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Guide for NRAs on International Mobile Roaming Cost analysis – Technical Paper

2.2.1 Business process modelling and MNO

How do we cost the elements in the diagram above? The operational world of MNO is organized as a
series of business processes – and platforms designed to support each operational process, everyone
with its staff and support assets. Business processes describe and govern all operations – from the
signing on by a roaming subscriber to the billing process and inter-operator charging, including the
various negotiations for IOT agreements between MNOs to set up roaming agreements and then
monitor them. Business process analysis (BPA) is used here, involving a dissection of business activities
into a chain of activities.

2.2.2 Use cases enable MNO-independent analysis

The flaw in this approach is that each MNO is different and its implementation of business processes
may be subtly dissimilar.

To overcome this, the concept of use cases is introduced to the analytic model. They may be seen as a
sort of mini-scenario of typical basic use from the subscriber's viewpoint, not the MNO's. Hence use
cases provide an approach with the power to distinguish costs across all types and sizes of MNOs, as it is
based on the subscribers' requirements, which are largely unchanging when roaming.

Figure 2 – Two views of the same assets and their costs – MNO and subscriber views

The basis of the cost model - USE CASES drawn from actual operational
behaviour:-
•To define the business processes, with staff and support infrastructure with its
software / hardware
•And therefore to identify the cost structures of international mobile roaming
services with the elements, processes and resources concerned in each

MNO Business Assets Use cases Roaming
View Processes Subscriber
Sales perspective
Back office
& Marketing Use case 4
& Finance Use case 3
Customer care
Assets Use case 2
Billing required Receive call
Use case 1
Network Make local
ops call

Costs
of
SCF
Assets
used

Each activity may then be examined as to its needs, with attribution of the resources necessary, be they
human resources, network elements and/or IT support systems, including the main MNO infrastructure
elements such as data centres, call centres or network operations centres (NOCs).

This may yield the costs, if attributed by element. So breaking down each step of the business process
and then costing that step produces a detailed cost attribution, bottom up. This may be viewed as a
simplified form of traditional activity based costing (ABC). An example is shown below:

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