Revenue Opportunities Research Articles

AirConn: A framework for tiered services in public wireless LAN hot spots

Access to the data services via wireless LANs at private and public hot spot sites is becoming commonplace. The goal of the airConn project is to define an architecture and a prototype implementation that enable the provision of premium and non-premium service tiers for both transient and nontransient users of wireless hot spots. airConn provides for dynamic renegotiation of service tiers and facilitates various billing modes. Thus, it enables service providers to increase their revenue opportunities via multiple flexibility manageable service offerings.

Optical Virtual Private Networks: Applications, Functionality and Implementation

Today's economic environment presents special challenges for telecommunication carriers—finding new ways to drive down network costs i, without limiting future growth opportunities. Minimizing operating expenses and capital expenditures is not sufficient to ensure future prosperity. New, value-added services can help carriers increase their revenues and profits—today. Virtual private networks (VPNs), both data (IP & MPLS) and optical, fit the description of value-added services. VPN services have received ample attention over the last few years as they are viewed by carriers as an attractive value added service and by customers as a cost effective replacement of leased private lines. VPNs can also help carriers reduce their costs—both capital and operational—by supporting multiple customers, each allowed with varying levels of network control and management over the same (shared) infrastructure. Optical virtual private networks (O-VPNs) represent the next step in the evolution of VPNs and provide similar underlying benefits as other VPN technologies to carriers. Although both carriers and vendors have been talking about O-VPNs for years, the first commercially viable solutions started becoming available in early 2002 [1]. O-VPNs provide carriers with new revenue opportunities as well as the potential to reduce their operating and capital costs. Additionally, O-VPNs offer carrier-customers several benefits, including lower networking costs, increased network flexibility and control, and improved network operational efficiency.

Revenue management trends and opportunities

Twenty-five years ago, the science of yield or revenue management was in its infancy. Only a relatively small group of professionals showed interest in the discipline, and research in the area was limited. Since then, an industry has developed around this science, involving academics, practitioners, consulting and software product companies and, no doubt, many others. Within the last few years, the professional landscape of revenue management has again begun to show signs of change. Within one professional society, INFORMS, a Revenue Management and Pricing Section has been established; also, the Journal of Revenue & Pricing Management has recently completed its second volume and is entering its third. Both these initiatives can help play a major role in the further progress and evolution of revenue management. This paper describes several initiatives and opportunities for the revenue management community to capitalise on. It is hoped that some of the ideas presented here will stimulate and support the efforts of academics as well as practitioners as they strive for ways to enable businesses as well consumers to benefit from successful revenue management implementations.

Best Practices for Service Organisations

Services represent the single largest opportunity for revenue - and profit - growth for many companies. Yet, says Hans Brechbuhl, some organisations still view activities such as product support and after-sales services as unavoidable overhead and approach new service opportunities the same way. Increasingly, consumers want to save time in every facet of their lives. So when they buy a product, they want their local electronic, clothing or other retailer to offer complete solutions that include services ranging from installing products to no-questions-asked return departments with short queues. Consumers are looking for a comprehensive purchasing, use and support experience that is pleasant and meets a need or solves a problem quickly and efficiently. And in many cases, they are willing to pay for such value-added services - they just have to be asked to do so.

A Management Platform for Commercial Web Services

Web Services offer the promise of allowing BT, along with its customers, partners and suppliers, to be able to assemble distributed applications that span multiple systems and organisations. The commercial drivers for this are cost reduction, new revenue opportunities and a better service through the use of automated end-to-end business processes. To achieve these benefits, BT will require a fully managed internal Web Services infrastructure. At the same time, creating a managed platform for our customers' Web Services deployments provides us with a new business opportunity. Early experience suggests that 20% of the effort in creating a commercial Web Services application is expended in defining the commercial opportunity, the service interfaces and server implementations. The remaining 80% is spent on ensuring that the operational and deployment environment is adequate to support business-grade service levels. Managing that 80% of the problem for our customers is a business opportunity for BT. This paper describes the requirements for a management platform for Web Services and then goes on to describe some of the value added business services that this platform can support.

Performance Monitor: The opportunity costs of revenue management

Revenue management (RM) brings rational approaches to pricing for goods and/or services with a limited shelf life. The practice of dynamically pricing a perishable product across different market segments continues to be applied across an ever-increasing set of business arenas. While numerous consulting and software development firms preach the bottom line impacts of RM practice, little effort is applied to monitoring the success of RM systems once in place. The continued success of RM hinges upon the ability to link organisational performance to the pricing and capacity decisions of RM systems. This link both reinforces the financial gains attributable to RM and indicates opportunities for future improvement. This paper outlines Performance Monitor, a phased approach to performance measurement designed and implemented at Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc. The focus is on the impact of RM practice via a dissection of the lost revenue opportunities of historic decisions.

