Spring 2011 | www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK Your guide to achieving a better bottom line Service providers worldwide share their Frameworx success stories
Sponsored by:
. d e v r e s e r s t h g i r l l A . c n I , s e i g o l o n h c e T a i d r o c l e T 1 1 0 2 ©
A Tier 1 Euro Europea pean n carr carrier ier red reduce uced d FTTP design time by 70% with Telcordia. When you’re about to launch a new business model targeting tens of millions of people, you have to be able to move fast. Our solution allowed this provider to automate next-gen fiber access design, reducing FTTP design time for a single neighborhood by 70% – from weeks to days. They also eliminated paper records of network assets, discovering €30 million of unrecorded equipment inventory. Wouldn’t your company like to t o realize potential like that? Get more details at www www.telcordia.com/potential_realized .telcordia.com/potential_realized
Realize the potential of telecom
. d e v r e s e r s t h g i r l l A . c n I , s e i g o l o n h c e T a i d r o c l e T 1 1 0 2 ©
A Tier 1 Euro Europea pean n carr carrier ier red reduce uced d FTTP design time by 70% with Telcordia. When you’re about to launch a new business model targeting tens of millions of people, you have to be able to move fast. Our solution allowed this provider to automate next-gen fiber access design, reducing FTTP design time for a single neighborhood by 70% – from weeks to days. They also eliminated paper records of network assets, discovering €30 million of unrecorded equipment inventory. Wouldn’t your company like to t o realize potential like that? Get more details at www www.telcordia.com/potential_realized .telcordia.com/potential_realized
Realize the potential of telecom
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK Your guide to achieving a better bottom line This publication is free to TM Forum members
Publications Managing Editor: Annie Turner
[email protected] Editor: Claire Manuel
[email protected] Writer: Dr. Lorien Pratt
[email protected] Creative Director: David Andrews
[email protected] Commercial Sales Consultant: Mark Bradbury
[email protected] Publisher: Katy Gambino
[email protected] Client Services: Caroline Taylor
[email protected] Marketing: Corporate Marketing Director Lacey Caldwell Senko
[email protected] Report Design: The Page Design Consultancy Ltd Head of Research and Publications: Rebecca Henderson
[email protected] Advisors: Keith Willetts, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, TM Forum Martin Creaner, President and Chief Operating Officer, TM Forum Nik Willetts, Senior Vice President of Communications, TM Forum
Published by: TM Forum 240 Headquarters Plaza East Tower, 10th Floor Morristown, NJ 07960-6628 USA www.tmforum.org Phone: +1 973-944-5100 Fax: +1 973-944-5110
Page 4 What can Frameworx do for you? Page 7 China Unicom Turning chaos into harmony generates a billion dollars Page 10 Qtel Group Revenue assurance program aims to deliver $105 million annually to bottom line benefit Page 14 Saudi Telecom Company Taking a customer-centric approach to strategic goals Page 16 Mobitel Simpler IT speeds up new service provision, drives take-up Page 20 Qwest cuts operational costs, gets products out there faster Page 22 Colt Technology Services, Telekom Malaysia, Aircel Certified solutions speed up time to market for service providers
Page 35 Magyar Telekom Better service provisioning and activation create foundation for growth Page 38 Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL/Ufone) Enabling consolidation and growth to go hand in hand Page 40 GTEL Mobile Fast deployment and differentiated products bring rapid success in Vietnam Page 42 PT Inovação Simpler network changes bring major benefits Page 46 European operator Consolidated BSS produces magic numbers Page 48 Microsoft Business Online Services Transforming IT systems to support new business models Page 50 Leading Indian service provider Measuring success through an open process architecture
Page 26 Telekom Slovenije Customers first: an object lesson in achieving multiple goals
Page 53 South East Asian operator How to save a million dollars a year
Page 29 Vodafone D2, Telefónica and T-Mobile Automation affords big gains i n efficiency, security and compliance
Page 53 Views from the top Industry leaders highlight the business benefits of using TM Forum standards
Page 32 AXIS Integration combats fierce competition in Indonesia
Page 58 Fall 2011 edition of TM Forum Case Study Handbook How to submit entries to the next issue
© 2011. The entire contents of this publication are protected by copyright. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, TeleManagement Forum. TM Forum would like to thank the sponsors and advertisers who have enabled the publication of this fully independently researched handbook. The views and opinions expressed by individual authors and contributors in this publication are provided in the writers’ personal capacities and are their sole responsibility. Their publication does not imply that they represent the views or opinions of TeleManagement Forum and must neither be regarded as constituting constituting advice on any matter whatsoever, whatsoever, nor be interpreted as such. The reproduction of advertisements and sponsored sponsored features in this publication does not in any way imply endorsement by TeleManagement Forum of products or services referred to therein.
www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
3
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
What can Frameworx do for you? Welcome to this digital, fall issue of TM Forum Case Study Handbook 2010 . Here you will find real-life case studies on how service providers from very different markets around the world have benefited from using the Forum’s Frameworx business and IT architectural blueprint. Read how China Unicom has reaped around a $1 billion in cost savings and new revenues so far and why a Tier 1 European operator found that small changes to its back office that once took three weeks now take three days, while those that took three months now take three weeks, and those that once took three years now take three months. A Frameworx deployment helped AXIS to offer tailored bundles in the fiercely competitive Indonesian market, resulting in it signing up 2 million more customers in three months. Another Asian operator is saving $1 million in procurement alone annually, while rolling out 3G. This is due to better visibility of its network assets and massive savings due to automation replacing many manual tasks. This Case Study Handbook shows, in the most pragmatic, real terms, how and why Frameworx and the Forum’s best practices are applicable to many sectors and situations as the digital ecosystem develops. It will be followed in the spring by an enlarged, printed edition, with even more great success stories. In the meantime, we hope this compact edition whets your appetite and starts you too wondering what Frameworx can do for your business.
What is TM Forum Frameworx? TM Forum Frameworx defines standard process and information models that service providers require to run their business and the major systems that implement and automate those processes. Frameworx also defines the architectural rules for grouping systems into logical domains – such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management – and the standardized interfaces between those domains. As demonstrated here in this Case Study Handbook , service
4
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
providers can generate big benefits from using TM Forum Frameworx industry-proven best practices and standards, including: n n n n
n n
reduced time-to-market for new products and services rapid system integration reduced product and service costs risk reduction by using clearly understood interfaces and certified compliant products support for new technologies and business models future-proof solutions that leverage industry concepts including Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
www.tmforum.org
Service providers are increasingly insisting that their suppliers conform to TM Forum‘s Frameworx: Within the last 12 months, demand for individual practitioner Frameworx certification has increased by 600 percent, while the demand for Frameworx Conformance Certified Product status, introduced in 2010, continues to increase.
Market drivers for standards-based solutions No matter what size service provider or what geographic presence, all feel continued pressures – and even decline – in fixed line revenues and reduced growth in mobile revenues resulting from market saturation. The explosion of smart mobile devices such as the iPhone and new broadband services is a runaway success that should be welcome news to providers. However since most of these new services have fixed price charging, service providers must increase spend on network infrastructure to meet accelerating data demands – with no corresponding increase in revenues. To maintain and grow their customer base service providers must improve their customers’ experience and rapidly bring new products and services to the market while controlling their operational and capital costs. Operational expenses account for about 50 percent of total company costs and are heavily influenced by the cost of systems and processes. Many service providers are updating or replacing their siloed, customized systems with a standardsbased architecture to ensure they can reduce operational costs while maximizing operations efficiency. Whether you’re a greenfield startup, a legacy provider, or need to evolve an existing infrastructure, achieving cost reduction and business agility requires the implementation of a standard business and IT architecture – one to which a company’s processes, systems, and people are aligned. TM Forum Frameworx provides a clearly defined architectural blueprint that helps providers become more agile.
www.tmforum.org
Developed by the industry, for the industry TM Forum Frameworx is the result of extensive collaboration by the Forum’s 750-strong corporate membership through TM Forum’s collaborative research and development programs. It has been widely adopted by the global communications industry as well as financial services and other sectors including media, cloud computing, utilities and defense. Frameworx is compatible with industry standards such as ITIL and SOA. It expands and integrates the Forum’s NGOSS standard Business Process (eTOM), Information (SID), and Application (TAM) Frameworks into a full enterprise IT and process architecture. These Frameworx components are: n Application
Framework (TAM) which provides a common language between service providers and their suppliers to describe and group systems and their functions. n Business Process Framework (eTOM) is the industry's common process architecture for both business and functional processes, and provides a comprehensive, multilayered view of the key business processes and tasks that every service provider needs to carry out, such as handling orders, fixing problems, or collecting revenue. n Information Framework (SID) provides a common reference model for enterprise information that service providers, software companies, and integrators use to describe management information. n Integration Framework provides a service-oriented approach to integration with standardized interfaces and support tools. The Integration Framework defines two key concepts: platforms and business services. Platforms are a logical aggregation of applications, systems, and people performing a common function, such as billing or work force management. SOA-based business services define the standard interfaces between platforms and applications so that your architecture can be implemented quickly and easily.
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
5
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Meeting service providers’ challenges TM Forum Frameworx meets the challenges facing service providers, today and tomorrow, by: n Automating system processes and tasks to enable operators to offer more products and services, while reducing time-tomarket and the cost of service delivery. Reducing the system footprint is also a driver towards operational automation. n Replacing the 'single system for a single service' silo approach with a system architecture that handles multiple services. n Providing a consistent, unified, and accurate view of business and operational data via an information model that enables cost reduction, asset realization, improved customer experience, and efficiency savings. n Using standard processes that allow the restructuring of legacy systems into clearly defined, coherent business and operational models and capabilities to create a robust enterprise architecture as well as enable the rationalization and removal of overlapping systems. n Clearly identifying and mapping systems and applications against industry-agreed functional areas, and providing a bridge between processes and data. n Ensuring predictable, defined, and seamless data exchange between systems by using common processes and reusable, tool-derived interfaces. n Encouraging business agility and re-use, essential in today’s market where service providers need to rapidly deliver new products and services, and increase revenues. n Providing end-to-end service management by integrating common business processes, enterprise information, and applications into a unified solution. n Rationalizing the business and IT architecture across the supporting components to reduce and simplify operational processes and costs. n Realizing ITIL-compliant implementations through the Business Process Framework (eTOM), which is now fully mapped to ITIL. Gaining an independent assessment of service providers’ and n suppliers’ conformance to Frameworx through the TM Forum Frameworx Conformance Certification program.
6
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
TM Forum Frameworx support services In addition to Frameworx, TM Forum has built an extensive supporting infrastructure to aid our members’ understanding of what is happening in the industry, which solutions are being adopted, and how to use Frameworx to facilitate the lowest cost, least risk evolution of a service provider’s business. These are shown in the graphic below. Please also see http://www.tmforum.org/TMForumFrameworx/1911/home.html
Implementation support Conferences
Benchmarking services Frameworx
Advisory & Training
Best practice guides
s s e c k ro r P w o s s e e m in ra s u F B
Product certification
Industry research reports
Integration Framework
F r a I m n f e o r w m o a rk t i o ( S n I D )
Application Framework
Catalyst technology incubators
Collaborative R&D
Industry publications
Webinars
Online communities Developer Network
www.tmforum.org
Turning chaos into harmony generates a billion dollars Summary: China Unicom is the country’s second largest mobile network operator with more than 160 million subscribers, as of August 2010. Before the Unified Voucher and Top-up Management Network Solution project, China Unicom had 55 different interactive voice response lines, 120 accounts receivable systems, and 200 different kinds of vouchers for topping up service accounts across the mainland. In addition, operations in each region were unique for different user types and services (wireless, wireline and broadband). To streamline the service operations from end-to-end, the operator developed the Unified Recharging Service Network, using TM Forum’s Frameworx, to integrate these disparate channels and provide a consistent user experience. Using Frameworx cut two months off the design phase of the project, which spanned over 268 BSS/OSS systems. The service has achieved 99.9 percent service availability and gained around a billion dollars a year in new revenues and cost savings. China Unicom needed to streamline its various service top-up operations and offer a consistent, simple customer experience. Before starting its Unified Recharging Service Network project, there were 55 separate interactive voice response (IVR) service numbers for customers to call, 120 accounts receivable (AR) systems and 200 different types of recharging voucher cards in use across the mainland. The recharging processes themselves varied widely across China Unicom’s 31 provincial subsidiaries: Operations in each region were unique for different user types and services (wireless, wireline and broadband). This situation caused all sorts of problems for the service provider and customers alike. For instance, there was no single voucher that could be used by a customer to recharge all the services on offer and customers who used services in one province couldn’t top up their accounts while in another. Nor was there a unified portal for recharging through multiple channels, such as SMS, online, and IVR. As Haoyang Lu, Planning Division, Information Department, China Unicom comments, “The project’s goal was to turn this situation from chaos into harmony.”
www.tmforum.org
He notes, “It was a very big challenge to provide a consistent recharging service for customers and different service accounts across the country, requiring the integration of multiple, distributed, province-centric systems. With so very many systems involved, it was a huge task to streamline all operations from end-to-end, and in particular revenue management was a difficult but crucial area.”
First such support system in China Indeed, such was the complexity and scale of the project, it’s no surprise that the Unified Voucher and Top-Up Management Network Solution is the first such service support system implemented in China. It unified the management of customer interfaces nationwide, across multiple access channels including the web, WAP, SMS and IVR portals. It also standardized the operator’s business processes across the country to provide customers with a consistent recharging experience. China Unicom chose to use TM Forum’s Frameworx to make the huge integration project easier and quicker, and to lay the foundations for future developments. Processes from the
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
7
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Business Process Framework (eTOM) were used to define the unified recharging processes and to resolve process design issues, mainly in the domain of the fulfillment assurance and billing (FAB) process blocks – that is, customer interaction, billing and revenue management. The architecture design was based on the Information Framework (SID), which was also used to resolve system data model inconsistencies, especially for designing the core parts of the recharging and account model. China Unicom took future developments into account with its design, thinking ahead to other possible transformational projects and trends. The Application Framework (TAM) acted as a reference to identify and define the scope of the technical solution; that is the integration relationship and the system processes, and interfaces between the customer interface, customer relationship management (CRM), billing and AR system. The Application Framework also defined system requirements and corporate system specifications.
Service contracts China Unicom used the concept of service contracts, derived from the Forum’s Integration Framework, to define in detail the services passing through the exposed interfaces and to streamline process interactions and monitoring. It also used Frameworx‘s methodology of service definition and the service oriented architecture (SOA) governance to help with the design of an holistic SOA-style architecture for the integration of multi-system networking. The use of the service contracts concepts and the methodology derived from Frameworx and the Integration Framework cut the design time by two months, resolving holistic architectural issues and the processes and service definition. From this, China Unicom developed a distinct ‘heart-beating’ mechanism that spans more than 268 BSS/ OSS systems that also draws on the Forum’s service level agreement management and SOA governance. It is designed to guarantee the end-to-end service quality an average of 99 percent service availability by defining and monitoring distributed key performance indicators. The heart-beating mechanism collects self-status information from management module deployed in the recharging network nodes in the 31 modules. It also collects status information about the local BSS/OSS systems in each province by initiating
8
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
simple service transactions. The central management system deployed collects relevant information of each provincial node through periodic management messages over HTTP protocol. Meanwhile, the central system broadcasts the status information about the provinces to each province. The communications within the network of distributed BSS systems is organized as a set of short connections, with a lot of built-in redundancy; that is information is not lost if a single built-in link goes down. China Unicom set up a star-like BSS network, linking multiple distributed BSS/OSS application systems (such as portals, CRM, business intelligence, settlements and intelligent network elements) across the whole country. This BSS-oriented networking infrastructure improves the agility of IT’s support capability greatly, acting as the foundation for nationwide process orchestration and better business support. The core part of this solution is a centralized consolidation plane (centralized transaction switch) for service and data switching, and routing. It is the primary application infrastructure for the integration architecture in the future. Haoyang Lu says, “With the help of TMF Frameworx standards and best practices as references, we achieved our project goal within a short time. Most importantly, all the project team could refer to a common methodology and unify thinking through the project lifecycle by referring to Integration Framework model, which is more relevant to the BSS domain of service providers rather than the general IT technical domain.” The project was implemented successfully and by the end of June 2009, the daily peak workload on the centralized switch was 1.25 million transactions, with an average response delay within the recharging network of 400 ms. At the time of China Unicom’s submission to the TM Forum Excellence Awards 2010, the operation had been up and running for over 7,000 hours without any faults.
Roaming rewards Customers now have a consistent and convenient way to recharge their own or others' service accounts and can pay as they go while roaming in other provinces. The current monthly recharge value passing through the system is around 1.2 billion Yuan ($180 million). In summer 2010, roaming recharge accounted for 35 percent
www.tmforum.org
of that total with around 45 million people using the roaming recharging service. China Unicom expects this to rise to 420 million Yuan a month, making an annual total of 5.04 billion Yuan ($758 million) revenue that it missed out on before due to the lack of support for roaming.
