Month: September 2022

Categories
Operational Excellence

Transforming Telecom Business Processes Using RPA

Leverage Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to accelerate business process transformation and innovation

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is widely used by companies around the globe to streamline their business processes. RPA creates software robots to automate the processes that are highly manual, voluminous, repetitive, and rule-based. Process automation increases work quality, minimizes errors, and allow organizations to scale rapidly.

The service provider’s operational landscape has many mundane processes like service fulfillment, service assurance, billing, revenue management, and network management. By adopting RPA, service providers can quickly and easily automate the manual and tedious processes, without much investment or hassle. As a result, service providers can reduce cost, improve data quality, boost customer service, and drive operational efficiency.

Figure 1: Some examples of processes from the Order-to-Activate(O2A) cycle suitable for RPA

RPA is being widely accepted across industries and serves as a guide to help service providers in their RPA implementation, right from business process assessment till rollout. Topics covered in the insight:

  • Why is RPA becoming popular in the telecommunication industry?
  • Preview of telecom processes with RPA potential
  • The RPA journey of a communications service provider – How to implement RPA successfully?
  • Common challenges faced during RPA implementation

By 2025, 3 out of 10 jobs will be done by software, robots, or smart machines allowing replaced employees to do more crucial jobs. -Gartner.

Categories
IT Agility

Test Data Management Reinvented – Deliver realistic, compliant test data in minutes, not days

Speed is a critical business imperative for all service providers in the Connectedness industry. The pace at which service providers can bring new products and services to market determines their ability to differentiate from competitors and retain market share. Applications are at the centre of this race, and as service providers look to accelerate innovation, they need to build out a more agile application infrastructure—and that includes a robust and comprehensive Test Data Management (TDM) strategy. Once viewed as a back-office function, TDM is now a critical business enabler for service providers’ agility, security, and cost-efficiency.

The lack of a TDM system impacts data security, test data creation, and provisioning. Service providers face the risk of exposing personal and commercially sensitive information such as financial, operational, and strategic initiatives in the test environment. Going manual with test data creation is also not feasible as it is highly time-consuming due to the huge production data volume.

With the increased use of automated DevOps toolsets and privacy laws that require secure data across global teams of employees and contractors, service providers must expand the charter of traditional TDM to meet the needs of today’s development and testing teams. This insight explores the top challenges service providers face in a standard TDM implementation and highlights the key enablers to consider when implementing new technology solutions as part of a TDM strategy.

Once viewed as a back-office function, TDM is now a critical business enabler for service providers’ agility, security, and cost-efficiency.

Categories
IT Agility

Speed up IT problem resolution

Implementing an adaptive prioritization model in IT Service management reduces ticket resolution time by 50%.

IT and network systems in the Connectedness industry have seen major evolutions during the last few decades. With tremendous changes in technology and services growing in leaps and bounds, monitoring applications cannot fulfil the dynamic demands of response time and stringent SLAs. The number of incidents and alarms generated in a service provider’s IT and network landscape is constantly on the rise. It is important to prioritize the incoming incidents with the right priority based on various attributes. However, most IT service management (ITSM) systems are still prioritizing the incidents only based on urgency & impact.

The current practice is to raise trouble tickets and work on each item based on the incident priority set by the ITSM system. The disadvantage of this traditional approach is that the impact and urgency parameters are not optimized. Thus, the incident priority is not alerted properly, leading to a poor customer experience. It also doesn’t recommend reducing the average cost of unplanned downtime, which is a major influencing factor in operational expenses.

There is an urgent need for an efficient incident prioritization model with high customer acceptance and considering true business needs and IT capability. Service providers must work with the business and the operations team to provide effective and faster issue resolution to define a priority model. A sound prioritization scheme can help service providers to stabilize their day-to-day operations and make them more proactive in their responses.

This insight discusses a unique adaptive incident priority model that could be easily integrated into the existing ITSM platform. This strategy enhances ITSM systems with the capability to analyze various important factors to determine the right incident priority.

There is an urgent need for an efficient incident prioritization model with high customer acceptance and considering true business needs and IT capability.

Figure 1: High-level architecture with adaptive priority model & topology analyser methodology

Categories
Operational Excellence

Data-driven Process Optimization to Accelerate Digital Transformation

With most Digital Service Providers (DSPs) investing in digital initiatives today, transformation is no longer a choice but a must-have!

According to a Celonis study, “Most organizations are struggling with transformation initiatives because they are diving into executions without understanding what to change first. In a rush to innovate, 82% admit that they do not review their internal business processes while setting initial goals for a transformation program”.

Also, DSPs experience increasing process inefficiencies due to the ever-changing landscape. Traditional approaches to handling these processes are more focused on process discovery. They do not provide an accurate view of these processes and the real bottlenecks. Hence DSPs need to embrace a data-driven process optimization approach to look beyond discovery.

This whitepaper details on leveraging a process optimization framework for the DSPs to set business objectives across the transformation journey. It helps identify critical processes, accelerates cost savings by 60%, and improves customer satisfaction by 30%.

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Fig. Key steps of process optimization approach

Categories
IT Agility

Self-healing tool is the answer for order fulfilment woes

Achieve automated resolution of order fallout issues and recurring requests.

Service providers in the connectedness industry face the challenge of meeting customer order fulfilment deadlines. With the introduction influx of complex convergent services, which require bundling of different product offers, order fulfilment is becoming more unstable and delayed. The ongoing mergers and acquisitions in the telecom industry make the process much more complex, leading to higher order fallout rates. Order fallout in the order orchestration life cycle results in customer churn and revenue loss for service providers. Hence, a swift resolution to the fallouts is a prime necessity.

