WeDo Technologies: consistency inside out

WeDo Technologies | The #1 provider of Revenue Assurance

WeDo1

Introduction

WeDo Technologies is a Portuguese company launched in 2011 and owned by the largest Portuguese conglomerate, Sonae. The company focuses in a very niche business called Enterprise Revenue Assurance. The experience that its founders had with the major Portuguese telecommunications operators made them understand that there were extensive risks related to revenue losses in the real time billing process. WeDo has tackled that business opportunity and was named by Gartner (2013) the world’s number 1 provider of Revenue Assurance and Fraud Management solutions for telecom operators. [1]

WeDo has come a long way since its ideation, and in 2013 reached €61.5M in revenues with a structure that includes more than 500 employees and with 12 offices in 5 continents. WeDo has also evolved its initial target market from only telecoms to a more universal definition that includes Retail, Energy, Insurance and Healthcare. [2]

WeDo2

Fig. 1: Enterprise Business Assurance explanation

Business model

Most companies invest a lot of money and effort in developing and implementing complex business processes that are fed by operational information critical for the business sustainability. Reality has taught WeDo, and probably all experienced managers, that companies often have limited visibility on whether these processes and information systems are working properly, since it can be highly costly to oversee every step in the process flow. Mainly in mature industries, such as telecoms, companies can’t be managed by blindly trusting in automated mechanisms.

WeDo Business model delivers the capacity to audit the performance of multiple operational systems, allowing companies to assess: [3]

  1. Where the information gaps exist
  2. Where losses are piling up
  3. Where revenue is being lost
  4. Where inefficiencies occur

In order to reach the answers to those questions, WeDo offers 8 packages of services that are intended to bridge the gap between business performance and operational management systems:

  • Revenue Assurance
  • Loss Prevention
  • Fraud Management
  • Internal Auditing
  • Compliance
  • Risk Management
  • Finance
  • Security

Since the revenue assurance challenge is global and quite equivalent across the countries, its services have extended to a new landscape of industries and geographies. The same technology that was primarily developed and implemented in Portugal was again implemented successfully in South America, Asia and Australia. Any company that deals daily with billions of information transactions is eligible for the WeDo services. [4]

WeDo3

Fig. 2: Revenue Losses per sector

Operational Model [5]

WeDo operational model was designed according to 3 major vectors:

  • “Walk the talk”
  • Highly skilled professionals
  • Balance between standardization and customization
  • “Walk the talk”

From a very early stage, WeDo understood that it had to “walk the talk” in terms of business control, business transparency and risk management. Under this assumption, WeDo has taken its own business assurance to the limit, documenting all its business processes and subjecting them to scrupulous auditing. In line with this, they developed the so-called “white book”, an internal document that defines all the major internal processes in detail – from HR to customer relationships. The white book is internally available and is the token of the transparency culture that WeDo preaches.

WeDo4

Fig. 3: WeDo slide showing how important processes are

  • Highly skilled professionals

WeDo structure is essentially flat when compared to similar companies and relies on very specialized labor that fully understands and masters the software behind the Revenue Assurance service. The new hires are subjected to deep training and are expected to be assigned to projects in any industry and in any country according to the client’s needs.

In the centralized departments (HR, Quality Assurance, Product Management, etc.), they also foster a culture of “cross-training” – which initially existed because of the small size of the company, but has now become an assumed internal policy.

  • Balance between standardization and customization

The future growth forecasts impelled WeDo to become as fast as possible in the customization of its services to the client’s needs. As such, in the last 3 years WeDo has significantly invested in the upgrade of its mainstream software so it can quickly adapt to the different client’s architecture of data. WeDo promises to do a “proof of concept” within 4 days and show to any client that the acquisition of WeDo software is an investment with fast payback. In addition to the orthodox Diagnosis > Solution Design > Implementation phases, WeDo also added the possibility for the client to purchase Support services. This is another way for a client to tailor the WeDo solution according to its own internal capabilities.

WeDo5

Fig. 4: Diagnosis framework for a telecom that feeds the WeDo software

Conclusion

WeDo is the paradigm of the successful niche business. The consistency between internal efficiency and the promise of processes’ reliability to clients has been key to its growth trajectory. But with the internationalization goal and the aggressive growth forecasts, many challenges are still to win and many questions are still to answer:

  • Will the business model survive the recent multiplication of locations?
  • Will the internal processes be strong enough to ensure international output consistency?
  • Will the international consultants be able to master the software as the Portuguese developers?
  • Will the portfolio of industries keep expanding or did it reach its saturation?

The next few years will certainly provide us with the answer to these questions.

Sources:

[1] http://www.wedotechnologies.com/en/knowledge/press-releases/2747-gartner-names-wedo-technologies-number-one-provider-of-revenue-assurance-and-fraud-management

[2] http://www.wedotechnologies.com/pt/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeDo_Technologies

[4] http://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Content/Company-profiles/WeDo-Technologies-revenue-management-May2014-RMA03-RMA14-RMA09/

[5] Call with Raul Azevedo, Product Development Director, 7th of December 2015

[6] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/WeDo-technologies-Reviews-E601710.htm

[7] https://www.tmforum.org/certifications-awarded/wedo-technologies-raid-version-6-3/

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Student comments on WeDo Technologies: consistency inside out

  1. Thanks for this post, Christiana!
    As you said it is a niche business, if ever there was one. They seem to have grown very fast and relatively quickly. I was wondering who the competitors were and if there was much space for growth (as you asked yourself in your conclusion). Do you think they can expand? If not, why?

    1. Thank you for your comment, Jonathan!
      WeDo was pioneer in exploring this niche market — which is part of the explanation for their national and international success –, so their major competitor is basically the possibility that companies might decide not to hire any company to solve the revenue assurance problem. But the market exists and is still essentially unexplored, WeDo just needs to convince the companies that they would benefit from its services.
      I didn’t explore this in the post, but one of the growth vectors that they have just started exploring are partnerships with major consulting firms (Deloitte, Accenture, PWC, etc.). These consulting firms have a privileged access to companies’ decision-makers and might be a key channel to sell the WeDo solutions. I am convinced that if they can successfully develop these relationships, they will have a promising and sustainable future.

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