Costs slashed Previously, the level of voucher commission was diverse and too high in some provinces, resulting in the average commission being 3 percent of the value of the voucher. By introducing the One Voucher card the average commission is 2 percent. As sales of the cards run at some 25 million per month, annual sales are around 300 million and so the commission saved is 300 million Yuan ($45 million) annually. Other savings have resulted from the One Voucher card too – the cost of producing the vouchers has fallen, due to the mass manufacture of one type of card, and costs have also fallen due to implementing a centralized operational model. China Unicom is producing around 480 million cards annually with a direct cost saving estimated at 1.8 billion Yuan ($270 million). The new, easy to use service was promoted by TV ads starting in December 2008. From the start, customers were keen to use it. The average number of recharging transactions increased by 50 percent. For instance, in Hong Kong, the service became the primary way of topping up accounts soon after its commercial opening on April 1, 2009, with 40,524 transaction there that month, with a value amounting to 4.3 million Yuan. Within another month, this had risen to 170 million Yuan. China Unicom is benefiting from being able to manage its business more effectively as a result of the project as all the data concerning the status of the recharging vouchers is collectedly centrally, quickly and accurately. Now the operator has up-to-date information about the cards, nationwide, as needed, and also controls the overall commission rate of voucher brokerage dynamically, which was unimaginable in the past. Plans for the future China Unicom plans to track developments in TM Forum’s Frameworx and other projects relevant to SOA to enhance its overall BSS infrastructure. It also plans to improve its SOA architecture and governance, partly to make it more flexible
www.tmforum.org
and easier to add other BSS service processes to, and partly to improve the operational stability of its IT infrastructure. The most recent stage of the project has already brought more features of SOA architecture into the network hub, including more SOA functionalities, such as service publishing, service proxying, service invoking, service management, service assembling and orchestration. These new features make the network more aligned with SOA principles and enable the centralized management to carry out service lifecycle management across the whole network. Also, more IT systems services are being deployed on the distributed BSS network. Perhaps most excitingly of all, China Unicom’s plans to integrate the recharging network with more service portals and turn it into a centralized payment hub are progressing rapidly. The unified recharging system has linked into China UnionPay’s member banks’ network and the centrally-deployed Portal of China Unicom. Haoyang Lu says, “We will hook up later with our mobile micropayment system and other value-added service platforms to broaden the scope of its applications. TM Forum’s Frameworx and best practices provide us with good references on which to base technical decisions.”
"Perhaps most excitingly of all, China Unicom's plans to integrate the recharging network with more portals and turn it into a centralized payment hub are progressing rapidly." CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
9
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Revenue assurance program aims to deliver $105 million annually to the bottom line Summary: The Qtel Group has grown rapidly from a single country operator with 500,000 customers in 2005 to a global player having presence in 17 markets in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia with a customer base of 69 million today. Key markets include Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia and Indonesia, through companies operating GSM networks and WiMax infrastructures. The operations in the different markets are very diverse in terms of maturity. For instance, Indosat in Indonesia is more than 40 years old while the operation in Palestine was launched in 2009. Qtel International is the centralized managed services arm, charged with increasing shareholder value across the Qtel Group from driving synergies, standardization, and the use of best practices. Lee Scargall, Group director of enterprise risk management, Qtel International, turned to TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model as the basis for a three year program, starting in 2010, to add $105 million annually to the bottom line by 2012. Lee Scargall joined Qtel International, at the end of 2008, to work at the head office in Qatar. His role is to drive and exploit synergies across the diverse operations, an important part of which is standardizing toolsets and processes. He says, “I went straightaway to TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model,” which is part of the Forum’s Business Benchmarking program (see page 13). Scargall had taken part in benchmarking studies before when working for a previous employer and understood the benefits it can deliver. He explains, “It is something we needed to do as a Group because some companies were mature in terms of their revenue assurance capabilities and some were not. In 2009 we started a maturity assessment across the Group to help us identify gaps and weaknesses to figure out what steps we needed to take in terms of improving our people, tools, processes, organization and influence (see Figure 1 on page 11).” It quickly became apparent there were no standard toolsets across the Group, processes were inconsistent, and controls inadequate. Scargall says, “Some of our companies were very good at revenue assurance and had toolsets and robust processes, while
10
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
others had no revenue assurance measures in place.” Having carried out the assessment, Scargall proposed a three year program to move everyone up to Level 4 of the Maturity Model, which, he explained, would deliver more than $105 million annually straight to earnings, before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The Qtel board agreed to the proposal and provided the funding to roll out the program, although it is completely self-sustaining. Typically, Qtel International pays for a short term pilot for an operating company to showcase the benefits of using specialist toolsets, then the operating company decides whether to enter into a commercial arrangement with the supplier. Scargall explains, “The whole thing is part funded centrally, and part funded locally to ensure ownership remains at the operating company going forwards after a trial.” “We set each operating company a target to detect and recover leakage that is linked to the TM Forum’s Maturity Model assessment; so if a company is at Level 1, then we expect a 1 percent detection rate, if at Level 2, then a 1.5 percent detection rate and so on.”
www.tmforum.org
Every operating company submits a monthly report about how much leakage was detected and recovered, and to which leakage point, as described in the GB941-Annex D guidebook: more than 100 leakage points have been identified by TM Forum, so each incident is logged against one of the categories. Scargall says, “We look at all the incident information from all the operating companies, we track it, check whether incidents are open or closed, how much revenue is at risk, what the recovery rate is, and so on. In other words, head office tracks all the incidents relating to revenue leakage across the Group, and can help the operating companies to manage them by providing advice and assistance.” David Stuart, assistant director of revenue assurance and fraud management, Qtel, adds, “This holistic approach at the head office allows us to identify those leakages that would impact more than one operating company. For instance, if one operating company reports a systemic leakage and we have the same system in five other operating companies, we will distribute the incident information to the others to ensure closure across the Group.” Qtel International acts on each of the five aspects identified by the Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model (for more detailed information, see our Business Intelligence Quarterly report on Revenue Assurance , published in November 2010, which is free to members from our website. Scargall says, “On the tools side, we have a signed two frame agreement to standardize the reconciliation software suppliers across the entire Group. We like a dual supplier approach to toolsets because it ensures there is always competition on price, and the operating companies have a choice of option A or option B which strengthens buy-in at the local level. They feel more part of the procurement process rather than having a single supplier imposed upon them.” “Concerning our people, we have established a training academy in Doha, Qatar, that educates our staff in revenue assurance using the TM Forum’s training program for which we receive Forum accreditation. Our aim is to see all of our staff becomes accredited. We also provide best practice guidance across the Group, and we’ve implemented a wiki where staff can exchange information and ideas. In addition, we have also enabled tweet alerts, and online chat capability so we can share information across the Group in real-time. This is particularly important when we are dealing with
www.tmforum.org
Figure 1: Likelihood to impact the bottom line RA people
69%
RA organization
69%
RA influence
72%
RA process
81%
RA tools
81%
Overall RA maturity
81%
0
20
40
60
80
100
Source: TM Forum
"We have established a training academy in Doha, Qatar, that educates our staff in revenue assurance using the TM Forum’s training program for which we receive Forum accreditation. Our aim is to see all of our staff becomes accredited. We also provide best practice guidance across the Group." CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
11
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
fraud, so having the ability to share vital information quickly can be critical in preventing leakage.” He continues, “The more you know about fraudsters’ activities across different territories, the stronger the position you are in to counter them. Developing a Group mentality is very important, people need to feel they are part of one team all moving in the same direction, and we want to embed this in our culture.” Scargall is encouraging competition among the operating companies by setting up a league table around revenue assurance targets. At the same time, he fosters a sense of community, in part by holding Group revenue assurance forums for some 30 people in total, “sharing information benefits everyone around the Group”, he states. “The heads of revenue assurance are the greatest influence and we all meet twice a year in a different location. We discuss the hot issues and how best to work together. Between the meetings, we have regular phone calls and on-site, follow-up visits. “We also work to raise the profile of RA with the local management teams to gain recognition and support for what we do: we need the CFOs, CTOs, and CIOs to all work together to realize the potential benefits of a successful RA program across the Group.”
The Qtel Group is making excellent progress towards its goals. Scargall says, “We are exceeding our targets in terms of revenue recovery, with over $50 million being added to the bottom line in the first year of our three year program.” There is no complacency however. Scargall acknowledges there is much more hard work left to do. “We are making good progress and report back to the steering committee each month. This is a big program and there’s significant financial benefit for the Group. The operating companies appreciate the leadership and co-ordination from head-office,” he says. He continues, “We are also trying to standardize our processes, establish centres of excellence across the Group, and take the experiences of what is being done well and apply it elsewhere. We have a range of operating companies that are at Level 1 and 2, and the only way we’re going to get everyone to Level 4 is by being more proactive.” Since embarking on the program in 2010, there has been a noticeable improvement to all five aspects of the Maturity Model, with the operating companies beginning to rise to Level 3. As Scargall concludes, “Reaching Level 4 across them all is the goal for the next two years.”
“We are exceeding our targets in terms of revenue recovery, with over $50 million being added to the bottom line in the first year of our three year program." 12
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
www.tmforum.org
TM Forum Revenue Assurance Maturity Model The Revenue Assurance Maturity Model is part of the Forum’s Revenue Assurance Solution Suite (see http://www.tmforum.org/KnowledgeDownloadDetail/9285/home.html?artf=artf1442). The Model (also known as GB941-B) offers a best practice approach. It provides a standardized way of establishing how well developed the aspects of the revenue assurance (RA) are within an organization. It enables service providers to identify weaknesses and standardize processes to maximize efficiency while keeping costs down. Five distinct aspects have been identified to help understand how RA matures (see Figure 2). How advanced each aspect is determined using detailed questionnaires. The Forum conducts the Revenue Assurance Performance study in addition to the Revenue Assurance Maturity Model for organizations whose maturity is more advanced.
Figure 2: The five aspects of revenue assurance maturity Organization
People
Influence
Tools
Process
The organization of RA responsibilities reflects how well aligned the objectives of individuals and the business are to the goals of RA. Organizational fit reflects the business culture and how well it is suited to adopting RA objectives.
The maturity of RA can in part be gauged from the human resource dedicated to it or providing secondary support.
Instigating, managing and delivering change is a sign of maturity. Influential RA delivers financial rewards to the business and is a mechanism to continuously improve its performance.
The use of tools is one of the most tangible guides to RA maturity, depending on how well the tools are designed and used, and the synergy between them. Their most effective use meets multiple business objectives.
RA is a high level process, containing many detailed processes, that should be improved constantly.
Source: TM Forum
In addition, the Model has five levels of RA maturity, as shown in Figure 3, to help a company establish where it is and where it needs to go to improve constantly.
Figure 3: The phases of revenue assurance maturity 1. Initial
1. Ad-hoc, chaotic. Dependant on individual heroics.
2. Repeatable
2. Basic project/process management. Repeatable tasks.
3. Defined
3. Standardized approach developed. Designing-in control commences.
4. Managed
4. Leakage quantitatively understood and controlled.
5. Optimizing
5. Continuous improvement via feedback. Decentralized ownership, holistic control. Source: TM Forum
www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
13
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Taking a customer-centric approach to strategic goals Summary: A conversation with the CTO of a large European service provider changed Mohammed Al-Hakbani’s approach to Saudi Telecom’s back office systems, from viewing them as a cost center to seeing them as the key to achieving strategic goals. By using TM Forum standards, benchmarking metrics and best practices, his company’s transformation project demonstrated their benefits in only 16 weeks. As he says, “One of the most impressive aspects of this project is that, with the support of TM Forum, we were able to determine which transformations were low hanging fruit – projects whose benefits would subsidize follow-on work – so that early projects could become self-sustaining.” Leading the investigation into the value of TM Forum’s Frameworx for his company – Riyadh-based Saudi Telecom Company (STC), the largest telecom company in the Middle East – Mohammed Al-Hakbani, Operation Support System (OSS) Director within the Network Sector, recalls a particularly important day. “We had been introduced to the CTO of a large European telecom provider, and he explained to us the strategic importance of OSS/BSS systems to his company – indeed OSS/ BSS transformation was central to his company’s shift from a technology-centric to a customer-centric organization. Now, I had been thinking of OSS/BSS as a cost center, not so much as a way to help us realize our strategic goals. So this meeting became a turning point that has since guided the Company towards significant benefit.” STC was privatized years earlier, in 1998, marking the beginning of a period of significant company transformation that has included organizational change, strategic investments outside the Kingdom, and technology and infrastructure investments in all aspects of the business. Like most telecoms operators worldwide, the move to a customer-centric focus required changes not only to technology, but also to software, culture, and processes. With the help of TM Forum, the company is now able to adapt industry best practices to its own unique needs; driving improvements in several customerexperience related key performance indicators (KPIs), as well as reducing implementation time for complex new initiatives. Al-Hakbani, who was the program manager for the company’s OSS transition, relied heavily on TM Forum. “The Forum gave us access to the experience of hundreds of service providers, providing best practices, benchmarking data, and specific standards and data models that helped us to coordinate both technical and process transitions.”
14
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
For example, explains Al-Hakbani, STC chose to introduce a new Fiber to the Home (FTTH) product line. As part of the design of new systems to support FTTH, STC was faced with an important choice regarding how to orchestrate the various systems that needed to be coordinated when provisioning new FTTH service. STC’s options were to use orchestration functionality inside its own inventory system – as had been done previously for its DSL service – or to spend the time and effort creating dedicated, centralized orchestration functionality.
Reducing risk, making informed decisions “In retrospect, it is very clear that our choice to orchestrate our process flows through a central information bus was the right choice,” recollects Al-Hakbani. “But at the time, the benefit was not so clear. The initial project was more expensive, and required changes to systems that had worked for years.” He adds, “TM Forum benchmarking data and Frameworx best practices were critical in helping us make the right decision. They helped us and our executive management to understand the substantial downstream capital and operational benefits that will be driven by this investment, as well as the less tangible benefits to STC’s customers’ experience.” Another example is STC’s trouble management process, also enhanced through the company’s membership of TM Forum. Increasing customer satisfaction by resolving trouble tickets ahead of time resulted in saving cost and improving STC’s brand perception. STC used the Frameworx trouble management process to identify opportunities for improvement, and then to demonstrate the potential benefits of the improvements to managers responsible for implementing trouble ticketing processes. A final example is STC’s performance assurance management
www.tmforum.org
process, which also gained through the company’s membership of TM Forum. With the introduction of a complex service such as IPTV, where customer experience was essential in reaching and maintaining the company’s customer satisfaction goals, STC used the TM Frameworx trouble and performance process.
Frameworx and best practices Al-Hakbani explains that his company v alues hard numbers that quantify business benefit: “We are very pleased to have been awarded the TM Forum’s prestigious Operational Excellence Award in 2010 for a transformation project that demonstrated benefit in only 16 weeks.” In this project, STC worked with IBM, and began with an assessment of current processes, applications, and architecture against TM Forum Business Process Framework (eTOM). “One of the most impressive aspects of this project is that, with the support of TM Forum, we were able to determine which transformations were low hanging fruit: projects whose benefits would subsidize follow-on work, so that its early projects could become self-sustaining.” STC’s transformation team mapped al l OSS processes to the eTOM model, in Level 3 as well as some in Level 4 and 5. As part of this project, STC also used the Information Framework (SID) for data integration. Internally, all vendor proprietary interfaces are mapped to the Information Framework. In addition, STC is pushing its vendor partners to be compliant with the Information Framework. STC uses TM Forum’s Integration Framework (MTOSI and OSS/J) for inter-working between different vendors, technologies, and systems in its service assurance implementation. STC is also collaborating with other vendors that comply with TM Forum Integration Framework and its interface standards. In addition to adopting Frameworx, STC is now involved in the TM Forum Benchmarking Program. “Our use of the Forum’s benchmarking data is particularly important at STC,” explains Al-Hakbani, who now tracks several benchmarking KPIs including: mean duration to fulfill service orders, percentage of orders delivered by committed date, mean duration to fix customer reported troubles, fulfillment process cost as a percentage of operating expenditure (OpEx), and assurance process cost as a percentage OpEx. By tracking
www.tmforum.org
these numbers and using them in its decision-making, STC is able to become a more rigorously managed organization.
Results Summary In summary, STC has realized a number of benefits from Frameworx and the company’s TM Forum membership. They are: n saving
significant potential downstream costs through understanding, and then implementing, TM Forum Frameworx architectural best practices including Information Framework (SID) and TM Forum interfaces (such as MTOSI, and OSS/J); n cultural and process change management support; n support in identifying low-hanging fruit transformation; projects, which produced the maximum value in the shortest amount of time, thereby optimizing cash flow; n identification of which KPIs, of the many thousands that it could have tracked, were the most valuable in converting to a customer-focused business.
Future As the benefits of TM Forum-inspired initiatives continue to be measured, STC will use them to justify further investments that incorporate Frameworx best practices, standards, and benchmarking information. Al-Hakbani explains that “working with the TM Forum is critical to our ability to cost-justify ongoing investments in industry best practices. As our thinking about the strategic nature of OSS/BSS investment matures, understanding other service providers’ experiences in recouping the cost of these projects many times over is very important to us, because it will make the benefits of this work very clear to our executive sponsors.” Look to STC to leverage its excellent technical staff as well as the passion of its OSS/BSS leadership to continue to push new boundaries. Particular initiatives will include an increasing use of software services, and continued development of its business process management infrastructure.
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
15
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Simpler IT speeds up new service provision, drives take-up Summary: Mobitel, Slovenia’s biggest wireless communications service provider, operates in challenging conditions. It is facing increasing competition, is heavily regulated and must comply with complex governmental processes before it can provide customers with new products and services. In addition, Mobitel’s OSS/BSS applications were developed in silos and it relied heavily on manual processes. Nevertheless, it has transformed itself, now delivering unique and customized products and services to the market, and will do so even more as it merges with its parent company, the incumbent fixed communications services provider, Telekom Slovenije (see page 26). For example, it will begin to offer combined fixed and mobile bundles starting July 2011. Little wonder Mobitel decided to adopt a service oriented architecture along with TM Forum’s Frameworx and streamline its IT and application infrastructure. It worked closely with IBM to gain greater operational flexibility, business agility, and the ability to respond to customers more rapidly. Mobitel reaped benefits almost immediately.
