Category: Insights

Categories
Operational Excellence

Go Beyond RPA to Speed Up Transaction Processing Time

Leverage effective continuous improvement techniques to achieve a high straight-through processing rate

Straight-through processing (STP) refers to the automated processing of transactions without manual intervention. Transaction processes are usually multi-staged, requiring multiple people across different departments and sometimes even involving paper checks. Companies often adopt RPA as a one-time solution to complete transactions and achieve a high STP rate. But is it really effective?

The estimated STP rate for any service provider in the connectedness industry is 75%-85%. However, the actual realization is only 30%-50%. One of the reasons that has contributed to the average rate is implementation of only RPA by service providers. Other widely used continuous improvement techniques like occasional continuous improvement and analytics-driven continuous improvement have proven to be less effective to achieve the targeted STP rate. Service providers must adopt effective continuous improvement methods to get more value from their existing RPA implementation.

Adopt the Automation Optimizer Framework, an efficient continuous improvement strategy to improve your STP rate. The framework identifies automation inefficiencies, root causes, and solutions for the identified gaps and continuously monitors the STP rates- all in an automated manner. Its key components are:

  • Intelligent RCA (Root-cause analysis) Engine: Drills down to transaction-level information to automatically identify the root-cause for fallout
  • Integrated Solutionizer: Constantly analyzes the output from an Intelligent RCA Engine and triggers respective action based on the identified root cause
  • Continuous Monitoring Tool: Tracks the STP rate progress over time for the defined objectives, KPIs and milestones


The estimated STP rate for any service provider is 75%-85%, however, the actual realization is only 30%-50%. Only RPA implementation will not suffice if the STP rate has to be improved.

Categories
Operational Excellence

Giving wings to your standard RPA bots

Combine the power of RPA with NLP to improve the automation potential of service provisioning

Most service providers in the Connectedness industry have started leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate various processes, especially in service provisioning. However, the standard RPA bot alone cannot automate the end-to-end provisioning process, as it involves a lot of unstructured data that requires manual intervention for processing. According to Gartner, “Today, 80% of enterprise data is unstructured”. Processing such a huge amount of unstructured data and performing end-to-end automation with a standard RPA is a major challenge for service providers.

To overcome this challenge, service providers can combine the power of RPA bot with a Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based engine capable of extracting information and processing the unstructured text. It further helps in deriving insights and providing the next best action, all in an automated way. This end-to-end automation helps the service providers to reduce the cycle time and provide efficient services to their customers.


According to Gartner, “Today, 80% of enterprise data is unstructured”. Standard RPA alone cannot process such a huge amount of unstructured data and perform end-to-end automation.

    Authors:
  • Madhusudhanan S
  • Velmurugan M
  • Gurunath L V
  • Mogan A.B.

Categories
IT Agility

Fix the broken dispatch process to improve field service

Spare location intelligence can enable efficient dispatch operations and reduce the issue resolution time by 45%

Most service providers are struggling with the rising cost of field service due to the increase in repeat dispatches and higher issue resolution time. It takes longer to repair faulty hardware, impacting the customer experience and leading to a higher churn probability. According to Forrester, 73% of customers consider time the most critical customer service point.

Spare parts information is critical to scheduling an efficient dispatch for repair activities. It is not only the right delivery of spare parts that matters but also the delivery should reach the right place at the right time. Getting this right, the first time is difficult as the current manual approach is error-prone and inefficient without any automation. With a wide gap between the availability of spare parts and onsite requirements, there is a high degree of unpredictability.

Fig:  Steps followed in field service operation showcasing the importance of spare information

To provide an efficient dispatch, it is crucial to ensure the right spare parts are available and dispatched from the nearest warehouse location through the most optimized route. The Spare-Location Intelligence framework can enable service providers to get real-time spare availability across warehouse locations and the most optimized route to access them.


The Spare-Location Intelligence framework can enable service providers to get real-time spare availability across warehouse locations

Categories
IT Agility

Eliminating avoidable truck rolls to save costs and improve customer satisfaction

Leverage statistical analysis and service truck roll optimizer for better field service efficiency

Truck rolls are an integral part of field service operations. It refers to any situation in which a technician is dispatched to solve an issue. But often, a field technician is dispatched to a job that is temporary in nature or can be resolved in under five minutes with a quick fix. Situations like these have become a huge pain point for service organizations.

