New provisioning process saves €8.5 million for E-Plus

"The CGI recommendations were striking… The assessment showed that many problems can be avoided and significant cost savings made when following a process-driven, top down approach."

Thorsten Dirks, Board member, Leader of the innovations department at E-Plus

The Client
The mobile telecom industry relies on fast and efficient processes to achieve quality customer service, control costs, and maintain a competitive advantage. At E-Plus, Germany's third largest provider of mobile communications services, the customer provisioning process was impaired by a series of technology driven implementations that resulted in a chain like process and multiple, complex point to point interfaces. There were many points of system failure, and a decentralized monitoring and reporting structure failed to reflect the accurate status of each transaction, leading to slow response times.

E-Plus needed to increase the reliability and speed of their provisioning processes to enable faster and more efficient failure detection and resolution. And, by reducing system complexity, they could speed time to market and increase operational efficiency.

The Challenge
In today's fast paced telecommunications sector, operators need to support the rapid, successive launch of new mobile data services to keep up with intense competition. The current provisioning environments are designed to support a limited number of services with extensive launch time. But, with the anticipated proliferation of new mobile data services, it is estimated that operators will have to offer up to 3,000 different services by 2004. Most operators will not be able to move quickly enough to stay ahead of the game.

Evolved over time, companies have implemented add ons to existing provisioning systems for every new technology or functionality and have ended up with separate systems for Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), Virtual Private Network (VPN), General Packet Radio Services (GPRS), and self service. Now they need to move from traditional bearer based provisioning, involving mostly network activation, toward service based provisioning for the 3G environment, with an enlarged number of triggers, such as front office, network, application servers, and external parties. Operators with a 2G customer base will need to support a mixed environment of 2G, 2.5G and 3G, and give customers the opportunity for a smooth upgrade.

At E-Plus, customer provisioning and the respective processes were managed through a monolithic billing application. The extension of the IT landscape toward stand-alone CRM and additional customer touch points, such as Internet-enabled services, led to a replication of provisioning processes and back-end connectivity. E-Plus also faced the challenge of reduced operability through chain-like business processes, spawning many systems and platforms, with frequent changes of data formats, hard-coded mappings, and no capacity for end to end monitoring.

When E-Plus called CGI, the customer provisioning process was error prone, implemented across many applications. The actual status of a provisioning transaction was not obtainable without tedious research and manual interference. The challenge was to disentangle the cross-linked processes, reduce the number of single points of failure, and get to a centrally controlled and monitored model of customer provisioning.

The Strategy
CGI' approach was designed to help E-Plus optimize their mobile data revenue opportunity by enabling new services to be launched rapidly, providing efficient resource management, and delivering lower cost and ease of maintenance.

After an analysis of business requirements, CGI focused on implementing work-flow controlled processes, reducing the number of single points of failure, implementing and asynchronous communication model, and establishing a central control unit for monitoring and reporting of transaction status. By designing E-Plus specific business processes starting on a system independent logic level, CGI ensured the best solution from a business perspective.

The chain-like processes were replaced by centrally controlled workflows, while the business applications were connected to a messaging platform. The participating applications were connected through adapters to the existing EAI infrastructure. CGI recommended the creation and implementation of a generalized object model as a normalization layer, facilitating data mediation between systems and the extension toward additional applications.

The next step was the design of generic object models and the implementation of generic business objects, data mapping rules, and direct mapping onto the related technology. The redesigned provisioning processes provided a reusable repository and a unique view, closely linking business and system processes, and enhancing the system's error detection and monitoring capabilities. In addition, the organization's dependency on its billing system was reduced.

A phased implementation reduced risks and enabled the operational departments to cope with the organizational change implied by the central messaging architecture. The top-down approach took a business view of the provisioning process, maximizing the business benefits, and enabled the implementation of a consistent customer-orientated process view.

The final solution offers the benefits of extendibility and operational transparency, enabling E-Plus to prepare for the upcoming challenges of 3G provisioning.

The Results
By taking a top-down, business-process focus to the redesign of their customer provisioning system, E-Plus expects to save more than €8.5 million between 2001 and 2005, in operational and capital expenditures. But the solution was more than a cost-saving exercise. Several key business benefits will help sustain E-Plus's competitive position:

• Increased quality of service: The provisioning process and the respective data flows can now be centrally controlled and monitored. The immediate distribution of provisioning information to front- and back-end applications ensures on-the spot and accurate information across heterogenous systems.
• Improved response times: By distributing information centrally from the EAI platform, response times were reduced from two hours to just a few seconds.
• Reduced time to market: The thorough analysis and subsequent documentation of the existing processes significantly increase E-Plus's ability to extend its service portfolio quickly in response to market demands. And, because of the modular nature of the implementation, existing processes can be reused for new services.
• Increased data quality and availability: The risk of data inconsistencies among systems was significantly reduced through central data distribution by the EAI middleware. Inconsistencies are now signaled and can be removed over time.
• Preparation for the future: The EAI platform is now a reliable component within the IT infrastructure, with the successful implementation of the business critical provisioning processes enabling the easy extension to new systems and clear access to legacy data. This enables E-Plus to offer mobile data services to their customers quickly and competitively.