DELIVERING THE RIGHT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EVERY TIME WITH AMDOCS OSS FOR UNIVERSAL SERVICE PROVISIONING

Transcription

1 AMDOCS CUSTOMER success story DELIVERING THE RIGHT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EVERY TIME WITH AMDOCS OSS FOR UNIVERSAL SERVICE PROVISIONING Amdocs OSS has enabled Slovak Telekom to improve service operations and to always place its customers right at the top of the priority list. Stanislav Pavlovic Director of the IT/System Integration Unit at Slovak Telekom AMDOCS > CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE SYSTEMS INNOVATION

2 AMDOCS CUSTOMER success story COMPANY AT A GLANCE Slovak Telekom (T-Com) HEADQUARTERS: Bratislava, Slovakia WEBSITE: EMPLOYEES: 3,628 SUBSCRIBERS: 2.3m (Mobile), 1.15m (Fixed Line) REVENUE: US$1,364m, 994m SERVICES: IPTV, Internet and IP Voice over FTTx, xdsl and Satellite, PSTN services NETWORK TECHNOLOGIES: DSL2+, Gigabit Passive Optic Network (GPON), Active Ethernet, DVBT. Figures as of fiscal year 2008 TECHNICAL ENVIRONMENT AMDOCS PRODUCTS: Amdocs OSS, including Resource Manager, Task Engine, Route Finder, Sync Engine, Discovery Engine, and Discovery Packs for Cisco and Juniper IP HARDWARE AND OS: HP-UX on Itanium DATABASE: Oracle 10g INTEGRATIONS: Micromuse Netcool, Order Management: Workflow and CRM Siebel, Reconciliation: Alcatel SDH, Metro Ethernet, IP and NGN EXECUTIVE SUMMARY With the decline of traditional voice revenues driving the need for a new network and next generation services, Slovak Telekom realized that running outdated and fault prone infrastructures would hinder efficiency programs. In addition, by continuing with these old support systems, the benefits would be short-lived as the systems became obsolete. As a result, Slovak Telekom s strategy was a long-term transformation program to secure continued growth while achieving operational and financial excellence. The integration of new service platforms and access networks could have meant complex provisioning and assurance processes. However, the deployment of Amdocs OSS has been fundamental to supporting Slovak Telekom s strategy to upgrade and centralize its service and network inventory system to support a diverse set of next-generation and legacy services. The resulting Universal Service Provisioning system enables Slovak Telekom to accurately and automatically provision new services while delivering the right customer experience every time. Amdocs OSS and the transformation strategy has resulted in key business benefits for Slovak Telekom, including shortening provisioning times by an average of 40%, reducing operational costs by approximately 20%, and reducing order rejects by 10% through Improved service design. This has helped Slovak Telekom change from an incumbent national fixed line service provider into a modern and agile multi-play service provider.

3 Amdocs OSS enables us to make sure that we know exactly what the customer is using currently and what we need to do in order to provision additional services to them. The last few years have been tough for the communications industry as consumer spending has been curtailed. As revenue streams such as voice continue declining, service providers need to deliver new, next generation broadband services into the market. The goal is to help maintain and increase revenue as well as maintain an excellent customer experience. For Slovak Telecom, one of the leading service providers in Slovakia, this was the main challenge as it began to transform its services portfolio with the implementation of technologies like DSL2+, Gigabit Passive Optic Network (GPON), Active Ethernet, DVBT and the respective services VoIP, Internet, IPTV and Satellite TV. With increasing pressures to save costs, many service providers have had to restrict spending on large OSS transformation projects, preferring to focus on lower cost projects which can demonstrate shorter term return on investment. Slovak Telekom also took a cautious approach to transformation while at the same time it recognized the huge competitive advantage and business benefits of upgrading its network inventory to support a wide variety of services across multiple underlying technologies in a single inventory system. At the start of the OSS transformation project Slovak Telekom made a strategic decision to implement the Amdocs Operational Support System (OSS) to support service and network inventory management. We recognized that a database of record solution would only provide limited benefit. With Amdocs OSS, which combines a unified inventory with process automation, we gain strategic value that will deliver the improved savings, efficiencies and speed that we will require in a more competitive market, said Torsten Minkwitz, executive vice president and CIO at Slovak Telekom when the decision was made to purchase Amdocs OSS, and currently Senior Vice President, IT-Solutions, Customer/Product, at Slovak Telekom s parent company, Deutsche Telekom. The result of this decision was to improve Slovak Telekom s operations efficiency and enable the company to make real savings in network deployment and service fulfilment costs. A strategic shift to a SOA-based architecture also provided a method of integration with other OSS which is much better supported through an industrybased Java foundation. The centralized service and network inventory provided by Amdocs seamlessly integrates with the provisioning process enabling Slovak Telekom to achieve operational efficiency and effectiveness in service fulfilment and assurance across a complex service portfolio in the face of decreasing resources. A key driving factor for improving operational efficiency has been the company s FTTH (fiber to the home) rollout project. Major achievements have been the short time to deploy the network and the speed of turning-up new customers. Slovak Telekom decided to cable homes in advance of the customer take-up of the service, so that customers could be connected very quickly to the service soon after they had placed an order. GPON fiber can be daisy chained from one house to the next, thus reducing the amount of cabling required, explained Thomas Bogdain, CTO and senior director for production and services at Slovak Telekom. It takes only weeks and not months to connect up the houses. The FTTH project aims to penetrate 25% of domestic households in Slovakia by the end of this year. The centralized service and resource inventory from Amdocs enables process efficiencies and time savings to the TFC, which results in happy customers due to the smooth and up-to-date service provisioning. Because of this rapid deployment of the physical network, it was necessary to have a centralized inventory which can be updated quickly as new sections of the network are built, and new service instances are brought into operation.