Mobitel was established in 1991 and is the biggest provider of mobile communications in Slovenia. Mobitel is part of Telekom Slovenije, which has some 3 million subscribers across five countries. Mobitel itself has about 1.5 million subscribers, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in innovation. Arguably, it leads the world’s service providers in many application areas. The telecoms market in Slovenia started out as a heavily regulated industry. Mobitel, under its parent company Telekom Slovenije, was the original mobile service provider in Slovenia. At the end of 2003, Mobitel had approximately a 73 percent market share, and competed against three other providers. As Mobitel faced increasing competition, the company realized it must reduce costs and streamline its processes to enable it to react to competitive threats quickly. It needed to be able to launch new products and services in days, not weeks or months. The executives at Mobitel decided the best approach was to implement industry standards and service oriented
16
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
architecture (SOA) principles – and TM Forum’s Frameworx is an enabler of SOA. Mobitel has now automated and manages its complex processes, SOA-based integration to various systems, and OSS/BSS applications after adopting a business process management platform (IBM’s Dynamic BPM), combined with IBM WebSphere Telecom Content Pack (WTCP). WTCP provides prebuilt accelerators aligned to TM Forum’s Frameworx, and an SOA-based approach to accelerate its time to market and optimize the business costs involved in generating new products. Boštjan Robežnik, IT director, Mobitel, led the push to implement an SOA. He says, “I approached Mobitel’s executives with the idea that SOA is a clear ‘must’ for the future. You have to have an SOA to enjoy a clean IT structure. SOA enables us to orchestrate the entire IT landscape and all its applications using a single business support system. It was
www.tmforum.org
only after we had obtained funding and implemented the SOA technology that we began to realize the potential for business optimization.” Mitja Stular, CTO, Mobitel, agrees with Robežnik: “SOA increases our efficiency. It brings a kind of organized distributed modularity into our network. Previously, we had many, many modules which were programmed in Java and C++. ” The new approaches are already proving beneficial, as Mobitel is merging with its parent company Telekom Slovenije, which provides fixed line services in Slovenia, and starting in July 2011, will offer fixed and mobile service bundles. To do that and offer new and innovative services and other bundles, the merged entity will rely on the new products and concepts enabled by the transformed order management process. As Klavdij Godniè, CEO, Mobitel states, “We implement the services of the future today, bringing the convergence of voice, data, Internet, video, television, advertising, local services and social networks. We achieve this by integrating with many established technologies, products and service suppliers in the industry.”
Selection process Mobitel’s primary reason for adopting a BPM and SOA approach was to separate business processes from the business applications so that business agility could be improved. TM Forum’s Frameworx was adopted as the basis to provide a standards-based implementation implementation model based on SOA and telecom industry standards, enabling Mobitel to reduce the risk of a vendor-specific vendor-specific implementation model. Mobitel then prioritized the business processes that needed to be transformed, focusing on the those that were most important to meeting its core business objectives. SOA maps IT services to business goals to help rationalize and optimize business processes by identifying and minimizing redundant or inefficient tasks. It also reduces operating costs, which in tough economic times is very important. With the promise of business optimization and the cost reductions it brings, Robežnik obtained buy-in from Mobitel’s Mobitel’s business units. One of the first aspects of its business that Mobitel chose to transform was order management, specifically customer order handling. Right from the start, Mobitel was committed to using
www.tmforum.org
TM Forum’s Frameworx in its IT transformation program and chose IBM as a partner to convert its existing infrastructure using its Smart SOA approach.
Tangible benefits The IBM WTCP provides prebuilt process models, business services, messaging schemas and other content based on TM Forum’s Frameworx, and supports the WebSphere Dynamic BPM platform. By adopting this Frameworx-based Frameworx-based approach, Mobitel has enjoyed the following benefits: n 40
percent less expenditure on professional services; n 80 percent saved through the reuse of artifacts; n 45 percent shorter delivery cycle for the ongoing maintenance and new releases of processes; n 40 percent reduced total cost of ownership. Mobitel began work on the customer order management function after a business value assessment was completed in collaboration with a team of business and technical experts from IBM. Klemen Dragar, Dragar, IBM client executive, says, “We created this assessment with staff from Mobitel working alongside our telecom industry experts to draw up a transformation transformation roadmap. We needed to understand what Mobitel wanted to accomplish as a business and how quickly they needed to achieve their goals. “ We helped them assess the costs and lead times required for process transformation using their existing systems and compared that cost to using a SOA approach using IBM’s IBM’s Dynamic BPM capabilities and our accelerators for implementing Frameworx process models, data models, application maps and a technology neutral architecture. It was clear SOA would create big financial benefits and we would be able to measure the benefits to Mobitel.”
Tackling the first process Customer order management at Mobitel was a heavily manual process, which took a long time to complete and was prone to errors. In addition, Mobitel is obligated by law to provide a contract with the consumer, verified by a signature, before
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
17
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
provisioning or placing an order for any service. In the past, this manual process meant that the store keeper had to call the credit card company to verify that the person was who they claimed to be, then the signature had to be sent to Mobitel’s Mobitel’s back office to be scanned and fed into the document management system. From there the customer information was manually entered into the order management system. In addition to verifying the signature, the would-be customer’s customer’s physical address had to be already listed in the government’s database. Not surprisingly, on average, it took up to 45 hours for a customer to register for and receive a new service.
Electronic signatures Now, after streamlining the order management process, the customer signs their name electronically on the new point of sale terminals (which have electronic forms built in that are filled in on screen) and provides all the other necessary information on the spot. This information is sent straight to Mobitel’s Mobitel’s back office with all the credit details. IBM’s WTCP helped accelerate implementing this new process, by providing out-of-the-box SOA-based business services that are mapped to the Forum’s Application Framework (TAM) (TAM) to abstract the functions exposed by the OSS/BSS systems. It also provides the business service interfaces from the Information Framework (SID) used by business data objects, and the business processes based on the Business Process Framework (eTOM). The Information Framework was used to describe the process by which the electronic form and signature were sent to the order management system. It was implemented by integrating the existing order management system, Mobile Mercury, with the WebSphere BPM platform, using the same processes. Mercury allocated tasks to the back office staff, and then measured how long the process took. Every task was created in the business process management platform, and monitored and measured. The whole business process is driven by a series of screens so that when all the manual steps are completed, the order handling process then invokes various technical processes.
18
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
These are exposed as business services in the service management and resource management layers, and had been deployed previously. The Information Framework-based order process still requires some manual intervention for exceptions, but getting the right tasks to the right people has reduced the cycle time, as proven by the measuring and monitoring key performance indicators that are used iteratively to refine the process using the BPM platform. Once Mobitel is comfortable with the initial deployment, the system will move to a higher level of automation. Approaching the project incrementally ensured continuity and helped staff develop their skills on the new tools. It also helped the team identify gaps in the process, enabling process re-engineering to meet the demands of the local situation. The screens used by the back office staff are all wizardbased, making for a better customer buying experience in terms of consistency, and ensuring that Mobitel complies with government rules related to pricing and discounts.
Sustaining the change Now, through a BPM and SOA competency center, Mobitel develops new business services that encapsulate the integration functions out of the OSS/BSS applications once and reuses them many times as developers access the services they need. The center has a big impact on the deployment of new processes and their upgrades, on the initial phases of modeling and service naming, and the use of appropriate standards. Robežnik says, “By using the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler, the business people have a way of communicating with IT, providing ideas about what the business processes should look like. Our business people used the IBM WebSphere Business Monitor to measure our human tasks and our different key performance indicators. This bidirectional communication between IT and the business units gives us more agility in the market and helps us lower costs. “Migration of services to the WebSphere platform has reduced the number of servers and operating costs. We also can introduce new services faster – such as a self-service portal, and a new billing and CRM application, so we’re
www.tmforum.org
providing better support to our customers, who are happier as a result.” Swami Chandrasekaran, Chief Architect, IBM Industry Solutions Services, adds, “The Frameworx standards including the Application, Information and Business Process Frameworks, and the WebSphere Telecom Content Pack were key enablers for Mobitel. These elements combined helped create the big picture, the vision, and allowed everyone to visualize the consolidated OSS/BSS target architecture, where we were going, to get their minds around it. “A lot of education was involved – we built dedicated teams to work on the enterprise business architecture, architecture, all using standard interfaces and information models. WebSphere Telecom Content Pack is aligned with the Information, Business Process and Applications Frameworks, which enabled the Mobitel team to accelerate the deployment of the automated order management solution.” The future is exciting for Mobitel, as it prepares to merge with parent company Telekom Slovenije, and offer combined fixed and mobile bundles and yet-to-be-created product and service offerings. To To do this, staff will use the standards-based processes and concepts that enabled it to transform the order management system to improve customer service and speed up order delivery times. Robežnik concludes, “Adopting the industry standards means using the best practices from around the globe, which help us run optimally. Also, Telekom Slovenije owns other mobile operators that can now easily adopt our solution because it is based on industry standards. This means our knowledge can be leveraged for additional benefits.”
"Telekom Slovenije owns other mobile operators that can now easily adopt our solution because it is based on industry standards. This means our knowledge can be leveraged for additional benefits.” www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
19
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Qwest cuts operational costs, gets products out there faster Summary: Qwest wanted to transform its service delivery to shorten the time-to-market for new products, including cloud services, reduce its operating costs, and have visibility and traceability from products to services to resources. It was also determined to reduce individual service component redundancy and enforce Qwest’s high standards for the overall customer experience. To reduce investment risk and prove the viability of what it wanted to achieve, the operator and its partners turned to TM Forum’s Frameworx and Catalyst Program before it embarked on the transformation. Within a year of the deployment Qwest saw a 4 percent increase in revenue, a 5 percent cost reduction, a 25 percent improvement in new product deployment cycle times, and a decrease in unique provisioning and assurance job steps. Advances in the communications industry – such as innovative business models, expanded value chains, converged services, and complex new technologies – constantly c hallenge a service provider’s ability to offer a high level of customer experience and efficient operations. Don Toland, director of program operations for Qwest Communications, knows those challenges well. “We see products not just converged from within the telecom industry, but we also see them coming from outside the traditional telecom space, ‘cloud services’ being a perfect example. In years past, the cloud was viewed as an IT service, however now it’s seen as an extension of our hosting operations. To support new services such as cloud, Qwest realized we needed a service delivery solution that would consistently federate our network and software services into a common platform and optimize service delivery.” To reduce investment risk by assuring business goals were achievable prior to committing funds to a full-scale implementation, Qwest turned to TM Forum’s industry-proven Frameworx standard as it planned and implemented its new service delivery platform. Qwest used the service layer of the Business Process Framework (eTOM) to model proposed telecom and cloud services, and Information Framework (SID) to rationalize product and service definitions. TM Forum’s Service Delivery Framework was used to address service lifecycle requirements. In addition, Qwest and its business partners prototyped and demonstrated their proposed solutions using the TM Forum Catalyst Program – a collaborative approach to solving critical industry challenges. The Catalyst process not only demonstrated feasibility, but also confirmed compatibility across Qwest’s business partners.
20
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Reducing risk To transform service lifecycle and service delivery methodologies to meet rapidly changing industry and business pressures, Qwest needed to: n streamline
service delivery processes; n speed concept-to-cash cycle times; n create visibility and traceability from products to services to resources; n reduce individual service component redundancy; n deliver best-in-class service levels. Following Frameworx best practices and standards, Qwest implemented the following solutions to meet its service delivery transformation goals: n order
management: automated sales order entry and order status visibility; centralized service and product specifications; configuration tools; consistent product and service orders; accurate quotes; n product information manager: product lifecycle management and workflow; rationalized product and service definitions; real-time product definition simulation and validation; n active service catalog: logical integration of product and service layers; model resources and services; drive provisioning workflow automation and inventory; rapid update of product offerings. Toland recounts the success ful adoption of Frameworx, saying, “Qwest first needed to ensure our approach for addressing operational and service challenges was headed in the right direction. To start, we presented our concepts
www.tmforum.org
to the TM Forum Community via a Catalyst proposal. After a critical review of TM Forum Frameworx standards and extensive participation in the feedback forums with vendors, we prototyped and demonstrated our solution – Service Model Catalyst: Enabling the Cloud Services Supply Chain – at the Management World event in Nice.” The Forum offers an unparalleled venue for establishing standards, for testing proposals in a Catalyst, and for demonstrating the real solution in a business environment. Using this process, Qwest confidently justified its anticipated return on investment, and was able to accurately break down and verify the operational expenses of each anticipated service deployment. Toland stresses the critical importance of TM Forum’s role in its service delivery transformation: “The Forum helped us establish a strong direction. We adopted Frameworx best practices and standards, tested our proposal in a Catalyst, demonstrated practicality, justified ROI, and moved forward with an implementation. TM Forum was essential at every step along the way.” As Toland notes, “TM Forum excels at bringing the right people together to actively debate and develop i deas, giving you practical advice on your direction before you invest.”
The results Qwest’s approach to participate in and contribute to the TM Forum Community led to a deployed service delivery platform that exceeded expectations, with both quantifiable and repeatable results. Toland confirms, “Frameworx absolutely enabled us to shorten product definition, deployment, and assurance times, improve our cycle times and operational environment, as well as decrease provisioning time. The result was faster delivery of consistent, reliable, and competitively priced services – the real measure of our success – with excellent customer experience.” Qwest believes TM Forum Frameworx Business Process Framework (eTOM), Information Framework (SID), and Service Delivery Framework are exactly what it needs to achieve practical application and fast return on investment. Within the first year, Qwest used Frameworx in conjunction with its own proprietary methods to realize a 4 percent revenue increase, 5 percent cost reduction, 25 percent cy cle time improvement for new product deployment, and an overall decrease in unique provisioning and assurance job steps. Toland stresses the real value of TM Forum is when a company participates in all aspects of the Forum, building strategic partnerships through the TM Forum relationships.
www.tmforum.org
One of the benefits of the Frameworx community is working hand-in-hand with vendors. Evaluating vendor technology and service provider ideas in a Catalyst Project is extremely valuable as they work together towards desired solution results. Not everything the company does can be in the open light of the Forum, but Qwest’s partnering success lies in focusing on vendors who adhere to TM Forum Frameworx, and who can demonstrate reliable, compliant interfaces with Qwest’s systems and applic ations. Throughout this process, Qwest collaborated with a wide array of vendors, incl uding: BT, Cisco, Comptel, Verecloud, Progress Software, Tribold, and Voss. “The vendor community has played a significant role in this project. It embraces TM Forum for its standards – which reduce development costs – and because it is a great marketing opportunity for them,” he points out. The communication giant’s support of TM Forum Frameworx is absolute. Toland asserts, “We strongly encourage other members to engage in the international Frameworx community. Not one of us stands alone in this converged environment, so the better we are at establishing common standards, the faster we can make traditional geographic boundaries irrelevant. TM Forum does a great job of looking at what’s coming down the road, implementing standards, and facilitating among all these different roles and disciplines. When you can get an industry to agree on a baseline data model as TM Forum has done with Information Framework, it’s just a Herculean task.” Core company divisions such as enterprise Business Markets Group, IT Operations, Products, Network Engineering, Channel Operations, and Finance all worked together to achieve Qwest’s service delivery platform success. The company continues to strategize, innovate, and streamline its service delivery methods with expert support from the international TM Forum Community.
What the future holds Now that Qwest has deployed its service delivery platform, it will look at the upfront sales process to improve sales effectiveness, and at solution design to take in and fulfill orders faster. Plans are also on the horizon to focus on realtime events, on-demand customer configurations, and using business analytics to explore cross-selling opportunities. Toland understands the value the Forum offers to Qwest’s future. He says, “If you make the effort, there’s a lot of depth to what TM Forum puts together which can be leveraged for the growth and success of your company.”
