Achieve automated resolution of order fallout issues and recurring requests.

Service providers in the connectedness industry face the challenge of meeting customer order fulfilment deadlines. With the introduction influx of complex convergent services, which require bundling of different product offers, order fulfilment is becoming more unstable and delayed. The ongoing mergers and acquisitions in the telecom industry make the process much more complex, leading to higher order fallout rates. Order fallout in the order orchestration life cycle results in customer churn and revenue loss for service providers. Hence, a swift resolution to the fallouts is a prime necessity.

Leveraging data-driven network inventory wizard to arrest 90% of errors

Service providers in the Connectedness industry manage inventory data, consisting of their assets and services that are critical to their operations. These assets grow every day, making them difficult to manage. In general, the service providers manually register their inventories once their capacity management team forecasts and decides to expand the network. Hence, building an efficient inventory management system with an intelligent User Interface (UI) becomes important to guide the users in the registration process. The lack of such intelligent registration tools will hinder the ability to plan optimized networks resulting in delayed service, poor customer satisfaction, and loss of revenue.

Some of the key factors that lead to inventory data issues are

• Manual registration of assets and services in the OSS inventory
• Duplication of records due to lack of efficient validation tools
• Multiple siloed inventories

To overcome the above-mentioned issues, service providers need to Introduce a data-driven inventory wizard with business rules to improve the registration quality and arrest the errors at the source, thereby maintaining a high quality of data in OSS inventory.,/p>

With a data-driven inventory wizard in place, service providers can realize major benefits in data integrity of inventory, such as:

• Timesaving: Improves manual registration time by 87.5%.
• Accuracy in data: Registration accuracy on an average improves from 70.5% to 98%.
• Reduced efforts: Reduces manual data entry by 65% and the rework to be done due to errors during manual registration

Fig: Key Capabilities to be built on data-driven inventory wizard

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

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.

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.