Protecting revenue in the distribution industry: a new approach with the revenue assurance and audit process

This paper presents the main aspects regarding nontechnical losses-NTL, including energy theft, frauds, process and IT flaws, data inconsistencies and bad debt and an innovative approach to protect revenue. The proposed new approach is the implementation of a formal RAAP-revenue assurance and audit process-that organizes, integrates, prioritizes and optimizes all initiatives to reduce NTL. This process guarantees that NTL will be detected, analyzed and fixed, and that all started initiatives will be followed up until termination, then feeding back the process to improve other new initiatives, so reassuring the effectiveness. This formal revenue assurance process is supported by software, fully documented and auditable, and integrated with other internal processes, as field inspection, commercial, customer support, auditing, etc. The revenue assurance and audit process (RAAP) described in this paper allows the distribution company to face NTLs with a formally-organized process using automated tools, and to be ready to execute revenue management according to ISO 9000 standards best practices. A case study with field results will be also presented.