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
21
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Certified solutions speed up time to market for service providers Summary: Three service providers – Colt, Telekom Malaysia, and Aircel – explain why they chose to use a solution that has now received TM Forum Frameworx Solution Conformance Certification (Business Process Framework Release 8.0 – eTOM – Levels 1 through 3). Advantages include faster time to market, less time and effort spent on integration, reduced risk and lower costs. In March 2011, Oracle Communications’ Rapid Offer Design and Order Delivery (RODOD) solution received TM Forum Frameworx Solution Conformance Certification. More precisely, the RODOD solution scope was assessed for compliance with the Business Process Framework (eTOM) 8.0, Levels 1 through 3. It is the first solution to be certified by TM Forum. The productization and certification of solutions should lead to higher business value for customers, and facilitate and accelerate the adoption of Frameworx. Oracle choose to embark on this rigorous process because service providers prefer to procure standards-based products to reduce risk, increase speed of service deployment – particularly concerning the time and effort taken in integration – and lower costs. This also frees up service providers’ resources so they can concentrate on areas of differentiation. The scale and scope of the problems c aused by legacy systems, proprietary interfaces, and inconsistent processes is demonstrated by the fact that, according to Yankee Group, the average time it takes a service provider to launch new services ranges from 90 days to a year, while the average time taken to modify offers is highly manual and varies from 10 to 20 days. As service providers need to offer more services and promotions quickly just to compete, the situation is only going to get worse. TM Forum's Business Benchmarking Program has found that it takes the best-in-class about two hours to make new pricing or tariff changes for small variations or bundle updates. However, the average is four months. For all types of orders (regular services and bundles), the Program has found that the best in class has a 4.4 percent rework rate, while the average score is 13 percent, up by more than 50 percent on the previous year. This is a worrying trend. KRC Research estimates 25 percent of data service orders
22
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
are cancelled before they are fulfilled. Vanson Bourne says 77 percent of service providers acknowledge that delivering bundled products and services has increased operational complexity, while 86 percent report an increase in transaction failures. Many initiatives that are described as BSS/OSS transformation programs are not strategic overhauls, but tactical improvements. Operators continue to struggle with slow offer design, high order fallout, poor order lifecycle visibility, costly in-flight order changes, and high operation expense. To address these issues, the horizontal Level 1 processes included in the Business Process Framework 8.0 Certification cover marketing and offer management and customer relationship management. The vertical Level 1 processes include product lifecycle management, fulfillment and assurance. Level 2 processes that are involved in the Certification process include product and offer development and retirement, customer interface management, selling, order handling, and problem handling. At Level 3, some 24 processes were inv olved in Oracle’s certification process. For example, under product and offer development and retirement, they include the development of detailed product specifications, and the launch of new products. Level 3 processes that fall under order handling include determining customer order feasibi lity, authorizing credit, issuing, tracking, managing, completing and closing customer orders. Here three service providers explain, in their own words, the value of greatly reduced integration time and effort in BSS/OSS transformations, including less risk, lower costs and faster time to market.
www.tmforum.org
Colt – greater speed to market Colt operates in 13 countries, and runs a 25,000km network that reaches 100 cities and includes metropolitan area networks in 34 cities with direct fibre c onnections into 16,000 buildings and 19 data centres. The c ompany offers IT managed services, data and voice services to major organizations, midsize businesses and wholesale customers. The importance of speed to market is underlined by Greg Branch, director of architecture, Colt Technology Services. Colt was facing BSS/OSS challenges concerning order management because, as Branch explains, “As we move into providing cloud IT services to our customers, there is a demand for a much greater degree of automation in the way we provision those and we need to be able to combine the provisioning of the cloud IT services with the network servic es as a single integrated solution.” He adds, “We have to be able to assemble those solutions in a managed way and deliver them in a way that meets our customers’ high demands.” Colt chose to use Oracl e’s RODOD solution because it meets its requirements of “matching our need to offer assembled solutions made up of technology components. Then, having placed an order, it breaks it into those components, builds an orchestration plan for the delivery of the solution, a nd invokes the delivery workflows for each component in turn – those deliv ery workflows being integrated with our service platform to automate the delivery of tasks. “The main thing is around speed to market. In our existing systems it can sometimes take months to launch a new product because of the changes that we have to make in multiple disconnected systems. By being able to launch a service on a single integrated platform, we expect that time to reduce to weeks, or sometimes even days. The first service we are launching on the platform was i mplemented from start to finish in three to four months.” www.tmforum.org
“The main thing is around speed to market. In our existing systems it can sometimes take months to launch a new product because of the changes that we have to make in multiple disconnected systems. By being able to launch a service on a single integrated platform, we expect that time to reduce to weeks, or sometimes even days." CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
23
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Telekom Malaysia’s IT transformation Telekom Malaysia (TM) describes itself as “Malaysia’s leading provider in information communications technologies” offering fixed, Internet and mobile services. Its High-speed Broadband Systems was rolled out to 750,000 premises during 2010. Nizam Arshad, VP, IT, Telekom Malaysia Group, spoke at Management World in 2010, “to share the IT transformation project we have at Telekom Malaysia, lessons learned, and the challenges we faced in order to bring forward a new IT platform for the company and its customers. The program is an 18- to 24-month program. We are about midway done with it, we’ve rolled out one release and we’ll have two or three more releases this year [2010]. We started off with more consumer [offers], moving forward into small and mediumsized businesses, government, and enterprise services. “Today we have lots of systems s upporting the services we offer to the market. There are gaps in some of them and certain solutions are quite old; they have been implemented for many, many years. The challenge we have today is that everything that comes out is a bundle of services and you have certain platforms that are fairly easy to deploy, but you have other platforms that are difficult, and it is challenging to deploy these new bundled services. “We need a more end-to-end capability that will allow us to bundle all of our services, for our internal users, for the call center and operations, as well as for our customers. This is something we are deploying in Telekom Malaysia today. “The RODOD requires a lot of flow-through – provisi oning, activation process – and now we have been able to deliver that in some of the services. But, for the most part, where there are bundled services, it is fairly challenging. So what we are doing, even for our first release, is a triple play service that we offer to the market. In order to do that, we require a set of tools that are fairly integrated, that we can build and use for
24
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
the current offer we have, and also in the future for the new services that are coming onboard. “The customers’ demands are going to be more and more challenging. This allows us to deliv er something to the market quickly and efficiently. To do that we require a different set of tools – what we have today doesn’t allow us to do that. By deploying the Oracle automated management, the EI [Enterprise Integration] solutions and the SDP [service delivery platform], this allows us to go to market much faster, deliver the services, and be more competitive in the marketplace. “Today, most of the offers that go out will be bundled services, which generally require several weeks or maybe months to deliver the more complex services. With the current solutions from Oracle, those systems allow us to deploy something fairly quickly – it could be a week, or it could be two or three weeks. If it’s a configuration that’s required quickly, it could be done within a day. “The customer imposes upon us more visibility and control in the way we deliver the services to them and with Oracle order management, we are able to decompose these complex products and services, and each step of the way, the status of that particular order is floated up to the CRM [customer relationship management] layer. That gives a lot more comfort and confidence to the customers, that we are delivering the service in the time level we are committed to. It has given us more visibility in the way we deli ver all the services to them.”
www.tmforum.org
Aircel – faster offer creation, less order fallout Aircel is a mobile services provider in India with over 35 million mobile subscribers. It offers pre- and post-paid services. Ravinder Jain, CIO, Aircel, explains about his use of standards, “The service relies on the entire Oracle [RODOD]] communications suite, we’ve just gone live with it. It gives us a lot of advantages in terms of service providers who come on board and provide their services to us, so the boarding of these content providers becomes seamless and much, much faster because the SDP is pre-integrated with all these southbound network elements and all the northbound classic OSS and BSS. “The role of order management becomes more vital, for example, when we were launching our eat-all-you-can service – which is caller ring-back tone – the customer is free to change that ring-back tone as many times as they wish in a day, or a week, or a month. They can choose to change every minute if they’d like to. That was really impacting our network and we wanted a robust order management platform that can really manage this kind of situation. “One of our major criterion was to have a n end-to-end view, be it an operational view or a billing view or a service view, all three parts of the organization must have a consolidated view
and the tool must provide it. That was one of the criteria. “The second criterion was scalability, we were looking for a solution that can really deal with a very large volume. For example, today we need to handle hundreds of thousands of orders an hour processing performance, close to 800,000 orders, so that is a huge volume to deal with. “The third criterion was for us to have end-to-end mapping of all the offerings we have, and i t must reduce the design time, the implementation time, the delivery time, and, at the end of the day, it must have a very low number of order fallouts and offer less operating cost. “So we went through the entire technology commercial process, where we looked at the various products that are there in the market and we found that Oracle OSM [central order management and orchestration engine of the RODOD solution] really gives us end-to-end visibility of the order management. What I really liked about Oracle OSM was the way the orchestration and decomposition happens at the network level itself, completely independent of the CRM and billing, so you do not have any dependency and it works as a component that is tightly integrated with these two. It has its own business logic to orchestrate and decompose all your orders.”
“The third criterion was for us to have end-to-end mapping of all the offerings we have, and it must reduce the design time, the implementation time, the delivery time, and, at the end of the day, it must have a very low number of order fallouts and offer less operating cost." www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
25
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Customers first: an object lesson in achieving multiple goals Summary: In 2006, Telekom Slovenije began a rigorously managed OSS transformation project that impacted a number of different systems. Every department involved in this project was given specific, measurable targets. When the project was completed, dozens of benefits had indeed been achieved, including 90 percent automation of the service design process, order-to-bill time reduced by 30 percent, truck rolls decreased by between 9 and 13 percent, and operational expenditures in some areas lowered by 10 percent. Dr. Lorien Pratt spoke with Gorazd Hribar Rajteri č, head of IT OSS at Telekom Slovenije, to find out about some of the success factors in this major undertaking. Why did Telekom Slovenije embark on such an ambitious initiative? Telekom Slovenije was privatized in 1994, having been the PTT in our country. It remains the largest operator, with about 2.3 million mobile users and 1 million residential and commercial subscribers. We also offer VoIP, IPTV and Internet services. In 2006, our legacy OSS systems, especially in our service fulfillment stack, were in silos, with hundreds of one-to-one interfaces between systems, which created huge complexity. We were managing thousands of service specifications, although each was similar to the next. We also had data and process challenges – inventory was of particular concern – and our processes were highly manual and inefficient. We needed to expand into many new services – such as fiber to the home, Ethernet, virtual private networks, and next generation networks – and realized that the systems we had could not easily support that growth. We also did not have a customer relationship management system (CRM), but knew that we’d have to build or buy one in view of our increasing focus on customers. So we began several interrelated projects, for fulfillment automation, plus the introduction of a geographic information system (GIS), improvements to trouble ticketing, a data consolidation initiative, and a BSS project addressing order management, billing, and CRM. Where did you begin? We knew we wanted to transform the systems shown in the Figure 1. We used Frameworx – specifically the Business Process Framework (eTOM), Information Framework (SID), Application Framework (TAM) and Integration Framework – to help us to
26
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Figure 1: Transformed systems
BILLING
CRM
OSS
MEDIATION
WO MANAGEMENT
INVENTORY
RATING
PRODUCT CATALOG
PROVISIONING
INVOICING
PROCESS AUTOMATION
TROUBLE TICKETING
A/R
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
FAULT MANAGEMENT
DATA WAREHOUSE
GIS SLA MANAGEMENT
decide which products to select from the market. We wanted products that were open, standardized, interfaced well with other solutions, and that would not take too much time to introduce into our environment. The Integration Framework in particular guided us towards a network model that is technology agnostic, which means that it has considerable future value for us in managing complexity and in continuing to decrease time-tomarket for new product offerings. We organized our objectives into four broad categories to:
www.tmforum.org
decrease provisioning time; decrease costs (by reducing operating and capital expenditure); increase service quality and customer satisfaction; and increase revenue (by avoiding leakage). Then, individual projects were given key performance indicator (KPI) targets to meet, such as reducing the number of truck rolls or increasing field force productivity according to certain measures. Detailed objectives (both quantitative as well as qualitative) were outlined within business process areas (such as to decrease mean time to provision, service design unit costs, time-to-market and so on) and for IT systems (including minimizing the total cost of ownership, Frameworx compliance, automation level, and performance). For our provisioning improvement project, our goals were to decrease provisioning time for all services to improve customers’ experience and shorten time-to-market for services. Finally, we worked closely with our vendors including Telcordia and our Slovenian research and development partner Medius, who helped with deployment.
Those are a lot of goals to handle at once, how did you do it? Yes, our CEO once said that the project was like, “Trying to win the 100 meter race while changing our running shoes.” One of the ways that we addressed the challenge was with a number of strategies around our personnel. We created a separate project for every product, and a separate business case justification for each. Over 200 people were assigned to various project teams, and we mixed up our personnel, with no more than 25 percent of people remaining within their original area. We created a project coordination group and an integration testing group, and froze or postponed non-critical work during the transformation effort. As the provisioning project got under way, the Application Framework and Integration Framework both helped to reduce the time and effort for decisions around our solution architecture. We used a functional domain decomposition that largely followed the Application Framework, and followed many of the architectural guidelines of the Integration Framework. Specifically, the Application Framework domain definitions guided us towards decoupling the product and service specification catalogs. We rationalized our service specifications design, which enabled a high level of automation. This reduced the proliferation of thousands of sales bundles into a much simpler service catalog and network factory.
www.tmforum.org
Did this effort produce any measurable benefits? Yes, we achieved the 30 percent reduction in order-to-bill time through our technology agnostic approach: we were able to automate design and assign for several mass market services, including POTS, ISDN, broadband, and FTTx. Along the way, our improved service design process and technology, and provisioning improvements reduced truck rolls by 9 to 13 percent. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that order-to-bill is not the same as order-to-cash. The first difference is in time delay, which is conditioned by payment terms agreed with our customers – in our case between eight and 90 days after the invoice is produced. The second difference is in the amount since we are facing bad debts. As neither payment terms, nor bad debts are system-dependant, we prefer using the order-to-bill terminology. It is hard to quantify what the cost of our project would have been without TM Forum guidance, but judging from architectures I have seen elsewhere, I’d say that, overall, our effort was reduced to about a third of what it would have been without the use of the TM Forum. We also reduced the risk to the project, in my opinion. What risks were involved? One risk we identified early on was the integration between the order management and other systems for managing the service orders lifecycle. To mitigate that risk, we defined interface contracts based on Integration Framework concepts, adjusted to Telekom Slovenije’s particular needs. Another decision that we made was to adopt a common data language down to the detailed functional requirements level as well as in interface agreements. This also helped us to bridge the language of the IT and business worlds. Here, we were informed by the Information Framework, although again we created extensions specific to our own needs. Do you have any advice for other CSPs undertaking similar efforts? It was hard for our people to visualize that success was possible with such a big transformation until our executives began to spend time going from project to project, explaining its importance. We realized that resistance to change is natural, and so explaining the benefits to key people, using the same people
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
27
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
for the old and new applications, and ensuring that our users were well educated, turned out to be very i mportant as we retired the legacy applications. A number of architectural changes simplified these issues a s well. Today we have established a service oriented architecture for our infrastructure which has measurably improved system interoperability. As a result, we now have over 1.5 million objects in our centralized GIS showing our network, representing over 26,000km of routes. Among other things, this replaced a stack of documents over 47 meters high.
Where does the project stand today? At Telekom Slovenije, we call ourselves the first Communications Experience Provider. This reflects our focus on the importance of our customers. This project achieved a number of goals that support this overall company mission. We can now launch products much faster than in the past: the new architecture has reduced our time-to-market by several months. Once a product is la unched, we also have enhanced and faster self-care options, based on zero-touch provisioning. After an order is entered, we can now provision data services in three days fewer, on average, than it used to require. In particular, our VPN provisioning time is down by 30 percent and was reduced by four days. Once the customer’s product is up and running, we are able to provide better service quality because we now have automated service impact analysis and root-cause ana lysis
through our cross-domain fault diagnosis system. We can also offer customer service level agreements, which increase our market share and revenues. We expect that our centralized inventory system and a reduction in unnecessary fault investigations will al so decrease our fault localization time by 25 percent, which means that when we do have a problem, our customers’ experience of downtime is reduced.
Did these customer experience improvements come at a cost to your organization? Actually, our operational expenditures are lower today because of the efficiencies of the new architecture. For instance, our operational expenses for each service order is down by 10 percent because of automation of labor-intensive tasks. We can do unbundled service availability checks – required by our regulator – for 15 percent less cost. Finally, our maintenance costs overall for commercial off the shelf products have been reduced by 15 percent. Thank you for your time to help us to understand your project. Thank you. We look forward to continuing to work with the TM Forum, especially learning from other service providers as we move forward with new initiatives.
Telekom Slovenije’s advice on inventory, product, and service catalog best practices As part of our deployment, we chose to position Telcordia’s Granite inventory and CNUM at the heart of our OSS. Our rationale: a reliable inventory of all network resources, services (such as ISDN, IPTV, LLU, VOIP, Metro Ethernet, VPN ) and implementation of a catalog of service and resource specifications is a pre-requisite to efficiency, automation, and, ultimately, to cost savings. During Telekom Slovenije’s provisioning improvement project, we defined more than 5,000 different inventory models (in Granite language templates) covering the physical resource layer (racks, shelves, cards, ports), the logical resource layer (including logical connections, channels, clouds, and other logical capacity) and the service layer (service specifications). After our successful data migration, the Granite inventory was populated with Telecom Slovenije’s complete network, including copper, fiber, and the MPLS backbone. Our approach to deploying a service catalog was especially powerful. We modeled our service specification as a technologyagnostic abstraction of a network service, hiding all technological aspects and decisions. This enabled us to keep the number of different specifications relatively small – to around 30. In contrast, the product catalog contains thousands of product specifications. A product activator module within our order management system decomposes product orders into service orders. As a result, service order orchestration flows are generated on-the-fly as a composition of atomic building blocks, usually containing micro-flow definitions and provisioning rules per service specification (such as POTS activate, IPTV modify, and so on). We consider this a state-of-the-art architecture with the flexibility that we need for future growth.
28
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
www.tmforum.org
Automation affords big gains in efficiency, security and compliance Summary: Vodafone D2, Telefónica, T-Mobile, and a number of other multinational communications service providers took the attitude that a business problem shared is a problem addressed in a shorter time, that costs less in money and effort. To comply with challenging global security and regulatory requirements, they needed a common mechanism for staff to enter password and login information once to gain access to multiple OSS systems. They collaborated through TM Forum, using its standards to speed up processes by as much as 98.1 percent. Before developing the single access mechanism, users had to log into each system separately, creating potentially serious security breaches, and wasting a lot of time. In addition, the user account security audit process was largely manual, and so was time-consuming and error prone, in itself creating a business risk. To address these i ssues, the operator team worked with TM Forum, along with vendors IBM, Wipro, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, and others. Ultimately, the TMF615 (Operator User Management) and JSR91 (Interface Program Enterprise Identity Management) teams were able to demonstrate a number of benefits through deployment of systems based upon these standards, including: automating the daily audits of users who have access to sensitive systems; ncompliance with audit and security requirements at local, group, and government levels; nreducing user provisioning time by 79.2 percent; ncutting by more than 90 percent the time needed to audit security of the entire OSS system user account lifecycle, as measured at Vodafone D2; ngreatly reducing exposure to security concerns surrounding the release of sensitive information to unauthorized parties.