A peculiar challenge faced by most Service Providers is that 25% of the truck rolls in their fleet are deemed non-value-add (NVA) or avoidable, costing millions each year. The process of creating truck roll appointments and subsequent follow-up activities still involves a lot of manual work. The customer service representatives (CSRs) create work orders manually without thorough assessment, resulting in avoidable or non-value-added truck rolls.

Service Providers must adopt a proven approach to address truck roll inefficiency issues. Transform field service management processes using techniques like:

  • Service truck roll optimization– Filters the NVA truck rolls and updates the work logs in the CRM system. Only the work orders that do not meet the business filter criteria will result in truck rolls
  • Pareto principle and correlation analysis– Uses analytics to identify the main causes for NVA truck rolls


25% of the truck rolls in a service provider’s fleet are deemed non-value-add (NVA) or avoidable, thus costing millions each year.

Categories
Cloud Insights

Don’t let the infrastructure management cloud your mind

Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to reduce provisioning time by 65%

IT infrastructures are generally imagined as big rooms with huge servers and systems connected with a web of wires. Provisioning of this infrastructure has always been a manual process for the service providers in the connectedness industry, which leads to a lot of accuracy and consistency issues. The advent of cloud computing helped in addressing most of these issues. However, the configuration consistency, manual scalability, and cost issues persisted. Also, deploying complex infrastructure solutions requires considerable effort from cloud architects. These efforts are neither easy to repeat nor modified in a single shot.

To overcome these challenges, service providers can implement a DevOps Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodology, which helps in automating the manual, error-prone provisioning tasks. It allows service providers to define the final state infrastructure, application configurations, and scaling policies in a codified way. This, in turn, reduces the dependency on cloud architects and provisioning time significantly.


Infrastructure as Code (IaC) helps the service providers to define the cloud infrastructure, application configurations, and scaling policies in a codified way.

Categories
IT Agility

Close the gap in network inventory to improve customer service

Leverage an RPA-based solution strategy to address inventory data inaccuracies and have a better insight into your network

Network inventory is the cornerstone for any service provider. To deliver seamless network services, assets and infrastructure (computers, routers, servers etc.) are a must. And the inventory available with an operator determines the kind, quality, and capacity of any services they offer. Therefore, these assets are crucial as service providers in the connectedness industry cannot operate without them.

However, service providers face several challenges in managing the completeness and accuracy of inventory data. Inventory data issues majorly arise due to human errors by field engineers, multiple sources of truth as a result of mergers and acquisitions and non-digital data storage formats. These issues eventually increase the lead time for new installs/repairs, high volumes of calls by field technicians to the customer care, frequent provisioning fallouts, etc.

Service providers must take a holistic solution approach to tackle the core challenges that are crippling them from effectively managing the network inventory data integrity issues. Manual data reconciliation projects are proving to be ineffective as they are labor-intensive, time-consuming and cannot handle network environments that are rapidly changing. Adopt an RPA-based automated inventory reconciliation framework to accelerate data integrity programs and improve service.

Figure 1: RPA-based Automated Inventory Reconciliation Framework


Service providers’ network inventory systems are often 20-30% out of sync with the physical and logical state of the network. An RPA-based automated inventory reconciliation framework can accelerate data integrity programs.

Categories
Software Intensive Networks

Building a 360° Network Cockpit

Implement an intelligent network visualization solution powered by Graph technology to deliver network insights faster.

Owing to rapid network expansion, major service providers in the connectedness industry are facing a critical challenge with the rise of data silos in their ecosystem. As a result, network data is dispersed across a variety of siloed and disjointed systems. This makes deriving insights from data collected across diverse assets more difficult. Several disconnected systems that consist of untraceable integrations and interfaces must be integrated to get a comprehensive view of the massive dataset. As a result, the service providers face inefficient network and resource utilization, delays in rolling out new network designs, and ineffective network troubleshooting.

There is a necessity for service providers in the connectedness industry to build a real-time 360° Network Visualization to drive smart decision making. Most service providers have started to implement Graph databases to address the problem of data silos and information irregularities in Network management. To be effective, service providers must develop both upstream and downstream data ingestion strategies. In this insight, we explore these two key components in-depth and identify the key capabilities required to build them effectively. Incorporating the 360° real-time network visualization approach can create a convergent and intelligent view of the network. In the Connectedness market, it helps to meet the growing demands of Network Planning, Network Operations (NOCs), and various user communities.


