Category: Insights

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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.

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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%

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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

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IT Agility

Cure data pollution at source with data intelligence engine

Leveraging data-driven network inventory wizard to arrest 90% of errors

Service providers in the Connectedness industry manage inventory data, consisting of their assets and services that are critical to their operations. These assets grow every day, making them difficult to manage. In general, the service providers manually register their inventories once their capacity management team forecasts and decides to expand the network. Hence, building an efficient inventory management system with an intelligent User Interface (UI) becomes important to guide the users in the registration process. The lack of such intelligent registration tools will hinder the ability to plan optimized networks resulting in delayed service, poor customer satisfaction, and loss of revenue.

Some of the key factors that lead to inventory data issues are

  • Manual registration of assets and services in the OSS inventory
  • Duplication of records due to lack of efficient validation tools
  • Multiple siloed inventories

To overcome the above-mentioned issues, service providers need to Introduce a data-driven inventory wizard with business rules to improve the registration quality and arrest the errors at the source, thereby maintaining a high quality of data in OSS inventory.,/p>

With a data-driven inventory wizard in place, service providers can realize major benefits in data integrity of inventory, such as:

  • Timesaving: Improves manual registration time by 87.5%.
  • Accuracy in data: Registration accuracy on an average improves from 70.5% to 98%.
  • Reduced efforts: Reduces manual data entry by 65% and the rework to be done due to errors during manual registration

Regardless of the tools or technologies used to tackle data integrity issues, discrepancies still happen. This issue must be fixed during the manual registration process to have a high-quality inventory data.

Fig: Key Capabilities to be built on data-driven inventory wizard

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IT Agility

Building an effective order processing system with easy tracking

Leverage smart dashboards for end-to-end order tracking and monitoring to prevent order fallouts and enhance customer experience

An efficient order lifecycle management (OLM) is vital for a smooth order process at every stage, starting from order placement to order delivery. The OLM must provide seamless experiences for both businesses and consumers to gain a competitive advantage.

However, service providers in the connectedness industry often experience challenges associated with siloed systems, order complexity, legacy systems, and manual order tracking. These lead to increased order fallout, high OPEX, reduced customer satisfaction and low order visibility.

Figure : Challenges in Order Lifecycle Management

Service providers must enable an end-to-end view of the orders, throughout the workflow, with real-time status to reduce the order fallouts and revenue leakage in a big way. An Order Assurance Dashboard with Backend Integration is the most optimized solution to a majority of Order Lifecycle Challenges. This dashboard provides:

  • Integration with backend systems: Provide APIs for quicker integration with all underlying systems which are part of the order lifecycle and fetch order status from each of them
  • End-to-end view of the order: Provide a view of all the orders as they pass from order entry to provisioning to billing
  • Order fallout tracking: Track and highlight orders which have breached SLA for immediate action
  • Reporting: Provide order flow reports on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis for individual products/services and regions
  • System health monitoring: Perform continuous monitoring to provide performance report and availability of all the integrated systems.​This will help in taking preventive measures and avoiding revenue leakage

An end-to-end view of the orders with real-time status tracking reduces order fallouts and revenue leakage in a big way.

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Operational Excellence

Building a successful Technical Support Center

Use proven tools and techniques to improve the efficiency of Technical Assistance Center (TAC), reduce inbound repeat calls and customer trouble tickets

Today, telecommunication is no longer limited to voice. In the past few years, the industry has rapidly grown to accommodate multiple services. In this era of multi-play, service providers in the connectedness industry are adding various services to their catalog, such as voice, messaging, broadband, IPTV, DTH, VAS etc. And to support these services, service providers have technical assistance centers (TACs) to help customers resolve issues related to specific services.

However, service providers have been facing challenges in maintaining and improving the efficiency and productivity of TACs as much of their efforts go into non-value-adding (NVA) tasks causing resource wastage. NVA tasks can be classified into following categories:

Figure : NVA Waste Classification

Further analysis of NVAs (over-processing, rework, waiting, etc.) shows that managing a high volume of inbound repeat calls and tickets and operating with distributed tools are the major challenges of a TAC.

To mitigate these challenges, service providers must explore innovative and field-proven tools and techniques, including robot-assisted screening, Proactive Network Analyzer etc. By implementing these techniques, service providers can easily realize a 30- 40% reduction in inbound repeat calls and customer trouble tickets.