Figure 1: A disparate, inefficient approach to user and authentication/ authorization management
OSS System A OSS System N OSS System B
Operator
OSS System N++ OSS System N+
OSS System C
n completely
Figure 2: A centralized User Identity Management System (UMS) allows a single source of access, but multiple protocols must still be maintained
OSS Identity Management System Approver
Solution overview The TMF615/JSR91 solution is summarized in Figure 1 through Figure 4. Figure 1 shows the traditional approach used by communications service providers (CSPs) to authenticate access to disparate OSS systems. As can be seen here, both users and user audit personnel must log into every system manually. Figure 2, in contrast, shows that a User Identity Management System (UMS) centralizes this process, with big reductions in the time taken to gain authorized access, the complexity of the process, and vulnerabilities in security.
www.tmforum.org
OSS System A
Operator or System
OSS System N OSS System B
OSS System N++ OSS System N+
OSS System C
OSS Active Directory
target system specific protocols
OSS Central LDAP
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
29
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Figure 3 shows that, with the addition of the standard interface to OSS authorization, as provided by TMF615, this process can be improved through the removal of the requirement for OSS-specific adapters, configuration parameters, data dependencies, and transport protocols. Finally, Figure 4 shows an additional scenario, where standards defined in TMF615 allow a CSP to use a single, global UMS to access multiple local systems, with further benefits described below. The remainder of this article describes the problem addressed by TMF615/JSR91 in more detail, along with how these standards deliver these important benefits of security and efficiency.
Overcoming the identity management challenge CSPs worldwide are challenged by the need for effective identity management. They are faced with a large number of users of increasingly complex OSS systems, and a user population of globally distributed user groups in many countries, across different continents. In response, CSPs are seeking solutions that increase security while simultaneously reducing the time required to operate OSS systems, and for administrators to audit users’ access to those systems. In particular, CSPs need to deploy processes to detect and remove dormant and orphaned accounts as soon as possible. They also need to certify that accounts satisfy certain legal requirements on a regular basis, and to reduce or eliminate the use of shared accounts (where two or more individuals share a single login and password). However, many OSS systems do not support these functions, and when it is provided, it is not centralized or standardized. This creates unnecessary complexity, security vulnerabilities, and inefficiency. The solution is found in a centralized UMS, as is provided by several vendors’ solutions, including IBM. An important part of an effective UMS deployment includes a standardized mechanism for communicating centralized user information to disparate systems. This approach brings big business and operational benefits, as described above.
30
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Figure 3: Adding TMF615 protocol allows only a single protocol to serve multiple OSS Systems OSS System A
Operator or System
OSS Identity Management System Approver
OSS System N OSS System B
OSS System N++ OSS System N+
OSS System C
only 1 protocol for all different systems
OSS Active Directory
OSS Central LDAP
Figure 4: A two-tier (global/local) UMS supports large CSPs with multiple units/groups
Global Identity Management System Approver
OSS System A
Operator
Operator or System
SPML
OSS Identity Management System
OSS System B
OSS System C
www.tmforum.org
The role of TMF615 TM Forum’s TMF615 uses the open standard called SPML V2.0 to define a communications protocol between a central UMS and a local OSS or local user management system (UMS-L). This protocol supports five functions: create, modify, delete, lookup, and audit. The standard defines how these functions operate in the following use cases: ncreate
a user; nassign account to user; nassign a role to a user; nretrieve user’s details; ndelete user’s account and entitlements; ndelete user.
Vodafone D2 has deployed this as an application-level gateway which transforms the TMF615 provisioning request into TIP trouble tickets. They are then tracked and routed through the existing TIP TT network (called Vine).
In conclusion Using the translation to JSR91 TIP Trouble Ticket application program interface means the provisioning process for all OSS applications can be set up completely independently of support from TMF6515. This can reduce the user lifecycle audit time by 98.1 percent. A big win for all concerned and a new standard in the industry.
Global, country, and local advantages A second arena in which standard protocols and architecture for UMS deployment can help service providers is by providing a mechanism for communication between what is called a global user identity management system (UMS-G) – which is used across the CSP – and a local UMS that is used within a particular group, country or geographic region (UMS-C). Large operators may also employ a third tier of local UMS – called an UMS-L – which provides the next level of access to a particular set of systems. To support this multi-tiered UMS scenario, TMF615 also describes each level of functionality and specifies how the user functions described propagate from one to the next. TM Forum Interface Program In addition to defining a standard automated interface to be used by service providers who want to manage their systems using a centralized UMS, the TMF615/JSR91 team defined a second standard to enable the creation of a standardized trouble ticket which initiates a manual process for those vendors that do not participate. This standard – the JSR91 – defines the Interface Program (TIP) Trouble Ticket (TT) interface, which integrates automated and manual processes to enable user management and audit on non-participating systems.
www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
31
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Integration combats fierce competition in Indonesia Summary: AXIS enjoyed huge initial success in one of the world’s largest mobile markets, Indonesia, which it entered in 2008. However competition was fierce, with all service providers trying to win market share through very low tariffs in a slowing market. Also, with 95 percent of the population opting for pre-paid, the churn rate was unusually high. To combat these conditions, AXIS decided to launch post-paid as well as pre-paid services, and, in part by exploiting the attributes of 3G, wanted to offer tailored bundles to consumers and business people. To do this it needed an open, integrated IT architecture that could accommodate new elements as well as reuse as many as possible of the 13 different systems run by five different vendors on its networks. The project had a tight deadline of six months, which it met using Frameworx to simplify and speed up necessary analysis, integration and implementation. New services can now be introduced within a week instead of two months, and the popularity of the new service bundles were such that in the two months after commercial launch, AXIS added 2 million customers to its base of 6 million, and has improved customer retention. In February 2008, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) entered Indonesia’s mobile market through its first foreign subsidy, PT Natrindo Telepon Seluler (NTS). From April 2008, NTS has traded under the brand name of AXIS. It held 2G and 3G licenses across many major towns and cities, and its vision was to offer innovative, affordable services using an intelligent network (IN) system and a flexible marketing strategy, AXIS had attracted 1.2 million subscribers by the end of 2008, but problems were looming. The most important was declining customer loyalty, the direct result of two main factors: firstly, subscriber numbers had grown 50 percent annually for seven consecutive years, resulting in a penetration rate of 37 percent among the nation’s 200 million people. At which point, a massive influx of competitors had hit the Indonesian market, all with the same plan of attack – slash tariff rates to lure subscribers from rival operators. Secondly, with a gross domestic product of $2,000 per capita, Indonesian subscribers are relatively price-sensitive and willing to shop around, which contributed to nearly 95 percent of subscribers choosing prepaid vouchers to pay for their mobile service. This led to unusually high levels of churn.
32
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
To gain mass loyalty, AXIS decided on a new strategy – to offer new 3G-based services and post-paid subscriptions to lure high value customers. This demanded end-to-end interoperability through cross-network and BSS integration, streamlining the company’s entire network, and converging prepaid and post-paid services. Moreover, AXIS needed to keep the solution’s total cost of ownership low and move fast to gain the advantage of being the country’s dominant pre-paid and post-paid operator ahead of its competitors. The company’s leaders set the ambitious deadline of October 15, 2009 to develop an integrated, flexible, open IT architecture that could support their business goals, giving the AXIS and Huawei’s IT teams fewer than six months for the entire project. This was a major challenge as AXIS had five different vendors who owned a total of 13 different subsystems on its network. They ranged from customer relationship management and enterprise application integration to SAP, customer loyalty management, mediation, provisioning, card management, and data warehouse management. This meant the business and operation management system was very complex and inefficient, with multiple interfaces, which
www.tmforum.org
made it expensive to maintain and run. In addition, accountability was often hard to ascertain and changes took a long time to implement. Day to day operations had a high error rate. As AXIS would be maintaining all these legacy vendors and services, it chose Huawei to implement the Convergent Billing Solution (CBS) and system integration for the new architecture. "Through this strategic partnership with Huawei, AXIS will get a robust solution to achieve a higher post-paid customer base through its innovative and affordable products in Indonesia’s market," said Erik Aas, President Director and CEO, AXIS. Huawei needed to ensure that everyone fully understood the diverse business challenges and goals of AXIS’s various departments, holding between 400 to 500 meetings with AXIS staff throughout the project. Many took place in the first few weeks, as the design team and engineers got to know all key personnel from AXIS accounting, customer care, and marketing, as well as the departments in charge of IT and networking operations. Huawei worked closely with AXIS’s technical staff to create a blueprint and build methods into the plan such as supplemental solutions for alarm reporting, backup procedures, and security protocols to avoid common pitfalls. The final version of this blueprint guided the two teams’ transformation of the compartmentalized IT structure into an integrated, efficient system. The blueprint took just three weeks to finish – about half the average industry time. Moreover, thanks in part to the quality and completeness of the blueprint, the two companies cooperated to complete the systems integration in under 13 weeks, and they launched the services commercially in fewer than six months. The two companies knew from the start that they needed a standard way of evaluating existing processes and defining new ones, and they turned to TM Forum’s Frameworx. They used the Business Process Framework (eTOM) as the guideline for processes and Information Framework (SID) for interface design.
www.tmforum.org
Some of the existing systems were reused and needed to work with Huawei’s new convergent systems including an Online Charging System (OCS) and billing system. To ensure they interconnect smoothly and operate with the existing systems, they were all were integrated using Huawei’s BSS integration framework. This BSS integration framework has hundreds of common business processes built-in that refer to the Business Process Framework with a common data model based on the Information Framework. Huawei analyzed processes to determine the requirement and identify inefficient processes, resulting in a requirement specification from which new processes were defined. See Figure 1: for how a service-oriented architecture (SOA) was used in Huawei’s integration framework. The defined business processes were key to the architecture. It executed an overall assessment among multiple layer systems based on future business processes.
Figure 1: Business processes in the service oriented architecture r e m u s n o c e c i v r e S
Presentation Layer
GUI Frame
Business Process
k r o w e m a r F n o i t a r g e t n I
Service
r e d i v o r p e c i v r e S
Component Layer
Operational System
Program
Package
Rules
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
33
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
After the business processes analysis, the Forum’s Information Framework and the Huawei’s BSS integration framework were used as the basis for designing standardized interfaces with reusable components. To achieve this, Information Framework business entities and their associated attributes were used to simplify the integration of applications. As the framework defines, a layered model was used to partition the information and data into domains, aligned with Business Process Framework high level concepts, such as customer, service and product. The benefit of this approach is that each domain possesses a high degree of cohesion between business entities within the domain, while having loose coupling with entities in other domains. This approach greatly reduced the interface analysis, and the interface interconnection and maintenance cost. Huawei shortened the project deployment time by overlapping the initial training stages with the final stages of system integration, and called on local Huawei resources from its two training centers in Jakarta. The supplier also started testing system integration and user acceptability before completing integration, saving several weeks in the process. By the final stages of the project, more than 100 IT staff from both teams were working simultaneously to ensure they met their deadline.
Results in record time Through its new open IT architecture, AXIS was able to offer convergent pre-paid and post-paid billing and service options. There was a big choice of service bundles for all sorts of callers, individuals or families, corporate and community organizations. Marketing could offer short promotions and bonuses to attract high-value customers, and has opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. Subscribers signed up in record numbers. In the first three months after commercial launch, AXIS’s subscriber base grew from 6 to 8 million – a monthly growth rate of 11.7 percent versus 2.6 percent per month during the six months prior to the deployment. At this rate, AXIS will reach its network capacity of 15 million before 2010 is out – a challenge it is happy to face. Customers also like the convenience and transparency of online account management and inquiries, and better service due to the increased operational efficiency. This is clear from
34
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
the improved customer retention rate in what remains a fiercely competitive market. In addition, time-to-market takes one-eighth of what it had been – down from two months to a week for new services. The overall gains for the operator include less time and effort spent on data interface analysis, and the simpler integration of Huawei products with partners’ solutions. There has also been a substantial reduction in day-to-day operational issues, although the operator is able to make maximum reuse of existing systems, which protects its investment. The system can also scale easily due to its open architecture, which requires less maintenance. The service provider has been able to converge its pre-paid and post-paid services, and the system’s greater flexibility is enabling the AXIS to move towards its goal of being marketdriven. "Huawei has been an important strategic partner of AXIS since our birth,” says Johan Buse, Chief Marketing Officer, AXIS, “and we are delighted to extend our cooperation for the development of this innovative new billing system."
"Subscribers signed up in record numbers. In the first three months after commercial launch, AXIS’s subscriber base grew from 6 to 8 million – a monthly growth rate of 11.7 percent versus 2.6 percent per month during the six months prior to the deployment." www.tmforum.org
Better service provisioning and activation create foundation for growth Summary: Magyar Telekom’s project to convert a legacy provisioning system into a single platform successfully enables the provisioning and activation of multiple product lines. The implementation relied heavily on TM Forum Frameworx and is delivering many benefits. They include cutting service activation by 20 percent and increasing the ratio of successful automated activations by 30 percent. Time-to-market for services was reduced by up to 20 percent, while the time needed to integrate new network management systems fell by 30 percent. When manual interventions are needed, they take 70 percent less time. The deployment of a zero-touch home gateway has lessened field force activity by 30 percent. New and existing services are being migrated to the new platform, and customer relationship management will be enhanced to support trouble ticketing and the management of service level agreements. Magyar Telekom (MT) is Hungary’s largest telecom provider. It provides fixed and mobile telephony, data transmission, and IT and systems integration services to consumer and business customers. MT is also the majority stakeholder in Crnogorski Telekom in Montenegro and Maekdonski Telekom in Macedonia. Launched in 2008, MT started by collaborating with HP Solution Consulting Services (SCS) to transform its business structure, processes, and technologies, and implemented a unified activation and provisioning framework for all services. MT’s Service Provisioning Automation project (SPA) converted a home-grown legacy provisioning system to a single platform for provisioning and activation of multiple product lines. OSSs slated for conversion included service design and resource assignment, order entry, service activation, and upstream systems notification. Completed in Q2 2009, the project realized a number of measurable benefits, including: activation time was decreased by 20 percent; nThe ratio of successful automated activations was improved by 30 percent; nTime-to-market was decreased by 10 to 20 percent by implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system that is independent of product structure for the provisioning system, and clear service and resource-facing service definitions; nIntegration time and effort of new network management systems (NMS) was decreased by 30 percent;
nManual
configuration times – when needed – were decreased by 70 percent; nField force activities decreased by 30 percent due to zerotouch home gateway deployment. MT also attributes a number of benefits to the use of TM Forum standards, including a 25 percent reduction in definition and detail design, and an overall 10 percent reduction in development time. Substantial risks were also mitigated. The project was a finalist in the TM Forum’s 2009 Excellence Awards, and won Global Telecoms Business magazine’s 2010 innovation award for fixed infrastructure service management. An overview of the project is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Service Provisioning Automation project overview
Feasibility checks n Service orders n
s p o & g m e c i v r e S e c r u o s e R
Sales / Customer Care Front-end CRM processes
M R C
nService
www.tmforum.org
Self Care Front-end
CRM
Billing activation
Feedback status
Billing
SPA
TV
Service Decomposition Fix Network
✔
✔
✔
Mobile Network
✔
✔
✔
Coax Human Recources Network
✔
✔
✔
Provisioning Activation
Network elements
Technical Inventory
Internet Phone
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
35
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
SPA’s goals Before launching the SPA project, MT was experiencing increases in service provisioning complexity due to more personalized services, hybrid networks, and end-to-end service guarantees. The company recognized that its goal of deploying next generation services required a modernized service provisioning infrastructure that supported fast and accurate activation. To reduce these complexities, as well as to achieve a number of customer experience and efficiency goals, MT sought a zerotouch, right-first-time, automated fulfillment stack to optimize the entire service delivery process, from service design and resource assignment, to order entry, service activation, and upstream systems notification. “Magyar Telekom engaged HP Solution Consulting Services to provide guidance on designing the optimum processes and solution as well as to deliver the project. HP focused on provisioning redesign, interface standardization, application integration and overall project management. “HP SCS consultants used COSMOS, a methodology capturing the industry standard to design a single, consolidated platform,” explains Thomas Bertram, CTO, Magyar Telekom Group.
The company set a number of goals for the project, including efficiency improvements, increased visibility into the provisioning workflow, greater customer satisfaction, reliability, and a single solution that could support multiple offerings over MT’s wireline, wireless, and coaxial networks.
Universal and uniform service layer When the SPA platform project was launched in 2008, it was tasked with achieving these goals through the use of a uniform and universal service layer that connected the CRM and resource layers. It also needed to integrate the processes from MT’s T-Home, T-Mobile, and T-Systems branches and support automated decision processes that allow business users to control policies, rules, treatments, and information access. There were a number of so-called non-functional requirements as well. These included producing a carrier-grade system using best-in-class practices and using a modular architecture in line with TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). MT chose HP’s Service Activator product as a basis for its deployment.
A typical SPA provisioning and activation process A typical provisioning and activation flow is as follows: 1) A customer speaks to the call center, and a request is captured by CRM. It validates the request from a marketing and sales perspective, and initiates the creation of a new connection or the provisioning of a new service on an existing connection. If needed, CRM will also initiate a technical feasibility request. The provisioning workflow engine, which is built on the HP SOSA bus, analyzes the type of workflow to be triggered (new, modify, delete, migrate, and so on). 2) The service decomposition module breaks down the sales products and converts it to technical service orders. 3) The provisioning workflow engine invokes capacity allocations in the technical inventory system. Batch processes ensure that all product catalogs, technical inventories and service catalogs are in synch. If the allocation fails, the service planning module supports manual allocation and planning, along with modification of the automated capacity reservations. Several versions can be designed and posted back to CRM. After a successful automatic capacity allocation, the decomposition module determines the necessary provisioning flow, whether fully or partially automated. 4) The provisioning workflow engine transfers allocation information to CRM. 5) If a manual activity/work order is required, the provisioning workflow engine invokes the workflow management system to initiate field force interventions and manual work orders. These are transferred back to CRM after manual activities have been fulfilled. 6) The provisioning workflow engine initiates HP Service Activator to start micro-workflows for activating resource-facing services. All exceptions, trial-loops, undo and rollbacks are managed by the workflow module of HP Service Activator. 7) HP Service Activator manages activations with element managers and network management system. 8) CRM is notified with activation status as needed. 9) The provisioning workflow engine initiates update of the sold product in CRM and billing. 10) The provisioning workflow engine instructs service level management to update service level agreement parameters.
