The need to adapt quickly to the changing environment means using existing building blocks and underlying systems to do so, rather than layer on new complexity. Martti Ylikoski explains how CSPs can employ Business Process Management Systems to gain the agility they need.
‘My team is mostly concerned with how we can raise our obligations to CSPs and make it easier for them to integrate their solutions and applications and so on…’ says Martti Ylikoski product manager, OSS Solutions Management & Applications. ‘…moving towards an SOA based architecture. We are productizing CSP business and operational processes. The integration architecture we are using allows us to pre-integrate the solutions towards our own and partner portfolio, but in real deployments to integrate them to any existing applications without losing the productization aspects. These processes are complex operations that cut across multiple applications and often across many divisions within their organization. Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean.’
‘We are currently developing a solution for incident analysis based on the concept of automatically collecting all relevant data for call center or help desk personnel and in some cases even acting on - and replying to - customer complaints automatically. For instance with a customer reporting poor service the system would automatically locate the customer’s position at the time of the call in relation to the nearest mast and calculate the coverage, reporting back to the customer with an apology if he was outside network coverage.’
‘Or say a customer was to report that his call did not go through we could detect whether he had misdialed, or that the recipient had hung up at the other end. Or if a customer was having problems sending an SMS we could detect whether the recipient’s mail box was full, or his phone out of memory or if there was a site repair in progress and that that there was a temporary network problem.’
‘So, for such simple – yet time consuming and labor intensive problems - we can use a known error database to act on them without bothering anyone and for more complex issues the system can gather all the relevant information from all the various applications and forward the situation to the right team. We don’t have to waste highly skilled technicians’ time flogging through the various data sources of different technology domains to find the root causes.’
‘This is just one kind of solution that we are productizing in the OSS product space. Another we are working on is for the mobile field forces that roam the network installing new elements or repairing elements when needed.’
‘This hardware maintenance module is just one small part of our Change Management solution but very interesting for all that. Imagine there is a faulty network element somewhere which has been flagged by an alarm and it’s of a type that requires human intervention. In other words someone has to go to the site, it can’t be fixed remotely. Our solution orchestrates the whole process of what happens next.’
‘Typically a work order is produced to kick-off the hardware maintenance process. Next you would go to an inventory to find out the site’s physical address, because in a network operations centre we only tend to talk in terms of object IDs, or IP addresses. Then you need to add some practical data, for instance who the site’s key holder might be, which in remote areas might mean driving 30 kilometers to the local village first. This practical information needs to be added to the work order. Next you would go to a warehouse management system to look up your spare part holding location, which could be in a depot somewhere or mobile in a van that needs to have a rendezvous agreed. This then goes on the order and might include a link to another process to re-order if stock gets low. Next we go to the field engineer workforce management system which usually is further complicated by having several sub-contractors listed on it. You have to ensure the right level of competence is matched for the job in hand, for instance if the job requires electrical wiring then you will need a contractor that holds the correct licenses etc. The allocation is then given using a push or pull type of dynamic work order scheduling. Finally there is the monitoring of progress in the field which is fed by engineers using smart phones to report on where they are, what they are doing and whether or not the job has been completed. Then the job ticket is closed.’
The benefit of having a system that can orchestrate all of these tasks is obvious in terms of efficiency and cost saving as an automated system can optimize field service usage, reduce site visits and shorten average travel times, but also huge benefits are gained from increased visibility, real-time reporting, efficiency, monitoring of SLAs and productivity down to individual engineers or an aggregated view of how different teams are functioning to develop a process of continuous improvement.’
‘These types of productization are always a win win for the customer because they are ready to go, easily integrated into their infrastructure, have a roadmap and a dedicated development team and are so much faster to integrate and cheaper to fix than something bespoke that you might get a systems integrator to develop for you.’
Next time…
In our next issue Martti goes on to explain that while a solution can be extremely flexible using Business Process Management Systems alone, OES can add further functionality quickly and cost efficiently.
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