Category: Insights

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Operational Excellence

Enhancing your business operations with AI/ML

Leverage AI/ML to enhance the efficiency of your day-to-day business operations and improve customer experience

Today’s digital-savvy customers demand advanced and ultra-rich experiences. Therefore, factors like service availability, turnaround time, and quality of service (QoS) are becoming increasingly important. But the question remains how can Service Providers bridge the huge gap that currently exists between customer demands and their fulfillment?

Service providers’ current infrastructure and service delivery approach are unable to match up with customer expectations. There is a dire need to enhance their key operational areas such as customer service, service assurance and network automation.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) technology, with its recent advancements, is fast becoming the choice of service providers to bridge this gap and improve operational efficiency. AI/ML systems, together with Bigdata, can process huge amounts of historical and real-time data from various systems such as CRM, billing systems, NMS/EMS, and product catalogues to provide actionable insights and predictions.

Service providers must adopt AI/ML solutions in their infrastructure to offer next-generation services and experiences.

  • Intelligent software-defined approach for operations and delivery of services (virtualization, self-healing, and self-learning networks)
  • Automation of customer service and customer experience improvement (chatbots, virtual assistants)
  • Predictive maintenance and agile operations (automated problem detection, troubleshooting, and optimization of networks)
  • Innovation in subscriber profiling, usage analysis, and personalized offers


Approximately 63.5% telecom companies are committing investments on AI systems to improve their infrastructure and enhance operational efficiency – IDC.

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IT Agility

Charge your customers in real-time using Online Charging Systems

Implementing a convergent and flexible charging for digital services

Digital services such as OTT platforms, video-on-demand, M2M communications, and IoT are experiencing tremendous growth in their subscriptions. To speed-up the delivery and management of these digital services, service providers in the Connectedness industry must leverage a real-time charging system. The Online Charging System (OCS) is a specially designed system that allows the service provider to charge an individual user for services in real-time. An OCS can handle the user’s account balance, correlation, and charging transactions. The OCS efficiently fills the current gaps by offering real-time charging for subscribers and flexibility in terms of service type, network technology, and payment method.

  • Charging methods – Content-based, Volume-& Time-based, Real-time service control
  • Service type – Voice, Data, Messaging, Video, Content
  • Network technologies – Fixed, Wireless, Broadband
  • Payment methods – Prepaid, Post-paid, and Hybrid


Although many service providers are embracing OCS, they cannot leverage its full potential and still face many operational challenges

Although many service providers are embracing OCS, they cannot leverage its full potential and still face many operational challenges. This insight discusses the typical challenges service providers face with OCS and recommends ideal solutions to overcome them.

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Operational Excellence

Artificial Intelligence in Action

Adding intelligence to robotic process automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a low-code, low-cost option for the service providers in the connectedness industry to automate high-volume manual processes, delivering cost, efficiency, accuracy, and transparency. By automating a large part of day-to-day activities, service providers can drive accuracy, improve employee morale and productivity, and ensure reliability and consistency of operations. However, to drive the intended benefits from their RPA initiatives, service providers need to understand the difference between the three primary levels of RPA maturity: Basic RPA, Cognitive RPA, and Intelligent RPA.

The Basic RPA relies on easy-to-implement and understanding fundamental technologies such as macro scripts and workflow automation. It is rule-based, does not involve much coding, and uses an ‘if-then’ approach to processing. Cognitive RPA, on the other hand, is a knowledge-based approach. It uses complex technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), text analytics, and data mining to automate parts of the process that Basic RPA cannot. But service providers can primarily benefit from Intelligent RPA, which uses AI/ML technology for decision making. With AI/ML, Intelligent RPA can go beyond data processing (gathering, sorting, calculating, and reporting), automate processes based on continuous analysis of incoming information, and learn to act smarter over time. This is especially beneficial for service providers dealing with large volumes of unstructured data. Furthermore, Intelligent RPA can gather insights and improve them over time while working together for the best results.

The insight elaborates on the three maturity levels of RPA and how to adopt them across the customer engagement lifecycle to help build out and deliver high-value use cases.


With RPA, service providers can drive accuracy, improve employee morale and productivity, and ensure reliability and consistency of operations

Three main levels of RPA maturity

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IT Agility

A comprehensive checklist to plan a successful migration

Leverage the migration strategy checklist for a quick, error-free, and resource-efficient migration

Migration allows service providers in the connectedness industry to get all the data they require in a single/centralized system. As a result, analysts and other employees have an easier time accessing the required data, which can be used to make better decisions, resulting in a faster time to insight.

Service providers opt for integration/migration programs for various reasons like integration post mergers and acquisitions (M&As), modernizing the legacy systems, changed compliance & regulatory requirements, and technology & feature enhancements. However, most service providers fail to migrate their systems effectively. According to Gartner, more than 83% of integration/migration programs either fail/exceed schedules and exceed budget by approximately 30%.

Leverage this insight for a quick and handy migration strategy checklist, covering both pre and post-migration activities. While the focus of the insight is on order management system migration, the same checklist can be used (with minor adaptations) for any transformation projects within the service providers’ environment.


According to Gartner, more than 83% integration/migration programs either fail/exceed schedules and exceed budget by approximately 30%.

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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.