36
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
www.tmforum.org
SPA project details MT’s SPA solution architecture is shown in Figure 2. As can be seen here, a business workflow engine orchestrates orders and CRM, which are then decomposed so that the appropriate inventory resources are allocated and reserved. It initiates field force tasks as appropriate for physical tasks, as well as configuration and activation at the logical level/layer. Orders are handed off to an activation-specific workflow bus, along with HP’s Service Activator, which then coordinates the order through various resource management systems, involving more than ten major systems in all. TM Forum’s Business Process Framework provided significant value in the design of this architecture; orchestration, decomposition. Other processes from the Business Process Framework described the primary handoffs between CRM, product lifecycle management, and SPA processes. The interfaces at these handoffs were described using the TM Forum Information Framework (SID), which guided the architectural choice of separating product, service, and resource, which were extended to meet MT’s particular needs. In addition, the Information Framework provided a starting point for the common data model used throughout the project: Business Process Framework processes and Information Framework objects were used for detailed process and interface designs. There are also a number of personnel benefits arising from the use of TM Forum standards. The use of TM Forum Frameworx helped management convey the quality and professionalism of the solution design methodology and operational model. Clear definition of different application responsibilities helped to reduce frustrations that would otherwise be felt on such a substantial transformation project. Diagrams derived from Information Framework and Business Process Framework helped to communicate project plans with stakeholders. The OSS team claims that creating the processes and data structures for this project from scratch would have taken much longer than re-using Frameworx. SPA project status today After a year of deployment, MT is today building on the SPA program with further fulfillment improvements. A number of legacy services and technologies are being migrated into the new system. These include CATV, SatTV, VoCATV, DVB-S, DVB-C, mobile voice and data and other value added services. In addition, CRM will be enhanced to support trouble ticketing and the management of service level agreements (SLAs).
www.tmforum.org
Figure 2: SPA Solution Architecture Customer Relationship Management Systems Siebel Product Catalogue
r M e y R a l
C
OSS
Order Management
Sold Products
4
8
9
Allocation
Fulfillment Status
Activation services
4
8
9
1 Sales Order
t n e m e g a r n e a y a l m e c i v r e S
1
Order
Business Workflow Engine (SOSA-F) 2a
Service Catalogue & Inventory
6a
2b
RFS Activation Workflow (SOSA-A)
Service Decomposition (Product-CFS-RFS)
RFS Activation (HP SA) 7a
t n e e c r m u e r e y o g l s a a e n R a m
6b
IMS
ANMS
ReKOD
7b HDM
AAA
WFMS BMS
INKA
Resource Management Systems
Information Architecture used by Magyar Telekom Products are offered to Magyar Telekom's customers. Products contain services or resources in any combination. Products can be material (a device) or immaterial (an implementation plan) or any combination of them. Products contain at least one service component and have a sales price. Services are developed by Magyar Telekom or its partners and combined into products for sale. The same type of service may composed into different products and have different price as an instance. Resources represent physical or logical components of services. Resources are typically devices, applications, licenses in IT or NT domain.
Product Product
Product has CFS
Product has PR
Customer Facing Service
CFS Requires RFS
e p o c S
Resource Facing Service
Service Product PR Host RFS
LR Implement RFS
Physical Resource
Resource
Logical Resource
PR Support LR
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
37
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Enabling consolidation and growth to go hand in hand Summary: Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited is the country’s largest communications service provider, offering voice, data, Internet, and TV services. It chose to use TM Forum Frameworx to help it consolidate its network operations when facing a period of rapid growth in its drive to improve the reliability of the network and its customers’ experience. As a result it suffers 50 percent fewer network alarms, has 30 percent fewer outages across multiple networks and the time to fix cut fiber cables has fallen by 40 percent. It has also enjoyed a 5 percent drop in indirect costs thanks to better visibility across its infrastructure. Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL/Ufone) is the country’s only integrated communications service provider (CSP) that offers bundled voice, data, Internet, and TV services. Since PTCL was privatized in 2005, it has initiated a series of modernization projects. Today, it is Pakistan’s largest broadband service provider, with over 400,000 subscribers across 1,000 cities, and has 80 percent market share. It is also the country’s first 3G wireless broadband provider. In 2008, PTCL chose to work with a number of vendors and TM Forum to create a new Network Operations Center (NOC) because it knew it was about to experience rapid growth and needed to be more streamlined and agile operationally. As it turned out, PTCL tripled its broadband subscriber numbers and doubled its broadband coverage in 2009. The NOC consolidates what were previously several dozen separate element management system functions, which didn't provide a centralized view of the company’s network. A central NOC is now located in Islamabad, with regional NOCs in Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Karachi. Together, they control, monitor, and manage the PTCL network through a centralized platform. The project’s benefits include: n 40
percent reduction in time to restore cut fiber optic cables, with associated operating expense benefits; n 30 percent fewer wireless local loop, broadband, and MPLS outages, due to the faster resolution of fiber cuts; n an estimated 5 percent indirect reduction in capital expenditure in the transmission/digital cross-connect domain due to improved visibility of network resources and their utilization;
38
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
n 50
percent fewer network alarms, increasing service availability.
In addition, the NOC provides full visibility into cross-domain performance, traffic, and trends. This supports network planning for expansion and optimization, along with improved visibility into operational data for networks and operations, supporting better decision making.
Centralized NOC’s project history PTCL’s fixed and wireless network consists of multiple technologies, including time division multiplexed and next generation network (NGN) C4 and C5 switches and routers, synchronous digital hierarchy, dense wave division multiplexing, narrow wave division multiplexing, IP, and wireless local loop. The network includes equipment and software from vendors, including Siemens, ZTE, Loop Telecom, Tellabs, CA Spectrum , Tekelec, and Huawei. Before 2008, the company’s network was managed in 40 separate operational centers. There was no central NOC providing network management for fault resolution, nor had it root cause analysis capability. This resulted in lengthy time periods for service restoration: a serious issue given the frequency of fiber cuts across the country, and an impediment to PTCL’s goals of providing excellent customer experience. For this reason, the centralized NOC project had a number of business goals, to achieve its ultimate aim of expanding its market leadership in Pakistan. It also sought to improve productivity and business agility while simultaneously reducing costs. Disaster recovery through the NOC was also a priority.
www.tmforum.org
To achieve these goals, the centralized NOC project included organizational as well as technology changes across multiple business units. Software was deployed to monitor and manage the multi-technology and multi-vendor network; and to carry out performance management for NGN, transmission, and signalling domains as well as to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) for effective management of PTCL’s operations.
The JSR91 standard was used to implement interfaces between fault management and trouble ticketing systems to simplify managing problems, as it is more flexible, and less costly. The use of TM Forum MTNM model is expected to reduce integration costs and risks since the OSS and network management systems already support the interface.
Frameworx aids transformation Frameworx played a central role in the project. TM Forum processes allowed the company to create process abstractions such that both national and regional NOCs are treated as one virtual entity: the same processes apply regardless of technology, location, domain, or vendor. In addition, PTCL says Frameworx supported lower costs throughout the project, based on the deployment of automated instead of manual procedures, standard process definitions, reusable processes, and the use of commercial off the shelf software. Automation efficiencies derived, in particular, from automated problem detection, trouble management, and the automated escalation of issues. Specific Frameworx benefits were right across the board. The Application Framework (TAM) enabled PTCL to identify applications and to assess vendors' capabilities, thereby helping the service provider draw up a technology roadmap. The Business Process Framework (eTOM which is mapped to the Infrastructure Technology Information Library – ITIL) helped optimize fault management and performance management processes. It also provided more meaningful KPI metric data for the implementation of service quality management to drive a customer centric operational model. In particular, it provided the processes needed for:
Project status today PTCL announced its new NOC in November of 2008, and the project was a finalist for TM Forum’s Operational Excellence award in 2010. Building on this work, PTCL designated 2010 as the ‘Year of Customer & Employee Care’, with a strong focus on quality of service for the company’s customers. Along with hundreds of retail outlets, four contact centers, and multiple touch points to serve its customers, the company’s newly enhanced NOC allows it to provide a more reliable network underlying its quadruple play of services to both consumers and business customers. Moving forward, PTCL sees the NOC platform as essential for its goal of diversifying future services to increase revenues, and to provide statistics to support ongoing trend analysis and network reengineering. PTCL’s parent company operates in 19 markets worldwide, and has a growing global footprint. PTCL itself has many customers with business outside of Pakistan, and is working to globalize its brand. To support these developments, PTCL is looking to expand its use of Frameworx components in the years to come. This will include improvements to inventory management and order fulfillment processes, as well as data modeling based on the Information Framework (SID).
n weekly
and monthly performance and health checks; n network monitoring; n issue detection and resolution; n alarm management; n performance management; n trouble ticketing; n work order management; n outage management.
www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
39
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Fast deployment and differentiated products bring rapid success in Vietnam Summary: GTEL Mobile was established in July 2008 as a joint venture between Vietnam’s GTEL Corporation and Vimpel Communications Group, a leading provider of telecoms services in Eastern Europe. As a brand new operator, its priority was to quickly build an operational business support infrastructure with integrated, value added services. It planned to capture market share and create brand awareness in the Vietnamese market through differentiated price plans and services. Key objectives included real-time rating for all accounts, hybrid pricing models, real-time credit control for postpaid accounts and a single product catalog with a focus on ease of use. Deployment began early April 2009 and was ready for service by July. It signed up more than 700,000 customers in the first two months through its Big Zero marketing campaign. GTEL Mobile’s first goal was to launch and grab market share in Vietnam’s highly competitive market. As a brand new operator, its priority was to build an operational business support infrastructure with integrated value added services quickly to capture market share and to create brand awareness through differentiated price plans and services. Key objectives included real-time rating for all accounts, hybrid pricing models, real-time credit control for postpaid accounts, and a single product catalog that was easy to use. GTEL’s business model called for non-discriminatory customer care, meaning a centralized view of customers’ accounts – regardless of payment type – across multiple customer touch-points. They include the web, interactive voice response, and call center. To achieve this, business processes needed to be aligned across critical business functions such as rating, charging, provisioning, ordering, customer care, and billing.
40
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Fast deployment Given that GTEL wanted to launch as quickly as possible, it decided it needed a solution that would provide products built in to minimize integration efforts and time. Such a solution would also enable the CSP to add rich functionality through configuration. GTEL wanted to focus on the product offering plan, rather than spend time on integration and customization. GTEL chose IBM and Comverse at its partners, because both had proven track records. IBM was chosen as the lead partner to integrate the Comverse ONE Billing & Active Customer Management solution and the many value-added services of the Comverse HUB: SMS, MMS, mobile Internet, ringtone solutions, and voicemail platform. The Comverse solution incorporates many of the Application Framework (TAM) components in a pre-integrated fashion to streamline the end-to-end flow of the Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM) business processes and elements,
www.tmforum.org
since all components speak the same ‘language’. Some of the key business processes provided by the Business Process Framework included: customer interface management; order handling; bill/invoice management; bill payment and receivables management; rating and discounting; and the management of bill events. Additionally, the solution leverages an organized product catalog/customer service management data model and single logical data model, which have been mapped to the Forum’s Information Framework (SID) to ensure a common understanding of terminology and concepts across the system’s components. The solution’s architecture not only increases operational efficiency by reducing complexity, but also ensures an enhanced and consistent end-user experience across all customer touch-points. All of which contributed to an extremely fast implementation of all the BSS requirements, (including customer care, point of sale, inventory and service activation), prepaid billing, and other value added services (SMS, MMS, mobile data, voicemail, and others).
The results The implementation began early April 2009 and was ready for service by July 2009 – a total of 16 weeks from the receipt of the purchase order to going live. So far, GTEL says the results have been outstanding, with a BSS that can handle 2 million customers with complete BSS functionality including real-time rating, charging, promotion, value added services integration, and point of sale integration. As a Vimpelcom company, GTEL is promoted under the Beeline VN brand name and its main offering is called Big Zero. After launching in July 2009, Big Zero attracted more than 700,000 active subscribers within two months. The Big Zero price plan gives subscribers free on-net calls after the first two minutes of a normal price phone call. It is backed by the solution’s features, which include concurrent tariffs and multiple balances.
www.tmforum.org
"Some of the key business processes provided by the Business Process Framework included: customer interface management; order handling; bill/ invoice management; bill payment and receivables management; rating and discounting; and the management of bill events." CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
41
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Simpler network changes bring major benefits Summary: PT Inovação is the technology company of Portugal Telecom (PT) and leads its innovation on IT and telecoms. OSS Solutions is one of the most important product areas and with its suite NOSSIS, PT Inovação is expanding its business into new markets like Brazil and Africa. To help implement operational processes efficiently and reduce costs, PT Inovação provides a solution based on a single mediation system for IT and telecom networks with autodiscovery and reconciliation functions, that ensure a centralized inventory more accurately reflects the network. The aim is to reduce problems in provisioning, performance and problem management processes, caused by network inventory inconsistencies. Jorge da Silva Gonçalves , Director of OSS department at PT Inovação explains to editor Annie Turner how using TM Forum standards, documents and best practices smoothed the way and the benefits they delivered.
What were the business issues you wanted to address? The project has developed a mediation and autodiscovery solution for the IT and telecom networks to detect inconsistencies between them and a centralized inventory (CMDB), then to build a reconciliation model between the networks’ database and the centralized inventory. The idea was that we could detect inconsistencies and update the network or the centralized inventory accordingly. The centralized inventory contains information about all the network elements and the relationships between them and the service components. This information is crucial to feed all service provider operation processes.
human errors, high volumes of data and the complexity of the data result in inaccurate data. This in turn means it takes longer and costs more to plan and build the network, to manage network capacity, deliver new services on time, and maintain the network effectively. Inaccurate data can also prevent you from being able to change service characteristics in real-time to meet clients’ needs or stop you managing the quality of service, which also means not having the information needed to validate service level agreements (SLAs). Put another way, it means greater capital (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx), and dissatisfied customers.
Why was this so important? Communications service providers (CSPs) need to automate processes and reduce human intervention. Centralized inventory will keep the information necessary to support process automation, namely service and resource inventory. This information has to be reliable to avoid errors and the introduction of manual tasks. An example is that when CSPs need to make configuration changes, they have to know which services would be affected and how they would be impacted. Inconsistencies cause problems with provisioning, performance and problem management: The combination of
What approach did you take? We developed the solution based on our suite of integrated OSS products, which we call NOSSIS, following international best practices. We were keen to use standard compliance and TM Forum’s Frameworx. NOSSIS uses TM Forum reference models: the Information Framework (SID), the Multi-Technology Network Model (MTNM), the Business Process Framework (eTOM) and the Application Framework (TAM). In this case we use our commercial off the shelf products: Network Activator for autodiscovery and network mediation; and a NETWIN module for reconciliation.
42
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
www.tmforum.org
We chose to use TM Forum information models because they are standard and generic, and you can apply them with several network technologies including SDH, MPLS, IP and so on. They are independent and can be used equally for the IT world and telecoms, which is very important as one of our key objectives was to have a single mediation system for the telecom and IT networks to simplify reconciliation and to keep a centralized inventory for both worlds.
Why is having a single system for the IT and telecom networks a priority? Today is no longer possible to dissociate IT and telecom networks, as services are supported on both technologies. CSPs need a centralized inventory with IT and telecom data in order to have all service relationships. This was the main driver to develop a single mediation and reconciliation system. Another important issue was cost reduction. You don’t need different teams to run them and you only have a single system to work with. Gaining this efficiency was very important for our customers. Can you give more detail about your use of TM Forum standards? Yes, for Network Activator, which spans fulfillment and assurance, we relied on the OSS/J Order Management Interface (see box copy below for more information). The Network Activator’s main functions are multi-service activation and mediation, providing an abstraction layer for the OSS, prioritizing and scheduling orders and services, and autodiscovery.
These matter because they bring a lot of benefits to customers such as enabling the faster integration of new network elements and IT platforms, provisioning with zero touch flow-through, and more flexible configurations for new services. The combination of the Network Activator's functions also enables automatic activation, discovery and inventory reconciliation processes. The Network Activator’s Northbound Interface is serviceagnostic as the Order Management OSS/J applications program interface (API) is based on TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID). This means new services can be introduced without changing the interface and that it can handle real-time, synchronous operations and bulk, asynchronous operations (see box on page 30). The autodiscovery Database is based on Information Framework and MTNM information models. This enables the support of any type of Entities (IT or network).
What was the result of you using the TM Forum best practices, documents and standards? To begin with, we have a flexible solution that can be configured to provide similar treatment for both the IT and the telecom networks. There is no need to pay for extra product software to introduce new networks, only configuration is required The MTNM model allow us to support many network technologies, IP, MPLS, SDH, Ethernet, PSTN, GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) with technology plug-ins that can be configured in a standard way. Through the OSS/J Order Management API we have an abstraction layer which provides open, standard interfaces for other systems.
