Page 103 - Performance Leadership

92 • Part II Operational and Analytical Dimensions

including in-roaming and including corrections is the reporting ARPU.
This is the ARPU that E-plus’s parent company wants reported. Lastly,
there may be more corrections coming in more than a month later.
Although these are not material of nature, they need to be processed
and allocated to the month they are related to (and not the month they
came in). This updated number is the “analytical ARPU.”
There are also multiple user types. In the E-plus definition, a user
basically equates to a phone number. A customer can be multiple users,
and business customers can consist of multiple individual customers.
The biggest impact on ARPU, however, is the definition if a user as
“active” or “inactive,” as the ARPU ratio is sometimes based on active
users. When does a user start being active? The moment the phone
number is activated, or the moment the first call is made or the first
text message is sent? Or, in the case of prepaid users, the moment when
credits are bought? And when does a user stop being active and become
inactive? At the end of a contract? This may sound logical, but given
the warranty on phones, for instance, there is still a legal relationship.
Or in the case of prepaid, does a user become inactive when no calls
are being made anymore? What about just receiving calls or “spam”
text messages? What about the credit that is still left? Or how to count
users that are temporarily shut off because the invoice has not been
paid? And how long should the period of no activity be before a user
is considered inactive?
Different parts of E-plus will have a different view on what the num-
ber of active users is. The operations department will look at call detail
records and come to a determination. The finance department will
look at the invoices and credit levels. The legal department will look
at the contracts and warranties. The moment we would try to create
one version of the truth, the result would be less insight, instead of
more. First, we wouldn’t be able to analyze the differences anymore
between the operational, financial, and legal view on active users.
These differences are important indicators for the health of the com-
pany. Second, in the current list of harmonized ARPU definitions, at
the reporting ARPU the ratio is not clean anymore because of alloca-
tions. Revenue generated by non-E-plus customers roaming on the E-
plus network is allocated to the ARPU of E-plus customers. The more
you would try to align the business ARPU and reporting ARPU, the