Wireless Communications: Myths and Reality

The use of wireless communications and computing is growing quickly, and wireless technologies are an active area of research and application. Many myths exist about different aspects of wireless computing. The purpose of this article is to examine the more prominent popular beliefs in this area. We address these beliefs using a framework consisting of three dimensions: technology, business, and society. For technology, wireless’ limited bandwidth and its effect on new wireless applications and services are discussed. For business, the anticipated revenue opportunities of Wi-Fi and mobile e-commerce are addressed. For society, issues of wireless security and its effect on wireless adoption are examined. Based on these examinations, we propose research directions along each dimension.

Digital Rights Management in the United States and Europe

Throughout its history, copyright law has always evolved in response to disruptive technological changes.' In recent years, the Internet and other digital communication technologies have once again begun to challenge the scope and justification of copyright law. Unlike earlier challenges, however, the implications of this challenge are Janus-faced. On the one hand, it is extremely difficult to take legal action against copyright infringers in communication networks.2 The advent of music file sharing networks such as the former Napster system, Gnutella, KaZaA, and Morpheus has brought the world's musical heritage to everyone's computer at a negligible cost. Accordingly, the recording industry has accused such networks of enabling mass-scale piracy and severely hampering revenue opportunities for content industries.3

Dollars and Sense: Revenue Opportunities in Home Care Medicine

It was not that long ago that most medical care was in the home. Physicians performed house calls routinely and were paid by the patient, if not in cash, then with a chicken or a basket of apples. Times have changed, but home-based medical care never ceased to exist.

Dollars and sense: revenue opportunities in home care medicine.

Dollars and sense: revenue opportunities in home care medicine.

Enterprise transforming initiatives

As the utility marketplace continues to evolve, long-term survival and prosperity require clear, strategic thinking on the enterprise transforming initiatives needed to effectively increase efficiency and improve revenue opportunities. After a vision is formulated or refined, one of the crucial steps to be undertaken involves a business-process modeling exercise aimed at determining the operational processes that will support the strategy. In many cases, business-process automation (integrating information across systems) serves as the foundation for an enterprise business-process model. Adapting a modern business-process model includes embracing change. Toward that end, enterprise-application integration (EAI), the nimble strategy that involves technology and process that enables disparate systems to exchange business-level information in languages that each understands, provides the backbone infrastructure for implementing a business-process model. Ultimately, EAI serves as the enabler of high-level strategies detailed out as part of a business-process modeling effort and provides the flexible framework to address changing business climates.

Cargo revenue optimisation

Long a cornerstone of passenger airline strategy, revenue management has yet to be embraced by the cargo, freight and shipping establishment. While the business problems of maximising cargo profit differ from passenger airlines in circumstance, the business model contains numerous parallels. Cargo revenue management has come of age and, with automation, is now equipped to deal with the challenges associated with profit optimisation. But profit maximisation also requires a willingness to address fundamental issues such as cargo product definition, contract pricing, short-term booking controls and medium-term allocations, among others. In discussing specific system and business-process solutions, this paper confirms the imperative that cargo carriers must adopt revenue management or face the consequences of revenue opportunity loss and being competitively disadvantaged.

Group revenue management: Redefining the business process — Part I

In the Journal of Revenue & Pricing Management, Volume 1, Number 3, Part I of this two-part paper discussed the business process associated with the group passenger market segment. While Part I outlined the problems and challenges faced in the current environment, Part II discusses how they can be transformed into revenue opportunities with industry best practice and revenue management system automation. With the dynamic combination of adopting new group business process and implementing automation, Part II addresses how an airline can increase its revenue, fill seats that otherwise would have gone empty, increase load factor, reduce overhead costs and overall improve the bottom line. All this can be realised through sound pricing decisions, negotiation tactics consisting of vital economic intelligence, and better inventory management — while at the same time not displacing higher-revenue demand. Furthermore, with the element of system automation, an airline can substantially increase the volume of business it generates while achieving economies of scale in productivity.

Voice services in next-generation networks: The evolution of the intelligent network and its role in generating new revenue opportunities

At least half of all interexchange carrier (IXC) voice calls can be classified as 800/Freephone or virtual private network (VPN) calls, generating on the order of $20 billion in revenue for IXC operators in the United States. As next-generation network operators deploy their packet data backbones, these advanced voice services will become essential to network operators seeking to attract key business customers. Furthermore, as incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) grow their packet data backbone business, they will gain new revenue-generating opportunities by interworking their existing voice services with new data networks. Intelligent network (IN)-based service platforms will play a key role in addressing such next-generation network needs. For instance, IN-based services are evolving to interwork with the Internet. This evolution will provide existing network-based high-value voice services with an easier to use Web-based graphical user interface (GUI) for both subscriber call control and service provisioning. Easier-to-use services like these will produce more revenue, and IN-based products will expand the revenue-generating potential of voice services for next-generation network providers.