What is OSS/J? OSS/J delivers Frameworx-based interfaces implementations (OSS/J applications program interfaces) and design guidelines for the development of component-based OSS systems. OSS/J technologies provide the foundation for unifying legacy systems and new applications quickly, and at low cost. The OSS/J APIs are multi-technology based and include Java, XML, and Web Services integration profiles. Each integration profile consists of specifications, a reference implementation, and a conformance test suite (TCK). All OSS/J APIs are publicly available at no charge. OSS/J became part of the TM Forum Interface Program (TIP) in April 2008.
www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
43
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Is the project ongoing and what do you still hope to achieve? We continue to develop the project in line with our roadmap, for example, we want to achieve a complete solution that provides network operations with real-time information about any differences between the real network and what we have in the centralized inventory. We need to give operations the choice between making a change in the network or the database. At the moment, we can only detect the inconsistencies and make the updates starting from a manual action. Our goal is to build in intelligence so that we can look into them and apply rules to work out whether we should alter the network or the database automatically. This is critical because it can be very serious if you get it wrong. All operators are very nervous about automatic reconfigurations because this is very complex and needs a lot of study, which is why it is usually done with human control.
Why is being able to achieve this level of automation so important to you? Because if there are bad configurations in the network, you can detect and correct them much faster if you can do it automatically and minimize the service downtime. Also if the centralized inventory is update faster, CSPs may avoid errors in provisioning and impact analysis, saving money. What have you achieved so far and what have you learned for the future? We built a single mediation system for autodiscovery and reconciliation of IT and telecom network, which is a very important step forward. For the moment, total automation of the inventory reconciliation process and network reconfiguration is our next step and requires further work. The Business Process Framework (eTOM) is a highly efficient way of identifying processes and activities that need to be supported, while the usage of the Information Frameworkbased common vocabulary facilitates communication and knowledge exchange between all stakeholders – and this too is very important.
The Information Framework’s role in more detail
The information model built on the Forum’s Information Framework is made up of a package of customer services (CFS), which may need network services (RFS). These in turn are implemented by logical resources (LRs). Entity specification enables the creation of a library of RFS descriptors, which are composed of LR descriptors (think Lego – with the service elements acting as a set of relatively simple building blocks that are interchangeable). The information model uses Multi Technology Network Management (MTMN, the latest version 3.5 is designated TMF608 by the Forum), a set of documents which define the information exchange, or interface, between Network Management Systems (NMS) and Element Management Systems (EMS) enabling the management of SONET/ SDH, DWDM, ATM, Connectionless (Ethernet), as well as ASON Control Plane based transport networks.
44
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
www.tmforum.org
ENABLING SIMPLICITY Being a service provider in today’s market isn’t easy. Delivering the right level of service, at the right price - and making a profit – is a tall order. To succeed, your business needs to run with maximum agility, simplicity and efficiency. As the global industry association focused on simplifying the complexity of running a service
provider’s business, TM Forum is collaboratively delivering the standards that are taking the cost and risk out of, and putting the flexibility into, running your business. Visit www.tmforum.org today to join the world’s leading service providers who are using our Frameworx standard to enable simplicity.
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Consolidated BSS produces magic numbers Since moving to a single BSS, a European operator has achieved ‘magic numbers’: Small changes to the BSS that once took three weeks now take three days, those that took three months now take three weeks, and those that once took three years now take just three months. Yet when the service provider became a subsidiary of a larger operator about five years ago, its 13 year old BSS comprised more than 30 systems with unaccounted relationships, which made them inefficient. There were different service channels and experiences for the different services, which was a great inconvenience to customers and limited marketing opportunities. New tariffs and services typically took from two to nine months to get to market, while customer care and billing systems were inflexible and reaching the end of their lives. The whole architecture was complex and involved hundreds of proprietary protocols. All this changed dramatically when the service provider chose TM Forum’s Frameworx to move to a single BSS with an open architecture. The service provider offers services to consumers and businesses, and its solutions include fixed telephony and Internet access, mobile and TV services in its home country; mobile services in its domestic market and adjoining countries; and data services in Western Europe. Work to re-architect a legacy BSS stack that previously included solutions from over 30 different vendors and with hundreds of proprietary interfaces began in 2007. Before the transformation, operating costs were high, and several months were required to bring new services or tariffs to market. Some projects required more than a year. Now it has a single BSS stack that supports multiple product areas, and which has an open architecture to facilitate future expansion. Built on the TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM), and utilizing a number of software systems from Huawei, the resulting OSS/BSS supports unified billing, invoicing, bill inquiry, credit control, and charging. There is also a unified view through several channels including a web portal, call center, and interactive voice response (IVR). The project team describes the end result as a 3-3-3 benefit, meaning that small changes to its BSS system that once took three weeks now take three days, those that took three months now take three weeks, and those that once took three years now take just three months.
46
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Motivation for the transformation In 2007, many operators in the more saturated European markets were facing serious challenges. The growth in mobile subscriptions slowed considerably while regulators were demanding lower tariffs. Customer experience was becoming a critical competitive factor and, at the same time, operators needed to offer triple and quad play services to retain market share. In response to this challenging set of circumstances, as the company began to offer an increasingly diversified portfolio of services, its IT operations were modified to support each one in turn. This organic growth pattern led to a BSS stack that was difficult to understand and costly to operate. Specific limitations included the following: n Complex
legacy BSS with more than 30 systems and unaccounted relationships resulted in inefficient operations. n There were separate systems for pre-paid, post-paid, and Internet services. n There were different service channels, each with a different customer experience, which was confusing and inconvenient for customers. n This meant limited marketing opportunities and restricted channel management.
www.tmforum.org
n It
took a long time to get products to market, with a new tariff or service development usually taking between two and nine months. n Customer care and billing systems had limited functionality, as they were inflexible and reaching the end of their lives. n A complex architecture and over 200 proprietary interfaces meant a rigid structure that got in the way of business goals.
Achieving greater simplicity To address these issues, the operator sought a single vendor that could integrate billing, customer relationship management (CRM), contact center, and business intelligence under a single, open, service-oriented architecture. The parent company already had a relationship with Huawei, which was chosen to engage with the subsidiary in a broader scope as part of its BSS transformation project. Following the guidance of TM Forum best practices, and as an important risk-reduction strategy, the solution was based on service oriented architecture (SOA) and was aligned to TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM). The Framework helped to identify redundant and missing steps in legacy business processes. The service provider also used the Business Process Framework to create a quantitative assessment of the value, cost and performance of existing processes. This helped to eliminate duplication and find missing steps in processes, leading to more efficient operations. It also helped to speed the development of new processes. In addition, TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) was used to design standardized interfaces ass ociated with reusable components. The Information Architecture specified entities, Unified Modeling Language models, and sequence diagrams. System interfaces were designed based upon principles from the Forum’s Integration Framework (TIP). Information Architecture business entities and their associated attributes were used to facilitate application integration in an implementation-independent manner. As the Integration Framework sets out, a layered model was used to partition the information and data into domains, aligned with Business Process Framework high-level concepts, such as customer and product. The benefit from this approach is that each domain possesses a high degree of cohesion between business entities within the domain, while remaining
www.tmforum.org
loosely coupled with entities in other domains. Overall, the total number of system interfaces was reduced from many hundreds, and the total number of vendors to fewer than 10. The Business Process Framework’s benefits went beyond the purely technical. As with many companies, the use of an established set of guidelines for the solution had an impact on staff confidence as well: its proven nature helped to reassure the team that the end result would be robust as well as scalable.
Greater profits Today, the service provider’s unified customer view and data model allow its CRM system to support consumer analysis and cross-selling for the first time. In addition, the operator’s employees can promote a product, resolve a problem or introduce a new service, based on a complete view of customers’ activities. This has resulted in improved customer satisfaction overall, and has allowed the company to improve marketing and sales efficiency, ultimately leading to improved profits. Customers have access to the same consistent information via a number of channels, including call centers, IVR, an e-care portal and an online shop. This approach has reduced costs and improved the customers’ experience. The parent company says the new architecture has given its subsidiary a competitive advantage. It will exploit this by rolling out to a number of technologies, starting with prepaid wireless, and continuing through a complete customer lifecycle management solution.
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
47
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Transforming IT systems to support new business models Summary: Microsoft decided to become a hosted services provider through a massive, global launch of a new commercial offering – but first its IT systems had to be transformed to support the new business and operational models. Microsoft Business Online Services simultaneously offers multiple business models, and creates opportunities for its partners around the world in new markets, from small and medium sized businesses to communications service providers. Its extensive use of TM Forum’s Frameworx and Business Benchmarking metrics reduced the time to commercial launch by up to 12 months, and has eased the subsequent integration of new elements and the expansion of its systems and service offerings. In 2008, Microsoft launched Business Online Services which includes online versions of business productivity tools such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting. To accomplish this, the company integrated eight separate vendor solutions to offer 20 online services in just eight months from project start to finish: a Herculean task the company says it could not have achieved without extensive use of TM Forum’s Frameworx, which played a big part, right from the start. Indeed Microsoft says that the use of Frameworx reduced the implementation time to commercial launch by nine to 12 months.
Project history In early 2008, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer asked the company’s business groups to launch a number of hosted services businesses by the end of the year. This required a big change to the company’s in-house systems. Says Eric Troup, senior principal architect, Communications Sector Developer and Platform Evangelism, Microsoft, “Compared to the software manufacturing business, a services business is much more complicated.” In particular, to offer a subscription-based service requires ordering, provisioning, billing, and other functions that are not unlike those that traditional communications service providers (CSPs) use to offer subscription-based voice and data services. These functions were not available in Microsoft’s IT systems then, which had evolved to support software manufacturing and licensing. The requirement to build such a substantial infrastructure in such a short time was challenging, to say the least, and so the company chose to leverage TM Forum Frameworx to make this new offering possible, efficiently and quickly. The Online Services OSS/BSS team started work in February 2008, and completed architectural and design work in early July 2008. Coding new components, configuring and integrating
48
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
existing components began in July. The new Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal was live and operational in early October, and the team officially rolled it out for the broader service provider audience at a TM Forum event in November 2008. In 2009, Microsoft added the Microsoft Online Syndication Interface (MOSI) which is a step towards making the process of implementing service syndication more uniform across multiple channel partners. Derived from TM Forum Frameworx and Service Delivery Framework (SDF), MOSI provides business-tobusiness (B2B) interfaces for service ordering and provisioning. For the system integrator, it provides an ac celerator for use when implementing complex bundled services leveraging existing customer relationship management (CRM), order entry/ configuration, and order management systems.
The role of TM Forum Frameworx In support of Online Services, Microsoft’s OSS/BSS deployment includes service lifecycle management, fulfillment, service assurance, and charging/billing functionality. It includes third-party systems as follows: n MetraTech’s
hosted software package for order-to-cash, professional services, and hosting; n RMS deals with credit card charge-backs and credit collections; n Cybersource provides a secure credit card payment gateway; n Arvato handles partner payment fees; n Arvato also provides services for Tier 1/Tier 2 customer and partner care; n SAP offers revenue recognition; n Rightnow supports ticketing and reporting; n WorldTax provides tax cal culation services. These systems were integrated using Frameworx elements as follows:
www.tmforum.org
Business Process Framework (eTOM): Microsoft adapted the Business Process Framework’s processes into its architecture. They were modeled in an internal enterprise architecture planning tool that facilitated a coordinated implementation across multiple groups. n Information Framework (SID): This was integral to the design of contracts between the various components that make up the Microsoft BSS/OSS to support Online Services. The Information Framework was the starting point to define the data structures associated with the architecture. n Application Framework (TAM): Microsoft used an internal enterprise architecture modeling methodology called Solution Domains. The Application Framework was used as the starting point to define the solution domains that Microsoft used to model the entire BSS/OSS architecture. n Integration Framework (MTOSI/TIP): Published application program interfaces (APIs) and MTOSI served as a starting point for Microsoft’s implementation. This enabled solution designers to generate actual contracts between application framework components when modeling business processes. In addition, the Microsoft implementation considered the work of the Architecture Harmonization and TIP in the formulation of its methodology to design and implement its BSS/OSS architecture. n Software Enabled Services (SES) Management Solution (formerly SDF): Microsoft contributed to and leveraged the SES to help shape its thinking around how hosted services are defined. The development of the MOSI specification and software development kit was directly influenced by the SES work. In addition, follow-on work on Service Delivery Platformlike (SDP) functionality was accelerated by the SES solution work. n TM Forum Business Benchmarking: At least eight Business Benchmarking metrics were directly incorporated into the Microsoft Operations Dashboards to support the initial release. n MOSI: The addition of the MOSI in 2009 was an important step towards beginning to automate service syndication order processing. n
Derived from the TM Forum Frameworx and Software Enabled Services Management Solution, MOSI provides the B2B interfaces for service ordering and provisioning. Once the syndication partner adds the Microsoft Online Services products to their product catalog, it can utilize its CRM and order entry systems to take and configure orders that can include Microsoft content in the bundle. The syndication partner’s order management system then passes the order to Microsoft via the MOSI to accomplish provisioning of applicable Microsoft services and receive status back. The addition of MOSI cut the associated time for B2B processes by 80 percent while
www.tmforum.org
greatly reducing the number of steps and opportunities for error. Overall the Frameworx approach underpinned Microsoft’s new service offering, enabling the company to: n Support
multiple business models – including direct to subscribers, indirect through partners, indirect through another service provider, and service syndication – offered to companies and partners in over 100 countries. n Put in place 7,000 channel partner agreements worldwide to sell the offering. n Develop channel partnerships in multiple sectors, including traditional communication service providers (Bell Canada, BT, Telenor, TDC, PGi, Vodafone, Orange, Telecom New Zealand, Telstra); technology distributors (IngramMicro, Tech Data), consulting and integration firms, and others. n Bring major benefits to Microsoft’s partners and end customers, who can rapidly and cost-effectively deploy software without needing to buy, install, and administer a server.
Expanded offering Microsoft is to continue to scale its OSS/BSS platform to meet global deployment requirements in the more than 100 countries in which the company operates. Expansion includes the flexibility to handle both subscription and usage-based cloud offerings on its Azure platform. Through service syndication, CSP partners are offering Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) bundled with local services to customers such as Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). Microsoft has announced the next evolution of Microsoft Online Services. BPOS will be expanded into Microsoft Office 365, which will bring together cloud versions of Microsoft's most trusted communications and collaboration products with the latest version of its desktop suite, for businesses of all sizes. It will be supported by an evolving BSS/OSS stack based on the TM Forum Frameworx reference architecture, which has proven its ability to scale to meet global demand. An unexpected benefit of this project was the amount of communications Microsoft received about its use of the TM Forum Frameworx. The company is now using it more broadly as part of its Solution Domain Enterprise Architecture Planning methodology and Microsoft IT is using elements of Frameworx for a broader range of internal global line of business systems not related to the Online Services business.
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
49
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Measuring success through an open process architecture Summary: Wipro helped one of India’s leading service providers align its business process architecture to TM Forum’s Frameworx. The goal was to establish standardized processes across business units and develop a robust, real-time performance measurement system linking operational key performance indicators to business goals and objectives. In total some 900 processes were aligned to the Business Process Framework (eTOM). This was key to the operator being able to merge and consolidate between 15 and 20 percent of processes across customer relationship management and resource management and operation. It also enabled the company to get its wireless services to market up to 30 percent faster and improved governance and process control through real-time key performance indicator tracking. The company also built on the Business Process Framework to develop standardized critical business processes that had been identified across four business units. One of India’s leading operators offers a range of communication services spanning mobile, wireless, wireline, public booth telephony and Internet services, based on both CDMA and GSM platforms. In total it serves close to 40 million subscribers across the country. As a well established player, the communications service provider was going through a phase of high growth in one of the world’s most dynamic markets, but the rapidly growing subscriber base was making it a real challenge to maintain service levels and strengthen its brand. The client decided to partner with Wipro Consulting to address the following key issues: n Non-standard
processes were in use across the business, with varying degrees of maturity. n There were pockets of resistance from user groups because earlier standardization efforts had had poor adoption and success rates. n Large numbers of processes were either obsolete or out of date. n Process execution was inconsistent and there were slippages regarding adherence to the quality of service specified in service level agreements (QoS/SLAs). n A lack of proper process controls and metrics resulted in uninformed and delayed decision making. n Static process repository and ineffective (manual) performance measurement systems were subject to manipulation.
Addressing the issues To address these issues Wipro worked with the client’s business excellence team to indentify critical business processes from
50
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
core operations – customer relationship management (CRM) and technology (network and IT). The combined team opted to use the Business Process Framework (eTOM), part of TM Forum’s Frameworx integrated business architecture. The Business Process Framework is based on customer-centric principles and the project team built on it to support the client’s organizational structure to help it achieve superior levels of quality and performance. Wipro Consulting’s solution followed a four phase approach towards that aim, starting with process discovery, through which the team prioritized critical business processes and studied the state of the process architecture. Next came process analysis which involved assessing the current state of alignment with the Business Process Framework, and identifying gaps and bottlenecks with regard to industry best practices. The third phase was process harmonization, that is, figuring out the best-fit process architecture aligned to the customized Business Process Framework and the organization’s structure. It also involved publishing process models using common symbols and notations (Business Process Modeling Notation – BPMN). The final phase was process controls, which meant defining key performance indicators for processes and identifying data sources for enabling real-time monitoring. It also covered defining and developing a balanced scorecard structure, linking the organization’s objectives with business objectives and identified measures for senior management.
