Assurance |
Ensures there is data integrity across your OSS/BSS platforms |
| Usage Assurance |
Ensures that all usage is processed completely, accurately and on time |
| Rating and Tariff Assurance |
Ensures that tariff rating data held in multiple systems are aligned |
| Risk and Compliance Assurance |
Ensures that fraud (including subscription fraud and SIM bypass) is minimised across all events and transactional channels |
| Network Inventory Assurance |
Ensures that there is alignment in network inventory, across all network elements and Operator’s OSS/BSS platforms |
| Settlement Assurance |
Ensures that the invoices from partners are in alignment with Operator’s records. Partners can be channel partners, 3rd party content providers, etc. |
| Order Management and Provisioning Assurance |
Ensures there is alignment on customer and network orders throughout the order-to-cash process. |
| Network Settlement Assurance |
Allows the Operator to validate payments to 3rd party network transport and equipment providers at the detailed inventory level. |
| Event Search |
Allows the Operator to archive and search event records either to support analysis into assurance issues or to comply with local legal and regulatory requirements. |
How it works
The Ascertain® Business Assurance Suite has been designed to solve the revenue and cost management problems of Fixed, Mobile, Broadband and Cable operators. Its flexible, open, industry-standard architecture, which shares a common core across the business assurance functional modules, allows maximum Operator benefit from Cartesian’s R&D investment. The core components of the Ascertain® Business Assurance Suite are:
- Integration and Enrichment Layer, which handles the data extraction
- Processing and Logic Engine, which contain the functional modules that drive the business assurance solutions
- Dashboard Layer, which provides user-defined views and reports and is the centralized monitoring point
- Case Management Layer, which turn actionable data into meaningful and measurable results
- Process/Workflow Management Layer, which provides the capability for routing of exceptions / cases to various members for proper handling
- Knowledge Management Layer, which provides users with a ‘wiki’-style pre-populated knowledge base
Why Cartesian and TMNG Global
Cartesian and parent company TMNG Global have more than twenty years of experience working with service providers and vendors in Networking, IT, BSS and OSS. We are both vendor-neutral and technology agnostic, which is unique in today’s marketplace, and we understand the strengths and weaknesses of different hardware configurations, software applications and platforms. By coupling our award-winning Ascertain® Business Assurance Suite of software solutions with our industry-leading team of business assurance experts, rest assured that with Cartesian and TMNG Global, as the complexities of your services, suppliers, technologies and customer demands increase, your ability to manage and optimize your revenue, costs and customer experience will also increase.
