China Telecom Case Study Revealing

I must say that I read the China Telecom case study with a great deal of interest.

Within that brief 5 page pdf that Hongtuan has provided is some fascinating insight and some of the things that most stood out to me were:

  • Stating that the initiative had an ROI of 6 months based on the leakage identified, but that the vendors probably invested more effort than they were compensated for.
  • Knowing that there may be 93 RA opportunities in China means that any effort to integrate these systems to reduce cost must also be an opportunity and, potentially, represent a far more complex and significant RA challenge to ensure they are correct.
  • The greatest challenge was the people in the operational areas. I am sure there were technical issues around data acquisition, business rule extraction, processing and exception analysis and iteration, and even how to fix the identified leakages but the fact that these issues were not as significant as the people issues is probably not unfamiliar to many of us.
  • The source of biggest leakage was around data synchronisation. For me this is one of the big 3 most likely leakages (alongside event record processing and bill calculation accuracy – all of which were assessed). I suspect that this may be one of the most difficult issues to address as customer contact may be needed for each individual case identified.
  • Lastly, the lack of findings in price plan accuracy, despite many rates and some complexity there though I note the comment that it was difficult to verify the accuracy of these. This perhaps infers that there may still be leakage out there, it just hasn’t yet been found.

My thanks to Hongtuan and China Telecom for providing this. Next piece of reading: Lee’s C&W presentation.

Mike Willett
Mike Willett

Mike is a Partner at Ernst & Young. He is responsible for enterprise intelligence across the AsiaPac region, helping clients to improve their management and use of data. He can be contacted at: [email protected].

Mike was previously the Director for Fraud & Revenue Assurance at leading Australian operator Telstra. He started his career at BellSouth (now Vodafone) in New Zealand and then moved to Praesidium Services in the UK. Mike graduated from the University of Auckland in New Zealand with degrees in psychology and marketing.

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