TELECOM SOFTWARE: Integration Matters

The telecommunications industry has been undergoing a major transformation, both because of changes in the government policy (like deregulation) and the advent of newer technologies (GPRS, 3G, etc). This has opened new opportunities leading to increased competition. Service providers like Bharti, MTNL, and Idea Cellular are diversifying into basic telephony, wireless, long distance, and ISP services. Operational intelligence and customer-care have become vital to maintaining and growing market share.

Start-ups are trying to cope with the problems of high growth phase, while another set of operators is finding it difficult to come to terms with the commoditization of key cash-cow services like ISD. Yet others are struggling to move from a manual-intensive, inconsistent, inflexible environment to one that provides significant improvement in customer focus, service quality, unit cost, and time-to-market.

Software plays a major role in the day-to-day operations of any telco. While network equipment software is embedded in equipment and is used to handle telephone calls in real-time, application software runs on commercial computers and is used to run and manage the business. Operations support systems (OSS) enable smooth functioning of any operation and comprise the following:

Integration Issues
Inter-application: Domain applications comprising the OSS layer like billing and customer-care provide rich domain functionality. Traditionally, these applications have been built as standalone applications with limited integration with other applications. However, business processes span different applications and may require frequent changes to meet business needs. Additionally, different kinds of user requests might have to interact with these applications. For example, a customer’s request for a new service like roaming activation may involve interaction with customer care, billing and provisioning applications. Similarly, a new tariff plan introduction will require interaction between billing and customer care applications.

Business-to-business: In today’s world, no service provider is able to provide the complete set of services on its own. For example, a wireless service provider like Idea Cellular will need to use the services of VSNL to provide international subscriber dialing facilities to its subscribers. Thus service providers need to integrate their systems with other service providers. Also, as the pressures on margins grow, the need to electronically exchange information with partners and customers will also increase.

Limited process-based: Telecom industry business processes typically involve accessing multiple applications and human intervention by different sets of departmental users. However, manual interfaces lead to increased costs and decreased operational efficiency. Ideally, business processes should require human intervention only in case of exceptional conditions.

Front-end: Applications must expose a unified front-end such that users, both internal and external, get a personalized view of the information they have access to. For example, customers must have the ability to view/alter the services they are subscribed to. Customer-care representatives should have access to all customer information and interfaces to network provisioning.

An IT manager therefore faces the following key challenges:
n Adapt the information infrastructure to the needs of constantly changing business
n Take advantage of new technology while maximizing returns from existing systems

The related key technology issues here are:
n Ability to integrate and leverage existing applications
n Flexibility and applications reliability
n Speed and time-to-market

Benefits of Application Infrastructure
Application infrastructure is as important as OSS for any telco for several reasons. It envisages a ‘single unified architecture’, which brings together all the pieces necessary to support Web-centric, component-based computing environments and customer-centric business models. It also provides a service provider with interaction, business logic and integration capabilities.

Leveraging Application Infrastructure – Case Studies

Case Study I:

Business Case: A large mobile services provider, ABC, wanted to improve customer services for its largest corporate accounts in the face of a similar service offering from its largest competitor.

Missing Capabilities: The current system did not provide automatic capabilities to optimize the workflow by assigning priorities to customer tickets based on customer profile. Customers had to call-in to ABC’s call center to query about the ticket status and resolution timeframes. Subsequently, if required, the call center representatives had to assign priorities. The biggest difficulty faced by ABC was to integrate the disparate systems that handled customer requests.

Application Infrastructure-based Solution: ABC took up a project to build two portals one customer facing and one internal for its call center executives. An integration layer was built around business process workflows, which acted as the "glue" between these portals. Business processes handle task assignment, management and control. Customers can now access a personalized portal to view subscribed services and view their trouble ticket status. Call center executives can access the internal portal to assign task priorities and track cases.

Metrics of success:
l Project delivered in three months – service provider able to match competitor offering
l Improved interaction with customers
l Customer self service leads to lowered cost of customers to do business with ABC

Case Study II

Business Case: XYZ, a leading telecommunications service provider dealing in local, long distance, international, mobile, Internet and IT solutions, wanted to provide network services to over a 100 providers and operators. These services included asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), Internet protocol (IP) access, bulk delivery of private circuits, and integrated services digital network (ISDN) connections for service providers and operators among others.

Missing Capabilities: The current system had different access channels into the business with multiple front-end CRM (Siebel) applications. There was no provision for B2B integration with customers. Most business processes spanning different applications required a lot of manual intervention and hence, there were delays.

Application Infrastructure-based Solution: XYZ started out by unifying access channels into the business by enabling a consolidated front-end application. New business processes were created, which enabled standards based B2B integration with customers. XML was heavily used to leverage existing IT investments. Application infrastructure enabled end-to-end business processes spanning multiple internal systems and an integration hub that integrates disparate applications, transforms data, and centrally manages business processes.

Metrics of success:
l Project delivered integration of front-end applications, business process flows and B2B
l Elimination of manual interfaces lead to lowered operational costs and improved efficiency
l Standards based B2B integration enabled providing service irrespective of technologies used by partners’

The key benefits are as follows:
n Data consistency across applications: Customer information is duplicated across multiple applications in an enterprise. Application infrastructure can be used to ensure that the information is in synch across these applications. Real time (or near real time) integration will ensure that the latest updates can be automatically propagated across the enterprise. This, in turn, will lead to better customer service, as different departments in the enterprise will be aware of the complete set of customer information.

Enabling a Telecom Service Provider with Application Infrastructure

n Reduction in duplicate data entry: Application to application integration ensures that appropriate data is entered only once. Processes can be built to enable any other application to access the same data. This enables elimination of manual interfaces and hence more efficient utilization of resources.

n Time to market: New products are frequently created in the telecom industry, by creating new packages. The base components however, remain the same. Application infrastructure helps to integrate these base components from different systems. Hence, new service packages can be easily offered by creating new business processes, which leverage the existing base components.

n Operational efficiency: Business processes can be used to automate integration between multiple applications, human intervention and integration with business partners. Business-to-business integration can enable real-time price quotes and subsequent order handling processes, thereby leading to lower operational costs and increased service responsiveness.

n Customer self-service: A unified user interface can be built, which enables personalized interaction with the users who need access to varied information like service subscription, billing, and new product offerings. The user interface can act as a front-end to back-end business processes like new service activation, and problem resolution.

n Revenue generation: The unified user interface can also be used to launch focused campaigns to promote new services and market services across product offerings leading to increased revenue. For example, a service provider may offer a ‘no installation fee for first-time DSL users’ scheme to existing premium wireless users.

Application infrastructure can positively impact the following critical success factors for a telecommunications service provider:
n Number of subscribers
n Customer self-service options (service activation, electronic bill payment, etc)
n Average billing/subscriber
n CSR to subscriber ratio
n Service quality parameters

Application infrastructure simplifies the flow of information between users and systems, and makes it possible to easily extend and support new or modified applications and business processes. It enables lower operational costs through lesser manual interference in business processes; increased customer satisfaction resulting from personalized access to integrated information; and faster time-to-market because of a flexible framework to integrate and leverage existing applications.

Munish Gandhi, consultant (professional services), BEA Systems