4 Challenges > Reduction in traditional revenue streams meant Slovak Telekom needed to develop and introduce new services > Multiple product and service portfolios threatened to create a complex, disconnected and unmanageable inventory > Fewer resources available to support expensive and complex inventory management systems > Needed to maintain a high level of customer service during transformation process Solution Implemented Amdocs OSS to provide an automated service fulfilment process with a centralized inventory system, including: > A single service/network resource repository > SOA-based architecture for easy integration > Automated service fulfilment from order to activation Referenced TM Forum and SID (Shared Information & Data model) for industry best practices and standards Results > Enabled a cost effective building-block approach to service provisioning > 40% average reduction in service provisioning times > Up to 20% operational cost reductions > Improved service design reduced order rejects by 10% > Ensured the right customer experience every time DELIVERING THE RIGHT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE EVERY TIME Driving the customer experience from the initial order through to service activation is key to being a successful service provider. Amdocs OSS has enabled Slovak Telekom to improve service operations and to always place its customers right at the top of the priority list when it comes to service delivery, said Stanislav Pavlovic, director of the IT/ System Integration Unit at Slovak Telekom. Selecting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential in measuring the true customer experience, while providing the customer with the necessary tools to obtain key information helps to improve that experience. Specific customer-oriented service tools that Slovak Telekom has used Amdocs OSS to develop are: > Precise Service Feasibility [by location] - allows customers to check the service availability at their own location themselves before ordering the service. > Precise Service Reservation - enables Slovak Telekom to reserve the necessary network resources in advance of a customer order which results in delivering the right services on time and at the specified level of service quality. > Precise Service Penetration - provides information about the service penetration in the network and guarantees that additional customers sharing the same infrastructure are not affected by congestion. For example, ensures that adding one more IPTV customer doesn t decrease the service performance to all customers sharing the same infrastructure. One of the key metrics used to measure the customer experience is the number of rejected orders due to incorrect service design, such as inaccurate service order data or incomplete data. With improved service design we reduced order rejects by approximately 10% after implementing the centralized inventory, said Pavlovic. Central and accurate service and resource inventory data is a prerequisite to a successful automatic TFC (Technical Feasibility Checker). The centralized service and resource inventory from Amdocs enables process efficiencies and time savings to the TFC, which results in happy customers due to the smooth and up-to-date service provisioning, explained Pavlovic.