Improve incident resolution time by up to 98% using a holistic tool that reduces order fallouts in the Order-to-Billing journey.

Categories
Media & Entertainment

Keeping ahead of the rapid changes in media services

Shifting to an enhanced order management system for FTTP-based IPTV

Order management is important to the success of any business but is especially critical for Internet Protocol television (IPTV) providers. IPTV is a service that provides television programs and other video content using the Internet Protocol (IP) such as Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) suite, as opposed to broadcast TV, cable TV, or satellite signals.

The deployment of FTTP-based IPTV service entails a significant initial investment for service providers. This investment is not only for the underlying network infrastructure but also for the customer order management process, including customer profiling, field worker density, and query resolution needed to provide a sophisticated IPTV experience. But FTTP-IPTV order management is operationally complex, often entailing dozens of sub-processes that involve multiple systems, departments, and partner organizations, which not only affects delivery and drive-up costs, but also negatively impacts customer satisfaction. Despite the challenges of order management, service providers must get it right to thrive in today’s increasingly competitive FTTP-IPTV market.

Service providers must carefully plan and qualify their requirements for an order management system to maximize the return on investment while providing a good quality experience to the subscribers. This Insight provides a master checklist template to aid service providers in effectively streamlining the qualification process for an order management system. Using the checklist, service providers can decrease costs, achieve faster roll-out, and increase customer satisfaction with FTTP-IPTV.

Service providers must deploy an effective order management system to maximize the ROI while providing a good quality of experience to the customers.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Robotic Process Automation: The key to accelerate digital transformation

To stay relevant in today’s digital world, the service providers in the connectedness industry should simplify their business and transform themselves into a digital organization.

The road towards digital transformation is a business-critical one, and the service providers embarking on this journey will need to consider how each aspect of their business can be optimized to fulfill the new digital objectives. To optimize the existing processes and keep pace with the competition, service providers should bring the power of RPA in digital transformation.

Automation is not new and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with its highly evolved level of sophistication, has made it a lot easier to automate processes across a variety of systems and technologies and reap tangible ROI in a very short time. RPA is a delightful journey, and the end-to-end lifecycle needs to be planned across the below phases to accelerate digital transformation.


To optimize the existing processes and keep pace with the competition, service providers should bring the power of RPA in digital transformation.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Increasing the pace of your process automation programs

Leverage bot development framework to empower RPA Centre of Excellence with bot velocity

Most service providers across the globe have been leveraging robotic process automation (RPA) to increase their operational efficiency and are at different stages in their journey. RPA helps an organization automate repetitive and mundane tasks using the development and deployment of bots or software robots.

But scaling RPA and increasing bot velocity to make it an organization-wide success is a big challenge. One definite solution to this challenge is setting up a robust RPA Centre of Excellence, which not only defines the best practices but also strives to achieve the organization’s goal.

An ideal RPA CoE has the following 7 components:

This insight focuses on the third component, i.e., bot development, specifically on the bot development framework. It throws light on best practices to create a robust development framework for driving bot velocity by standardizing development across the organization. By following these guidelines, organizations can reduce the bot development, testing, deployment, and review time.

A robust bot development framework helps in reducing development, testing, deployment, and review time by 30%

Categories
Digital Customer Experience

Personalizing the customer experience: The key to shaping the future of service providers

In today’s digital world, the success of every service provider in the connectedness industry depends on the experience it provides at every point of customer interaction. But the evolution of customer behaviors and expectations has made it difficult for the service providers to maintain customer loyalty.

According to Gartner, “Despite a mandate to create a differentiated and innovative customer experience (CX) strategy that will drive business growth, over 70% of CX leaders struggle to design projects that increase customer loyalty and achieve results”. Hence to overcome the paradigm shift in customer interactions, service providers need to reimagine customer experience by embracing the ongoing technological advances.

This whitepaper details how service providers can deliver a personalized CX across customer journeys. Further, it elaborates the three key imperatives to create a unique strategy and reimagine customer experience. Service providers must leverage the key imperatives with the power of the cloud, data science and AI to achieve digital transformation and customer delight.

Fig.Reimagining CX with 3 key imperatives


To overcome the paradigm shift in customer interactions, service providers need to reimagine customer experience by embracing the ongoing technological advances.

Categories
IT Agility

Give your apps a new shine with microservices

A simplified approach to breaking up your monolithic applications into microservices

There is an increased tendency among service providers in the Connectedness industry to move their enterprise-scale applications to the cloud. With most of the service providers’ business systems still not cloud-ready, executives have begun to mandate initiatives to modernize their legacy applications for the cloud. These legacy applications are usually large monolithic applications with years or decades of accumulated technical debt, making them difficult to change, expensive to scale, and weighing down on an organization’s innovation capability. As monolithic applications become too large to deal with, many service providers are breaking them down into the microservices architectural style.

Digital pure-play companies such as Meta, Alphabet, Apple, etc., have embraced microservices architecture for their website, applications, and digital experience. Microservices architecture is one of the key factors that has enabled them to achieve phenomenal growth. Thus, embarking on the microservices transition journey will help service providers achieve agility, flexibility, and scalability. It will also help them derive granular insights and leverage them to deliver superior customer experience and enable new business streams. To accelerate the transition towards microservices, service providers need to revamp their massive, bulky, siloed, and complex environments to support the microservices strategy.

This insight highlights the five-stage strategy, which includes guided qualification checklists to assist service providers in embarking on an effective microservices transformation.

Embarking on the microservices transition journey will not only help service providers to achieve agility, flexibility, and scalability but also help them to derive granular customer insights.

Five stages with a proposed qualification checklist and key recommendations to navigate through the migration journey