The role of standards This solution revolved around aligning the service provider’s process architecture to a customized Business Process Framework process hierarchy, focusing on:
www.tmforum.org
Figure 1: Benefits realization: Combining Business Process Framework (eTOM) and Business Process Modeling Notation for Request & Complaint Management
Assess current Business Process Framework alignment
Customize Business Process Framework process hierarchy Process Analysis
Identify process gaps & bottlenecks
Process Harmonization
Design best-practice processes
Map process architecture to eTOM Publish standardized processes
Customized Process Architecture Customer Strategy, Infrastructure & Product
Process Control
Operations
Marketing and Offer Management
Customer Lifecycle Management
Resource Development and Management
Technology Management and Operations
Service Development and Management
Service Management and Operations
Supply Chain Development and Management
Supplier/Partner Relationship Management
Process Discovery
Enterprise Management
Prioritize Critical Business processes Study As-Is process architecture
Strategic and Enterprise Planning
Enterprise Risk Management
Financial and Asset Management
Enterprise Effectiveness Management
External Relations Management
Knowledge and Research Management
Human Resource Management
Frameworx Business Process Framework
n order
handling and fulfillment; n customer request and complaint management; n problem handling; n QoS/SLA management; n service assurance; n billing and payments management; n and technology management and operations (resource management and operation – RMO) covering both IT and network resources.
Short and long term benefits The project delivered both short and long term impacts and business benefits. The standardized process architecture meant that a total of 900 processes across the enterprise were analyzed and aligned to the Business Process Framework across the levels of Strategy Infrastructure and Product (SIP), Operations, and Enterprise
www.tmforum.org
Identify key roles & responsibilities Define process metrics - CSFs & KPIs Link KPIs with real-time dashboards
Management. Some 15 to 20 percent of processes across CRM and RMO were consolidated and/or merged and there has been a 30 percent reduction in getting new mobile services and products to market. The new architecture has also meant increased conformance to external audits and readiness for the TL9000 quality management system standard, designed to meet the supply chain quality requirements of the global communications industry. More effective process performance measurement has brought increased governance and effective process control through real-time KPI tracking. The implementation of the balanced scorecard with real-time monitoring of measures helps senior management executives make more informed decisions. Throughout the whole project, change management created awareness about building a culture of measuring performance across the organization.
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
51
ENABLING INNOVATION The game is changing for communications service providers. Cutting costs is merely a ticket to play, not to grow. The key to growth lies with innovation – underpinned by business agility, smart partnerships and inspired creativity.
community of more than 50,000 professionals on the cutting edge of innovation. As a unifying force for the industry, it’s time for you to join more than 750 companies across 195 countries collaborating to simplify service innovation.
As the global industry association focused on simplifying the complexity of running a service provider’s business, TM Forum brings together a
Visit www.tmforum.org to learn more about TM Forum membership and how we help you enable innovation.
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
How to save a million dollars a year Summary: A leading mobile service provider in South East Asia wanted to improve the efficiency of its entire network and service management processes to facilitate the rollout of 3G and leased lines. It saw the increase in network coverage as critical to maintaining its market leadership, along with improved service delivery and better quality trouble management. To this end, it deployed a transformational OSS solution, in which the use of TM Forum’s Frameworx played an important role, particularly in enabling a number of vendors to work together, easing integration and providing end-to-end visibility of the converged networks. The end results include the operator saving up to $1.1 million a year on the procurement of transmission equipment. Other returns on investment include an 80 percent improvement in data quality and efficiency due to better plant rollout processes, while automated error detection and correction for network management system issues have eliminated manual tasks 100 percent.
In its quest to extend network coverage and improve operational efficiency, this South East Asian communications service provider (CSP) transformed its disparate and complex network management systems through the deployment of a converged end-to-end OSS solution. This involved upgrading all the network and service management areas, from business planning, to network rollout and support in its radio, transmission, fixed, and access networks. The project included cross-domain integration in its drive to optimize its assets, and their flexibility, and speed up its 3G rollout – all while maintaining operational excellence and fostering interoperability.
end, cross-domain system management, as different parts of a single process were spread across multiple applications. This meant the operator had little insight into exactly how its network was used, and inventory was found to be inaccurate about half of the time, which wasted a lot of resources, including unnecessary site visits. There was also a lack of meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs), and even so, only a third of rollouts were completed within predefined KPIs. Another priority was to address the lack of automation in the execution layer, which meant a lot of manual data collection and reporting.
The project’s scope The network operator and NetCracker jointly analyzed current and future modes of operations. They leveraged NetCracker’s best practices for business process re-engineering and adhered to TM Forum Frameworx, in particular, the Forum’s Application Framework (TAM) to achieve the separation of functionality and management tasks, operations execution, and cross-domain consolidated management. The foremost issue was to gain an holistic view of end-to-
Crossing departmental borders Network rollout is a collaborative process touching many departments: an effective OSS solution provides visibility into and aids the integration of network resources and business processes, and their functions. The deployment of NetCracker’s OSS solution involved 3G cell site planning, installation, and maintenance, along with backhaul planning, design, provisioning, and installation. It embraced managing the rollout, from financial and asset management, to reporting to government as required
www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
53
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Figure 1: Description of the integration interfaces
Financial & Asset management
CRM
Supplier Management
Site Contractor
NetCracker GIS
Service Inventory & Provisioning
Discovery and Reconciliation
Rollout Automation
Workforce Management
Trouble Ticketing
Outside Plant
Resource Inventory
Design and Planning
Configuration Management
Service Quality Management
Field Engineers
Engineering Design Tools EMS/NMS Resource Activation
Fault Management
and licensing matters, and procurement. The plan was to establish a single, centralized, integrated inventory database to provide all engineering departments with quick and accurate information and to support the operator’s multiple businesses. This would also present an end-to-end, convergent view of the entire network and streamline the rollout, service fulfillment, and service assurance processes to improve customer satisfaction and business efficiency. The operator wanted to re-engineer business processes and replace proprietary inventory and work flow systems to enable the planning, operations, and business departments to see the entire inventory and, importantly, have visibility into the capacity management processes, at the time and in the future.
Frameworx’s contribution The deployment relied heavily on three elements of TM Forum’s Frameworx. The Application Framework (TAM) enabled
54
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
the stakeholders to understand each other (through use of a common language) while building the solution architecture and, in particular, while classifying current and legacy systems, and designing the target solution and a transition strategy. This was very important, as so many companies worked alongside NetCracker to bring about the operational transformation. IBM was a service integrator on the project, while SAP handled asset management and budgeting. Performance and fault management applications were dealt with by partners including Metrica and NetExpert. Network planning systems involved ACTIX EPS. Other suppliers that played a part in the project included MapInfo and several more for element management and network management applications, from the radio access network to the core network. NetCracker and partners used the Business Process Framework’s (eTOM) Strategy, Infrastructure, and Product
www.tmforum.org
(SIP) processes in the resource layer. The project also relied on the Business Process Framework’s Operations processes – specifically Resource Management and Operations – to design the rollout process. Moreover, certain general Level 3 sub-processes in the Business Process Framework were further decomposed to cover mobile specifics, like site search, surveys, contracts, and so on. The solution also uses the Forum’s Information Framework (SID) as the standard to model managed inventory objects in NetCracker, as well as in information exchange in the system integration process. Besides utilizing Information Framework models, NetCracker also expanded them with mobile specific resources like cell, sector, cell relationship, servers, and so on. The success of integration and migration depends on building a common, flexible, and re-useable knowledge domain that governs and maps disparate data syntax and semantics (for example, common naming conventions). NetCracker’s data mediation engine and NetCracker’s implementation methodology addressed these challenges.
A million dollars The new OSS solution has achieved a number of key goals, starting with more accurate and consistent information about assets. There is now one data source for applications, with NetCracker’s solution serving as a consolidated i nventory, handling data from more than 10 cross-vendor transmission network management services (NMS), four radio NMS, and the core network NMS. Better support for the discovery and re-allocation of unused network assets, as well as improved capacity management, has had a major impact on operational efficiency. For example, by better managing capacity, the transmission provisioning process, and reservations in the transmission network, NetCracker is helping the operator save up to $1.1 million a year on the procurement of transmission equipment. More accurate inventory information has also reduced rejections for work orders for field engineers, caused by inaccurate inventory, by up to 50 percent. It has also speeded up the rollout of cell sites through automated control and
www.tmforum.org
management, which uses the single data source which has reduced delays in management. The average site rollout time used to be 239 days; by streamlining and managing the business process, the new OSS has shaved between 10 and 20 percent off that time, depending on the type of site. The configuration management for 2G and 3G radio networks offered by the OSS improved data consistency, leading to an efficiency improvement of 30 percent, while the full automation of error detection and correction for NMS configuration issues eliminated all manual tasks – literally by 100 percent.
Fewer, more specialized applications The repositioning of applications for technical operations, and their integration with control and management, have resulted in fewer, more effective, specialized applications. They have delivered cost savings because it is less time consuming to maintain fewer OSS applications: NetCracker’s solution replaced eight legacy systems and over 100 spreadsheets and other documents, integrating their data and functionality into the solution. Some 20 fewer system engineers and business staff are now needed, again making savings on operational costs. Faults are detected more quickly through converged, crossdomain, multiple-technology inventory management. The service provider has already seen a return on investment for its rollout acceptance processes and, due to greater visibility, is able to control and track process KPIs. This has led to some 60 percent of manual tasks being eliminated in the rollout acceptance processes. Efficiency has been increased by around 30 percent as redundant steps and checklists have been removed. In addition much less time is needed to build a process for new equipment – one day’s configuration instead of three weeks’ development. The project’s outside plant rollout processes reduced the number of manual tasks by 50 percent, while improving data quality and efficiency by 80 percent. The bottom line is that in addition to saving over a million dollars a year, this Asian service provider is in a strong position for continued, efficient, and cost-effective network expansion due to automation, the reduction of manual tasks, and the implementation of Frameworx.
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
55
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Views from the top about the business benefits of TM Forum standards At Management World Americas held at Orlando in November 2010, we sent our roving reporter, TM Forum’s market strategist, Tony Poulos, to interview some of our members about their use of and views about using the Forum’s standards and the benefits they deliver. This is what they had to say. Sunil Lingayat, technical director, Northrop Grumann TP: Welcome Sunil. Your company is very much involved in defense and government. Why are you here at Management World Americas 2010?
SL: I provided some information about how leveraging [the Business Process Framework] intersects with ITIL, which is another dominant framework, so hopefully we will be able to interact more on that. TP: We are also actively involved in that right now.
SL: Management World Americas for telecom service provider or cloud service provider really offers a lot of value in how to deliver a service. There is a lot of work that is being done that can easily be leveraged, such as Frameworx, that really helps anyone playing in this space to get a good start. TP: You are v much involved in the Business Process Framework (eTOM). When you use it as a part of your business operation, how does it work out? What attracted you to it? What are the most important bits you use? SL: We primarily leverage eTOM [the Business Process Framework] for building our cloud services delivery framework, really because its is already a proven framework in the telecoms space. There are a lot of similarities in offering telecom and cloud services, so we are leveraging that to get a good start on building a cloud delivery framework. TP: Are there any specific areas of the Business Process Framework that help in terms of defense, for example, security must be a major issue for you? SL: Security is a major issue, but what we are more focused on in leveraging [the Business Process Framework] is the fulfillment issues and monetizing aspects, and also the ability to break it into the resource, the service and user layers, which really is a good framework too. TP: Will you be part of the process of providing input into the development of the Business Process Framework as you find things that need enhancing? That’s how the Forum operates, building on input from our members.
56
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
SL: That’s right.
TM Forum’s ITIL activities ITIL advocates that IT services must be aligned to the needs of the business and underpin the core business processes. It provides guidance to organisations on how to use IT as a tool to facilitate business change, transformation and growth. TM Forum has been working with itSMF (now itSMFi), the trade body whose members develop ITIL, to put it and the Business Process Framework on a converging course. Their aim is to address any interworking issues, and ensure that more integrated support is available to users. TM Forum and itSMF recognize that both frameworks have strengths that, if combined, would bring major benefits to all the industry sectors involved in delivering convergent services. Release 8.0 of the Business Process Framework, launched late in 2008, has direct support for ITIL embedded in it, as will Release 9.0. Both show how the two Frameworks can be used together to mutual advantage. In addition, the two organizations produced a joint Technical Report on integrating the frameworks. ITIL has been adopted by thousands of organisations worldwide, and is supported by vendors and service providers including IBM, Telefónica, HP and British Telecom (BT). For more information please contact Mike Kelly, TM Forum’s senior technical manager and subject matter expert, via
[email protected].
www.tmforum.org
Brian Cappellani, CTO, Sigma Systems We are an OSS [operations support system] vendor. We provide what we call the service layer abstraction, sitting on top of the network, abstracting out the complexities of the network, both from a provisioning and activation perspective – top down – as well as from a mediation perspective, from the bottom up. We use a lot of TM Forum Frameworx, actually. They form the basis of a lot of the applications and products that we’ve built. From the provisioning and activation perspective, we use OSS/J, the ordering and activation framework, which was the JSR264 order management API [application program interface]. Folks on our team helped contribute to that specification and we’ve found that it is getting broadly adopted in the OSS field. From the mediation side, we’re actively involved in the IDPR [Internet Protocol Detail Record], usage management side of the house. IPDR provides a great framework adopted by a lot
of our customers in the cable space, around not only usage management, but network capacity planning as well as policy control. When [the] IDPR [Organization] became part of the Forum [back in 2007], it brought a lot of the customers who are using IPDR with it to the Forum, so we didn’t necessarily need to introduce it to our customers. I think that since IPDR became part of the Forum, it has raised IPDR’s visibility as a standard in the industry as a whole. Events like Management World Americas and Management World [to be held in Dublin in May 2011] are great because they bring operators together. There is a great opportunity for learning in all the sessions, but I also really find, particularly in the Forum, it’s the one area where the key issues that the industry is facing are debated and discussed in a very open and very constructive manner.
What is IDPR and why does it matter? Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR) technology enables the collection of metrics on user behavior and simplifies the integration of third party applications. Service usage can be monitored and analyzed to bill a subscriber for their consumption (such as bandwidth used) or to manage service consumption, abusers of acceptable use policy, Quality of Service, or Quality of Experience. IPDR’s flexibility is critical for next generation services, whose usage requirements are difficult to predict and which could use a variety of complex accounting models. IPDR allows the operator to monitor service patterns and usage, and to establish differentiated services or service levels, such as with different service level agreements or prices. IPDR can be applied to capacity management, traffic analysis, user trending, revenue assurance, billing, digital advertising, and other use cases under exploration by TM Forum’s Cable Interest Group. IPDR records are created by cable modems, multimedia terminal adapters, settop boxes, and other devices, and used by OSS and BSS applications. The IPDR specifications provide more robust data than can be captured with other standards. The IPDR specifications include: n n n
requirements for IPDR collection and encoding, and transport protocols to exchange IPDR records IPDR service specification design guidance sample IPDR Service Definition Documents.
CableLabs has adopted IPDR/SP as a mandatory part of Data over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) and OpenCable. Other adoptions of IPDR have been made by industry bodies including Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, American National Standards Institute, The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, Java Community Process, 3rd Generation Partnership Project, and International Telecommunication Union. The ongoing development and adoption of the IPDR specification is made through CableLabs and TM Forum multi-service operator members’ contributions. In addition to maintaining the IPDR technology standard, TM Forum hosts an IPDR Users Group that collaborates on implementation specific challenges. If you’d like more information or to join the online community, please go to http://www.tmforum.org/BestPracticesStandards/IPDR/4501/Home.html
www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
57
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Ian Collins, President, Atria Networks TP: C you tell me about your company and how it uses Frameworx please? IC: We are a telecommunications company centered in Ontario Canada. We are a Metro Ethernet provider, serving the business and public sector, and carrier customers our speciality is high capacity broadband. We are in an amalgamation of several regional telecom companies and over the last few years, we’ve been gathering up about 5,600 route kilometers of fiber, about 1,000 on-net buildings and what we needed to do was take a good look at our business processes and we bought the regional assets, they all did things eight different ways. The processes weren’t aligned with any particular standard per se and in my experience, we’ve always used the TM Forum’s standards and Frameworx-type of processes, so we wanted to go back and look at what we do today and then really move our business processes towards being an industry standard. It was a long process. It took probably 10 months of working with our staff to get them first to understand what the TM Forum processes would do for them as the business and why it is important and then education and then actually getting the work done. Following that we were able to then start looking at back office vendors, but again, we were looking for a vendor that actually supported the Frameworx standards and could implement our processes the way we felt they needed to be done in the business.
Fall 2011 edition of TM Forum Case Study Handbook The next edition of our Case Study Handbook will be published digitally and printed in time for Management World Americas 2011 (to be held at the Peabody Hotel, Orlando, Florida, November 8-10). It will contain a collection of case studies from service providers around the world outlining how they derived quantifiable business benefits from using TM Forum’s Frameworx, training, Revenue Assurance Maturity Model, Business Benchmarking Program, documents, collaboration and best practices.
TP: are you happy with the results?
If you would like to submit a case study for consideration, please contact Annie Turner, TM Forum’s Publications Managing Editor direct via
[email protected] no later than September 5. Members are welcome to enter as many submissions as they wish, so long as they meet our stringent criteria of demonstrating quantifiable benefits derived from TM Forum’s standards and other activities. For more detail, please see www.tmforum.org/CaseStudies/2212/home.html .
IC: Absolutely. We’ve recently gone live with it and we feel we’ve a very disciplined and a lot more rigor in our programs now. Our clean order package is truly clean with the right information and the work flows are working quite well so far.
Please note that we will continue to publish case studies on our website, as usual, so in the meantime, go to www.tmforum.org/SubmitaCaseStudy/2742/home.html to get started.
58
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
www.tmforum.org