“In a typical service provider’s technical assistance center (TAC) landscape, many tasks are NVA (non-value adding), leading to resource wastage”

Categories
Digital Customer Experience

Establishing digital trust in intercarrier settlements

Leverage blockchain to automate dispute management and reduce the settlement time

Service providers in the connectedness industry receive intercarrier invoices worth over USD 1.2 billion annually and are challenged with revenue blockage of more than 25% due to disputes. Managing disputes and improving trust in intercarrier settlements is challenging for service providers. The traditional approach of dispute analysis and resolution is inefficient, delaying settlements for several months. The most common causes of dysfunction are:

  • Multiple siloed teams and manual handoffs cause delays between invoice auditing and settlement
  • Prolonged and expensive verification of claims due to third-party intervention
  • Dependency on intermediaries for settlements is prone to high-security risks

The aforementioned challenges increase the cost of managing and resolving disputes. As the interconnect margins continue to decline, shifting to a smarter dispute management process will become critical for addressing the revenue blockages. Blockchain-powered dispute management increases the security, transparency, and traceability of settlement data shared across the network, reducing the settlement time by 60%. The inherent capabilities of blockchain reduce the dependency on intermediaries, with a simple, near real-time, error-free reconciliation and settlement process.

Leverage blockchain-powered dispute management to reduce the settlement time

Implementing blockchain-powered dispute management increases the security, transparency, and traceability of settlement data shared across the network, thereby reducing the settlement time by 60%.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Ride the fiberization wave with a lean and scalable operating model

How fiber operators could build a lean and scalable operating model to deliver with speed, keeping an eye on cost

Deep fiberization remains a strategic objective for global fiber operators to meet the data consumption demands. As per the EY report, global fiber deployment will double during CY2018-2026, majorly led by 5G. The global fiber optic cable market is expected to reach USD 20.8B by 2026 at a projected CAGR of 14.5% between 2020-2026. To ride on this fiberization wave, fiber operators must act quickly, keep an eye on cost and check data accuracy before making planning decisions.

Fiber operators need to rethink their business operations to overcome the challenges in their journey towards accelerating fiber rollouts. The three key domains of a fiber operator and the associated challenges are listed below:

  • Plan & Build Massive coverage targets, high cost to build, shortage of skilled labor
  • Service Delivery Longer cycle time, siloed and disconnected customer journeys, repeat visits and rework
  • Service Assurance Operational Efficiency due to lack of automation and standardization, reactive approach in network management

Fiber operators must build a lean and scalable operating model to overcome all the above challenges and achieve their fiberization goals efficiently. Here’s a proven 4-step approach to building a lean and scalable Target Operating Model by transforming your business capabilities:

  • Step 1: Perform due diligence and discovery of as-is fiber journeys
  • Step 2: Benchmark capabilities using Capability Maturity Assessment
  • Step 3: Collaborate and identify change initiatives
  • Step 4: Plan implementation and define a roadmap

Successful implementation of these steps can help fiber operators to reduce their operational expenses by 53% (in just 3 years) and create a lean and scalable organization.


A lean and scalable operating model will enable fiber operators to achieve fiberization goals efficiently by transforming their business capabilities.

Categories
Cloud

Magic of containerization

Modernize .NET apps and rapidly deliver new features to your customers

Today’s IT infrastructure in the connectedness industry, involves more than 70% of the servers using Windows Operating System (OS), according to Statista report. Majority of the workloads used in these Windows servers are .NET-based legacy applications, which are in an urgent need to be modernized, to become more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective. But there are some critical challenges faced by the CIOs & technology decision makers, who are striving to modernize these .NET-based legacy apps. The challenges include:

  • .NET versions prior to Windows Server 2016 do not support containerization
  • Migrating .NET apps fully to cloud is expensive
  • Lack of clear migration strategies of .NET apps leads to lot of re-engineering efforts
  • Re-writing all the .NET apps for the latest Windows version is a time-consuming process

To overcome these challenges, service providers must adopt a well-defined modernization strategy, which includes containerization of the .NET apps and share workloads across hybrid cloud environment. Containerization enables service providers to scale their .NET applications as and when required, without any size and memory limitations. In fact, the containerization process starts with the .NET apps that are already running in the enterprise. It helps create immediate impact by saving on re-coding time, reducing costs, and limiting risk of operations. Furthermore, service providers who want to remain on premises or want to be closer to their data center, can also be benefitted from containerization, using software tools such as Google Kubernetes Engine On-premises (GKE on-prem).

Key transformation levers to successfully containerize and modernize .NET-based legacy applications

Containerization will power the future of connectedness industry, no doubt. However, service providers must study their business case in-depth and choose the right approach as they embark on their containerization strategy. Service providers must also pay due attention to the management of the container lifecycle and orchestration of containers, which requires considerable container management capability and expertise.


Containerization enables service providers to scale their .NET applications as and when required, without any size and memory limitations.