Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 3

	This Month's Issue:
	Automation

Automating Operations - Merely Reduce OPEX or Beyond?

By Dhananjay Pavgi

Automating OSS and its eco system components was traditionally looked at as the means & measures to reduce OPEX and increase operational efficiency. With the advent of IMS, NGN etc., a new disruptive application wave of services has arrived. To sustain this disruptive wave, back office IT applications like OSS/BSS should transform in to mature state of automation so that customer experience could be improved and tools (such as web self-care) are provided to the customer to ensure customer retention. Be it improving Service Velocity (reducing Concept to Market cycle times) or be it improving customer satisfaction (customer driven Trouble to Repair processes), automating operations has become crucial to the success of service providers business.

In order to achieve operations automation to ensure smooth delivery and consistent user experience of Next Generation services, there are various dimensions that need to be considered. Unless, all these dimensions are considered; automation of operations won’t lead to the desired results.

Automation of Business Processes

The level or degree of automation of operations really depends on the business need/processes described by service providers. With more automation in place, error rates are lower. However that may not be necessarily true. System Integrators and Enterprise Architects should have the end goal of automation clear before they devise a solution. And this is tightly linked with the synchronization of business process automation and systems automation. That means systems automation is dependant on business process automation. For example, severe problems in the process automation of order capture would nullify the sophisticated automation in the downstream Service Provisioning system components. The purpose of business processes and OSS automation is to improve business results for telecommunication service providers. Processes are often implicit within an organization, buried in the network of people and systems that has evolved over the years.

As such, these processes are often very hard to formally observe and define. Many organizations often find it difficult to understand exactly how their processes work today and even harder to work out how to implement better processes. Through automation, companies are looking for a different way of improving business processes, leveraging dedicated software to capture, design and implement processes and eventually monitor the performance of these processes across the organization. Process automation reduces disconnects between technology and business. It improves the operational flexibility and efficiency, customer

In order to achieve operations automation to ensure smooth delivery and consistent user experience of Next Generation services, there are various dimensions that need to be considered.

satisfaction, minimizing revenue leakages and unstable processes. Process automation helps provide a holistic business-system view that plays an essential role in the transformation of a CSP into ‘lean operator’.

Impact of Regulatory Norms

OSS automation is also tightly coupled with regulatory norms. For example, depending on regulatory norms in a particular country/geography, automation requirements from service providers would vary. For example, wholesale service providers in the UK, should provide a common automated platform to manage order, fault and billing information from its retailers. Whereas automation of management processes for LNP, CNAM, LIDB, E911, etc would be critical in the United States. Directives from regulators would keep playing an important role even in the future when we talk about OSS automation.

Importance of Data Quality

The success of OSS automation is directly lined with the Quality of the data that OSS systems deal with. Therefore, the stress must be given on doing thorough analysis of the quality of underlying data. Improper data not only affects the success of automation but also drastically reduces operational efficiency. As a quick fix (short term solution), this at times forces tailoring business processes in the fashion which are not good for the business benefits. For example, missing or incorrect product catalogue definition would nullify all the efforts spent on automating Concept to Market (C-2-M) processes and OSS systems components around these processes. Similarly; incorrect mapping of customer information to services and network resources would severely hamper automation of

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