How CGI helped Australia’s largest privately-owned provider of fibre-to-the premises (FTTP) network solutions design and implement a new operational and business support system.

Summary:

  • Design and implement a replacement solution for OptiComm’s business and operational support systems (B/OSS) that can scale for planned future growth
  • A multi-phase integration of a custom Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution, Power Automate and Azure logic apps
  • Automation of key business processes
  • 85% automated provisioning
  • Improved customer satisfaction with connection tasks being faster, with less errors
  • The first phase provides OptiComm with a saving of one full time equivalent (FTE) in staffing costs for their National Operations Centre (NOC)

The challenge

OpticComm is one of Australia’s leading independent telecommunications carriers, specialising in the design, construction, operation and maintenance of FTTP networks. Today, OptiComm has a large, growing customer base that they expect to increase four-fold by 2023 due to increasing demand for high speed fibre networks.

To ensure they could support this planned customer growth, OptiComm engaged CGI with a brief to transform and modernise their operational support systems. This new system would enable their service providers, end-users and service desks to undertake connection tasks faster, more accurately and at a lower cost while accommodating for future scale.

The solution

In order to define and future-proof the transformation strategy, our experts took a platform-based approach to transform and enable process automation over three phases.

“Having a technology agnostic provider look at what the solution really needed was key in driving the right outcomes. CGI assessed not only what technology was best suited to our business processes but also the culture of OptiComm which was equally important in adoption and scaling at pace”
– Ben Liew, Chief Network Officer, OptiComm.

Phase one was to enable OptiComm’s RSP customers to interface via a new direct portal for broadband service orders including:

  • New Connection requests for properties within the OptiComm network
  • Disconnection requests for properties within the OptiComm network
  • Service modification requests for properties within the OptiComm network.

Phase two was to create a customer portal to allow property owners to initiate and pay for connection requests. Future phases will automate remaining processes and decommission all legacy technology.

After evaluating the organisation’s technology platforms our team decided to leverage the core capabilities of Microsoft standard platforms to build the required solution.

Our team recognised that building a built for purpose system would have been prohibitively complex and costly to implement.

We also noted that the OptiComm workforce were already highly adept with Microsoft’s suite of business platforms and so extending this capability through Microsoft Dynamics 365 would not require a high degree of change management.

Through adding on Flow and Power apps, OptiComm could achieve a fully unified B2B and C2B capability that not only integrated with their business systems but extended to activation of the network elements via APIs and customer portals.


The project referenced in this case study was delivered by Unico, which CGI acquired in March 2022.