open source revenue assurance

Motivations

1.What

It started around 2010 when the company which I worked had just forming up new RA group and there was no revenue assurance tools. With tight budget as a start-up mobile company,RA had to start something manual to detect revenue leakages. That is when we came out writing our own script performed reconciliation, trending analysis, gap analysis, rejection analysis and re-rating.
This is an open source revenue assurance project. This project is free, anybody can take the source code, run the program and detect revenue leakages in your company. This project is licensed under GPL.

2.mission statement:

to create as an international community, providing free revenue assurance tools to all service operators through open component based API and architecture.

3.Objective:

    -To solve global operators major concern-COST.
    -To give service operators a better choice to invest in low cost RA tools.
    -To give service operators a quick detection of revenue leakages with fast installation.
    -To develop extensive and various gaps detection techniques through open modular architecture.
    -To give better operational support and solution through open community.
    -To support operators wide transformation with low cost budget.

4. People:

In this project,there will be 2 types of people.

    -Developer.
    -Users.
Developer are the people who design and develop the source code. Developer are the expert in the programming language and software life cycle.
Users are the people who mainly employed by the service operators.They might be finance manager,billing manager,RA or Fraud analyst or operation analyst who are interested to use this tools to detect gaps in revenue. When the user used this tools to find revenue leakages,eventually they are adding value to this project by contributing ideas on techniques of detection

4. Features and Requirements

-reconciliation. -trending analysis. -rerating. -gap analysis.

5. Terminology

    -Revenue Assurance - a function within a company to detect gaps of revenue along the revenue value chain end to end.
    -Operators - Service provider to customer, e.g mobile operators, fixed line operators, electricity operators or utilities operators
    -CDR - common data record, a set of record capturing the usage of the customer.
    -OSS - operation support system,the support facilities that carry and deliver the service to the customer
    -BSS - billing support system, the support facitities that capture the service for invoicing and billing purposes.

5. Development Status

The program are now still at design stage. We welcome interested developer to join this project. Below is brief architecture of the software.
    ETL stand for extract, transform and loading are the fundamental of this software.
    COLLECTION is a module to collect the raw files from various source systems like switching, network or billing system through various protocols like ftp or s-ftp. COLLECTION also allows database to database connectivity like ORACLE, MSSQL or dsn.
    EXTRACTION is a module to read various types of files ranges from binary and ASCII, including ASN.1, CSV, Excel, text, HTML, email and many more. EXTRACTION used PLUG-IN to read these files.
    PLUG-IN is the adapter to read and translate collected file above from switching and billing. PLUG-IN will read binary ASN.1 file and specification of the file format are specify in XML file. This is to avoid commercial violation with the big player like Ericssons, Nokia Siemens or Alcatel.
    TRANSFORM is a module that enriched the raw records into Meta data. This is the place where normalization, filtering and grouping are happening. TRANSFORM required data.
    LOADING is a module where getting the result from TRANSFORM and inserting them into database which are partition, indexed and optimized for faster viewing later.
    ENGINE is the module which contains various techniques of doing RA. In our first release, we have completed to build reconciliation MODULE. Users are allowed to customize MODULE during installation.

Examples of ENGINE are:

  • RECONCILIATION
  • RERATING
  • PROFILING
  • TREND ANALYSIS
  • GAP ANALYSIS

    • 6. Download Code

      Below are the setup environment to run this code
  • Operations System : UBUNTU 11
  • Compiler : Python 2.7
  • Database server: Mysql
  • IDE : Aptana Studio 3
      • Download here. I will soon park this code under freecode.com. Need more time.

    7. Version Control and Bug Tracker Access

    8. Communication Channels

      -forum (mailing list)
      -facebook.
      -what's app(android,Iphone).
      -RSS
      -wikis

    rules: Try to avoid private discussion. Please discuss all here in forum.Zero tolerance toward rude or insulting behavior.

    9. Documentation

    No documentation yet. Waiting for volunteers to support this project.

    10. Example Output and ScreenShots