Increasing pressures on the business mean operators have to deliver a massive number of commercial offers which need to be launched in days and weeks, not months or years. Sponsored by Oracle 
 
 


The business of communications is going through a period of massive change with new competition, innovation, speed and customer satisfaction being held at a premium. As a consequence of these increasing pressures on the business, operators now have to deliver a massive number of commercial offers which need to be launched in days and weeks, not months or years.
To compound these issues, operators need to fulfil a diverse range of sales order formats and content types through multiple order capture systems while managing the unique fulfilment needs of each customer’s order all while taking into account the evolution of fulfilment systems in their business as well as in suppliers’ businesses.
That’s a difficult enough set of tasks to achieve in purpose-built environments but telecoms operators are attempting to address this changed dynamic using existing systems that have evolved into highly rigid and siloed order management systems. Such systems are characterised by delivering slow offer creation, high order fallout, poor order visibility, costly in-flight changes and escalating IT costs to manage this increased complexity.
Typical order management environments are hampered by slow offer design and implementation with a fragmented design process across organisations and systems that have been amplified by the growth of operators through acquisitions within a single line of business or the expansion of the business into multiple lines of business as a triple or quad play provider. In addition, offer design and implementation relies heavily on time consuming, manual processes to test new offers and limited ability to re-use existing work which means new processes are required to be mapped and tested to all systems for each new offer. This creates the slow siloed process driven environment causing great pain. Another issue is the long order cycle time. Run time which results in high order fallout because of a lack of uniform order capture mechanism, adds to the difficulty of creating complete and accurate orders and limits ability to decompose orders and provide orchestration plans for complex service bundles. Issues such as being unable to confirm order status on demand, with limited or no visibility into the order delivery process and resource-intensive in-flight customer revision and cancellation requests add further complexity and cost to order management.
Those costs manifest themselves as opex and can be largely attributed to constraints imposed by product and service based silos that result in duplication of functions and systems which have an escalating effect on systems integration, maintenance and enhancement costs.
Brian Kracik, Oracle’s director of product marketing, states; “As a consequence of this growing disconnect between the front and back, and the stress the business continues to put on existing systems, there is a strong need for a revamp of these systems and we are seeing a move towards deploying a centralised order management function. Operators are now looking to move to an environment that can enable rapid offer creation, low order fallout, complete lifecycle visibility, low-cost in-flight changes and reduced IT costs through consolidation. There are really four options available for the operator today. Middleware based solutions which are process driven, niche order management point products that can carry a high degree of integration risk, customised, services-led CRM and order management solutions which become one of a kind environments, or a fully-integrated solution that addresses customer care, offer design and order delivery.”
Oracle’s approach has been to focus on enterprise-wide order management innovation. To that end, the company now offers solutions that: synchronise product classes with the master product catalogue; enable commercial offerings to be decoupled from fulfilment supporting zero configuration offers; ensure every line of a sales order and its dependencies are understood; decouple the fulfilment system topology from fulfilment flows; generate an orchestration plan to fulfil each unique customer order and are backed by intelligent order change management capability and notification, and fallout management capability.
Oracle’s rapid offer design and order delivery solution has been designed to address the challenges outlined above and improves functionality in three key areas:

• Fast offer design and implementation. The Oracle solution simplifies design time integration with order management so the end-to-end view required to create and test offers is provided. The solution also enables rule based zero configuration for offer introduction and new services being added to an existing family.
• Short order cycle time. Benefits of the solution that shorten the order cycle include; enhanced technical service qualification to improve order accuracy across all channels for all types of orders; automatic decomposition of sales orders to generate unique orchestration plans for any offer or bundle; on-demand order status visibility across the order lifecycle including jeopardy and exception management; and automatic generation of compensation plans to handle in-flight revisions and cancellations.
• Elimination of service-based silos to reduce opex. Using a proven convergent platform for orchestration across systems eliminates the need for costly new silos and productised integrations reduce initial and ongoing support costs.

Aircel’s order management evolution

Aircel, the-fast growing Indian carrier, has more than 30 million subscribers and is the market leader in four regions in India. Its massive growth has meant the operator’s existing system was prone to failure in the face of order volumes exceeding 800,000 each day, with peak loads in excess of 100,000 orders per hour. Those volumes, coupled with need to address enterprise market demands for automated fulfilment of enterprise functions and manage the complexity of enterprise orders, necessitated rapid evolution at the operator. In addition, the absence of a subscriber service catalogue – the existing CRM and order management systems reflected a billing view but provided no service view – complicated the situation still further.
Aircel was unable to scale up to meet growing order volumes, unable to stop revenue leakage, had difficulty in addressing the needs of corporate customers and, as it tried to improve its operations, its front office was becoming more and more fragmented with multiple screens and systems for CSRs to manage and track customer orders through.
Ravinder Jain, CIO of Aircel India, explains the issues and the resolution; “The role of order management has become more vital,” he says. “For example, when we launched our all-you-can-eat ringback tone service, because the product is actually free, users can change their ringback tone every minute if they want. That was really impacting our network so we wanted a really robust solution. One major requirement was to have an end-to-end consolidated view. The second criterion was scalability. We wanted a solution to deal with very large volumes – we had 100,000 orders per hour [for the ringback tone service at peak] so we wanted a solution to scale up to this type of performance. The third criterion was to have end-to-end mapping of all the services. The solution must reduce delivery time, have a low number of orders fallout and have a very low operational cost. Oracle gives us visibility and I really like the way orchestration and decomposition happens independently of the CRM and billing. It has its own business logic.” GTB

From six days to six minutes; accelerated delivery at BT

BT Global Services has deployed an Oracle solution to accelerate complex service delivery over its RealTime Customer Self-Service Initiative. “Our challenge is how to deliver a lot faster, get it right first time more often and reduce instances of failure,” says Simon Hollins, programme director at BT Global Services. “A simple order could take from six or seven days to a month to process. We also found out that if any data in process was incorrect the whole process could fail so we had to take a more radical approach than in the past.”
That approach started from the ground up and Hollins uncovered huge complexity. “We found, when we investigated the way we were running orders that there was enormous complexity but every stage was supported by different systems,” he adds. “We re-engineered those processes and the underlying systems into our platform model. Those platforms are supplied by Oracle and we can then push an order through in real-time. The entire process runs through in a seamless and automated way.”
In fact, the deployment has been so successful that, when BT trialled it with 20 enterprise customers, additional business benefits were uncovered. “Customers were delighted at being able to get new services and put orders through in just a few minutes but, more than that, they started experimenting with upgrading the network for a short time – just an hour – or changing their class of service,” says Hollins.
That ability to flexibly alter services resulted in BT seeing revenues increase at three quarters of those triallists.
Hollins is pleased with the way the Oracle solutions works. “When we first tried this particular development at BT, we tried a number of approaches such as custom models,” he says. “We realised we needed to shortcut the process using COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) software and, particularly with Oracle, we saw that 80% of the functionality we needed was already there. Pre-integration took a lot less effort than previously expected.” GTB