Eliminate data silos and irregularity challenges in Network management and accelerate design rollout by 33%.

Categories
IT Agility

Attract and retain customers with enhanced broadband service coverage

Leverage a unified serviceability framework to improve the service qualification

Today, most service providers in the connectedness industry are challenged in determining the service availability for different customer addresses as it is cumbersome and time-consuming. Ineffective broadband service qualification results in the poor customer experience of the existing customers and the unserviceability of new customers. Hence service providers need to focus on improving the serviceability for retaining and enlarging the customer base. The major factors contributing to ineffective service qualification include:

  • Lack of support for multiple technologies (e.g.) Copper, Fiber, IPTV, Cable, Fixed Wireless
  • Lack of agility to accommodate the real-time needs of the customer
  • No standard address and service repositories
  • Inaccurate measurement of loop length, resulting in reduced service offering

Service providers can leverage a unified serviceability framework to overcome these challenges and improve the serviceability of the customers. It assists in responding to customer requests rapidly with improved customer engagements and real-time responses for service qualification inquiries. Further, it helps to improve the overall broadband qualification coverage and customer experience.


Ineffective broadband service qualification results in the poor customer experience of the existing customers and the unserviceability of new customers.

Categories
IT Agility

Achieve security objectives at speed with automated vulnerability management

Reduce time taken to fix security vulnerabilities by 50% with vulnerability analysis best practices

Cyber-attacks are increasing every day and are now the third-highest global risk, according to the World Economic Forum. GSMA’s mobile telecommunications security threat landscape report of 2019 says, “there was a 55% increase in breaches caused by open-source software vulnerabilities”.

Addressing security vulnerabilities is a top priority for service providers in the connectedness industry because a cyber-attack could disrupt services for millions of customers, impact customer’s trust, and deteriorate service provider’s brand & reputation. To achieve the required security objectives, service providers must adopt a structured approach to vulnerability management. Vulnerability management, which is the process of finding, assessing, remediating, and mitigating security weaknesses for known assets, gives service providers the ability to assess the status and risk of unknown hardware/software.

Depending on the service provider’s infrastructure size and state of the configuration management database (CMDB), finding the responsible asset owner can be a highly challenging and cumbersome task, resulting in lead times of up to many weeks. Therefore, vulnerability management must include automation to discover new vulnerabilities, perform risk assessment, and assign it to the right team for a quick resolution.


Addressing security vulnerabilities with speed is a top priority for service providers as a successful cyber-attack can essentially disrupt service for millions of customers

Fig:  Steps followed in field service operation showcasing the importance of spare information

Categories
Software Intensive Networks

Accelerate SD-WAN service delivery to serve the pent-up demand for the enterprise connectivity

Automate and digitize workflows to achieve touchless SD-WAN configuration, provisioning, and activation

Before the pandemic, SD-WAN was primarily marketed to enterprises to reduce costs and improve flexibility. As businesses realized the pressure to go digital, cloud applications became the foundation for most organizations, enhancing their productivity and collaboration. What eventually evolved into an absolute necessity was to run these essential applications more efficiently, on a more reliable network -which is why SDWAN has become one of the most successful networking functions in decades. What will further fuel this adoption is the recent shift to a mostly remote or hybrid workforce model. According to a report by IDG Research Services and Masergy, over 90% of organizations expect to adopt an SDWAN solution eventually.

For businesses, Managed SDWAN Services provide attractive opportunities to tap into the growing SDWAN market and create new revenue streams. As per Markets and Markets Research, the global SD-WAN market size is expected to grow from USD 1.9 billion in 2020 to USD 8.4 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 34.5% during the forecast period.

But businesses can seize this opportunity only if they fulfill their customer needs on
time – by quickly activating the SD-WAN services. Potential roadblocks such as validating network compatibility, managing the service across multiple platforms, and solving the integration, operational and process-centric challenges can significantly delay the order to activate journey – leading to revenue loss and missed opportunities.


To accelerate the entire Order-to-Activate journey, businesses must eliminate process inefficiencies and embrace automation and digitalization at various levels.

To accelerate the entire order to activate journey, businesses must eliminate process inefficiencies and embrace automation and digitalization at various levels. This also means building a holistic tool that enables consolidating and automating workflows to achieve touchless SDWAN configuration, provisioning, and activation.