Introduction to Mark Spracklen, Leader/facilitator of the Telecoms Profitability Interest Group.
I have been practising Telecoms Costing, Profitability and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) for over 25 years. The last 8 years in an operator looking after Price approvals, as well as setting the Finance run Cost model requirements, and doing the internal audits.
After over 25 years of implementing Profitability, I am now focusing on training and developing better solutions and methods. Part of this is leading the IG, where I will try and facilitate communications between different Operators, so they can help each other find better solutions.
You can email me at Mark@Profitability-Analytics.org
Mission Statement of the Telecoms Profitability Interest Group (IG)
To bring together Operators, Consultants and Software providers to realise the potential of Profitability to grow the Revenue through better Pricing.
The IG will allow all interested people to share ideas, get help with existing problems, and hopefully find better ways of doing things, leading to better solutions.
There are four main areas:
1. Costing. While most operators have Regulatory Cost models, these are not always suitable for Profitability, but most can be quickly adapted. The biggest challenge is Retail Costs, which are often just allocated based on Revenue. A better understanding of how these vary by Channel, Tariff and Products is needed.
2. Revenue. Recent changes to the way Bundles are treated using IFRS rules mean that most Revenue in the financial GL Accounts is unsuitable for Profitability and needs to be calculated differently.
3. Profitability, Customer Lifetime Value, and Pricing. There is no one answer to this, and it depends on the Tariffs. For example, for some Pricing, like 5G, it may make sense to exclude Fixed Costs. To gain a fundamental understanding by using advanced analytics, Individual Customer Profitability is needed. The methodology to do this is no different from the traditional views, it just requires much more powerful software tools that can process the Millions of Customers and Billions of Product combinations.
4. Analytics and AI. Profitability on its own adds very little value! “Actionable Information” allows Marketing to design better pricing and better target offers that add real value. Analysing the vast amounts of Telecom’s data is extremely difficult and requires in-depth knowledge of the industry, particularly Pricing. Often, existing solutions have standard views like Product, Tariff, Channel, Business/Residential, Post/Prepaid, and some simple Value (Revenue) base Segmentation. What is really needed is Dynamic Segmentation to see why certain groups of Customers are more Profitable than others. I believe that AI can help a lot with this; it will not replace analysts but is a powerful tool they can use to get new insight into the data.
My background.
CVA solutions, 9 Months. Independant consultant.
Working on developing my Best Practice, methods and training.
Implementing small Costing and Profitability projects for Operators and one Regulator.
Built a Bundle Revenue modelling solution to solve the IFRS problem using some well-known software.
Ooredoo Qatar/Group, 8 Years. In Regulatory/Telecoms Economics, responsible for:
Price models. This mainly involved working with Marketing. These were Forecast Profitability models. These were mainly used to validate Commercial price proposals and get the Regulatory Price approval required to launch the new Prices.
Revenue Modelling. Due to issues with the new IFRS rules, many financially reported Revenues are not suitable for Profitability and Pricing.
All Regulatory Reporting, Volumes and Revenues dashboard.
Interconnection and Wholesale pricing, benchmarking, and Economic arguments to support these.
Accounting Separation. Requirements and Review of Finance created Model. These were used as inputs to the Pricing above.
Tax/Royalty calculations. But using the profitability models and using IFRS rules, we managed to reduce these by >>$10M a year!
CVA, 12 years.
After leaving Deloitte, I founded a niche consultancy to offer Telecoms solutions:
Profitability and Regulatory models were implemented in dozens of operators.
Worked with the SAS Institute to develop their Profitability solutions.
Did due diligence and Company valuations.
Deloitte 8 Years.
I was the Project Manager of the Customer and Product Profitability (CPP) project, where we created the first Multi-Dimensional Costing and Profitability models and developed a Best Practise Methodology. This was implemented by many operators like Vodafone and Vodacom.
Later the Advanced Mobile Solution Set (AMSS), where I focused on advanced analytics and the use of AI to give Marketing better tools for Pricing and Tariff design to improve Profitability.
At Deloitte I was a qualified trainer and trained many 100’s of consultants, Operators and Regulators.
I'm looking forward to the launch of this interest group. It should generate some very interesting discussions!