Capacity Optimization Planning System (CAPS)

IBM's capacity optimization planning system (CAPS) is a decision-support system based on linear programming for strategic planning of semiconductor manufacturing capacity. CAPS finds the volume mix of products to maximize profit, constrained by the existing tool capacity, or identifies the tool capacity required to manufacture a specified mix of products. The major challenge was formulating the linear program to reflect the available manufacturing capacity. The formulation has to deal with parallel, unrelated tool groups that may perform the same operation at different rates, to capture the preferential order in which to use such tool groups, and to identify which are the true bottlenecks. Capacity planners use CAPS to reconcile product-demand forecasts with the available or planned manufacturing capacity and to generate requests for capital investments. The manager of site operations credits CAPS with identifying tens of millions of dollars in revenue opportunities and with avoiding significant unnecessary capital expenditures.

CALL CENTRE - - COMPUTER TELEPHONE INTEGRATION

Call centre largely came into being as a result of consumerneeds converging with enabling technology- and by the companiesrecognising the revenue opportunities generated by meetingthose needs thereby increasing customer satisfaction. Regardlessof the specific application or activity of a Call centre, customersatisfaction with the interaction is critical to the revenuegenerated or protected by the Call centre. Physical(v, Call centreset up is a place that includes computer, telephone and supervisorstation. Call centre can be available 24 hours a day - whenthe customer wants to make a purchase, needs information, orsimply wishes to register a complaint.

The Future of Psychology in Departments of Psychiatry

Health care reform has put increasing pressure on faculty of medical schools to become self-supporting. Opportunities for clinical revenue will decrease, but psychologists who are able to generate research funding will become increasingly competitive, albeit as “mercenaries,” i.e., capable of paying their own way plus generating a profit to support departmental operations and educational programs. Changes in the health care system signal an end to psychiatry's paternalistic relationship to psychology and present opportunities for psychology proactively to influence its future role in health care. Research, political action, and revised scientific mission, models, and roles represent important strategies in the redefining of psychology as a basic science and major profession in health care.

Global marketing challenges and opportunities for manufacturers’ representatives

Global marketing expansion is being widely promoted in both the professional and domestic communities. Domestic markets alone cannot provide the revenue and growth opportunities required by many business organizations. Many business firms want to sell in international markets but lack the expertise and financial resources to sell overseas effectively. In domestic markets, manufacturers’ representatives currently provide the sales function for many such firms, especially small manufacturers. Investigates the potential role that manufacturers’ representatives will play in global marketing expansion. A survey of 119 representative agencies was made to identify and study their experiences and/or perceptions about expanding their client base to world markets. Results show that 60 per cent of representatives were optimistic about their future opportunities in a global economy but were hardly aggressive (up to now) when it comes to entering world markets. Over 80 per cent of the representatives had enquiries from foreign principals, but only 47 per cent initiated the contacts. Moreover, only 23 per cent sought global markets for their current principals’ products.

ECONOMIC PRODUCTION QUOTAS FOR PULL MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

We consider the problem of using “safety capacity” to ensure due date integrity in a pull manufacturing system and quantify the basic tradeoff between lost revenue opportunity and overtime costs. In this context, we address the question of when it is economically attractive to use “under capacity scheduling” and the problem of setting economic production quotas. We develop four models for addressing the quota setting problem. The first three assume that quota shortfalls cannot be carried over to the next regular time production period. Models 1 and 3 assume that these shortages are made up on overtime and incur fixed or fixed plus variable costs. Model 2 does not use a capacity buffer and treats shortages as lost sales. Finally, Model 4 assumes that shortages can be backlogged to the next regular time production period at a cost. For this model, we compute both an optimal quota and an overtime “trigger,” which represents the minimum shortage for which overtime is used. We give computational results that i...

Bringing the fiber to the home

The issues involved in replacing copper telephone lines by fiber all the way to the subscriber's home are examined. The advantages of deploying single-mode fiber in the trunk and local-loop feeder networks are enumerated. The biggest problem namely, how to power the electronics in the absence of copper wire, is discussed. The need to allow a graceful upgrade to capture future opportunities for broadband revenue is emphasized, and potential broadband services are described. Predictions are made regarding the ISDN network of the future. >