5 With improved service design we reduced order rejects by approximately 10% after implementing the centralized inventory. OVERCOMING IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES Ensuring data quality in the inventory system was a key challenge during transformation; otherwise the status of the real service and network resource wouldn t be reliable, said Pavlovic. Amdocs Resource Manager enabled Slovak Telekom to provide the end users responsible for service and resource data integrity with effective data entry and modification tools. Users are able to enter complex service and resource models using either wizards or the automated interfaces from external workflow systems. Field technicians are then able to update the access infrastructure information via mobile devices, which gives them the unique opportunity to continually clean the last mile service and network design which is used later for error-free service provisioning. Another challenge was being able to design and create a re-usable service component-based interface to facilitate the order management process. During the implementation of the IPTV service and later during the roll out of the GPON access technology, Slovak Telekom understood the need for a building block based service provisioning approach. Packaging the components of the service into blocks increases the reusability of the generic service components in many provisioning scenarios, explained Pavlovic. Service and resource models had to be designed and built for the next generation network services such as VoIP, GPON and Active Ethernet. Building the service models requires an in-depth knowledge of the service structure. We referenced the TM Forum and SID (Shared Information & Data model) to help us to design the service in line with the framework which was then implemented in the service model. Amdocs OSS provided the right platform to enable this service and resource modelling to be carried out, said Pavlovic. A CENTRALIZED SERVICE AND NETWORK INVENTORY Implementation of multimedia services like IPTV, Broadband and VoIP on an optical access requires an inventory-centric approach in order to enable centralized service management of the particular service components, be it physical access to the core network or logical components of the services, explained Pavlovic. The central inventory from Amdocs enables effective integration with the northbound BSS systems (providing service feasibility and reservation) as well as southbound OSS systems for service activation and testing. The main advantage of the central inventory has been the ability to manage customer services and related service resources in one central place. Amdocs Resource Manager enables us to reduce the number of interfaces required for acquiring and managing the information about customer service design in the customer care, service and resource problem management areas. It will also enable us to assess the impact of adding or removing the services to a customer. The centralized inventory gives us instant and correct information about the current set-up of the customer s services, and that is the only truth which is used in customer care processing, explained Pavlovic. Amdocs OSS enables us to make sure that we know exactly what the customer is using currently and what we need to do in order to provision additional services to them. AMDOCS SHORTENS TIME TO MARKET AND REDUCES COSTS Centralizing of the service and network inventory with Amdocs OSS has enabled Slovak Telekom to shorten the time to market for new, next generation services. The central inventory contributed to the reuse of all the important service provisioning interfaces for service Design and Assign of the network resources which led to a reduction in time-to-market and reduced implementation costs. Pavlovic explained, Amdocs OSS has reduced time to provision the service on average by 40% in cases where the service order data is clean and up-to-date. In these cases, an automatic feasibility check and service design can be done, saving time for manual design. This also saves time when handling any exceptions on the customer site if the data was incorrect. Operational expenses were also significantly reduced by the use of the Amdocs OSS. For example, labor costs were reduced due to shortened provisioning times and increased operational efficiencies, enabling more tasks to be carried out by the same people at the same time, while reduced human error minimizes fallout, re-work and unnecessary site visits. Combined with up-to-date and clean data, Amdocs helped us achieve up to 20% operational cost reduction during the transformation directly related to the centralized inventory, said Pavlovic. In line with the strategy of further expanding broadband access in Slovakia, Slovak Telekom is planning to make access available to all services via the optical infrastructure to more than 310,000 households. With a universal service and network inventory system provided by Amdocs, Slovak Telekom s future as an agile leader in multimedia and telecommunications services for Slovakia is assured.

6 SLOVAK TELEKOM ABOUT AMDOCS Amdocs is the market leader in customer experience systems innovation. The company combines business and operational support systems, service delivery platforms, proven services, and deep industry expertise to enable service providers and their customers to do more in the connected world. Amdocs offerings help service providers explore new business models, differentiate through personalized customer experiences, and streamline operations. A global company with revenue of $2.86 billion in fiscal 2009, Amdocs has approximately 17,000 employees and serves customers in more than 60 countries worldwide. For more information, visit Amdocs at For the most up-to-date contact information for all Amdocs offices worldwide, please visit our website at Amdocs has offices, development and support centers worldwide, including sites in: THE AMERICAS: ASIA PACIFIC: EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA: BRAZIL AUSTRALIA CYPRUS IRELAND SOUTH AFRICA CANADA CHINA CZECH REPUBLIC ISRAEL SPAIN COSTA RICA INDIA FRANCE ITALY SWEDEN MEXICO JAPAN GERMANY NETHERLANDS TURKEY UNITED STATES SINGAPORE HUNGARY POLAND UNITED KINGDOM THAILAND RUSSIA Copyright 2010 Amdocs. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or distribution other than for intended purposes is prohibited, without the prior written consent of Amdocs. These materials are confidential, and shall be returned to Amdocs upon request. The trademarks and service marks of Amdocs, including the Amdocs mark and logo, Ensemble, Enabler, Clarify, Return on Relationship, Intelecable, Collabrent, Intentional Customer Experience, CES, Cramer, Qpass, SigValue, DST Innovis, JacobsRimell, ChangingWorlds and jnetx are the exclusive property of Amdocs, and may not be used without permission. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. SLVK_CSTMR_SCCSS_STRY_04-10