Summary

Our client, a major German Telecommunications Company with a comprehensive services portfolio provided broadband Internet, fixed telephone & mobile services, and digital television and on-demand entertainment for millions of residential and business customers, wanted to enhance it’s IT capability to be able to respond to competitive challenges in the telco industry. The telco operator wanted to increase the speed at which it rolled out new products and services to the market,. The need was to build a scalable technology platform that would allow the client to ramp up and down its services according to their business needs and obtain a lower average cost while improving services.

In DigitalSkunks, the client found a company that could assure a competitive SLA (Service Level Agreement) covering complex integrations and interfaces between various applications in their architecture.

By outsourcing the Business Digitalization managed services contract to DigitalSkunks, the operator got access to a dedicated team of highly skilled engineers to cover all operational needs and requests in a timely and professional manner.

Background and Challenges

Our client had over 60+ applications for 8 million multiplay subscribers and 2000+ simultaneous users. The business challenge included:

• A huge ticket backlog across its business functions, e.g., provisioning, billing, WFM etc.
• There was a need to reduce the ticketing backlog by using E2E Application Support in a L1, L2, and L3 model for incident and problem management.
• In the past, new product launches were hampered by a lack of support in the period immediately after go-live phase because of the limitation of its ticketing system.

Client had a long relationship with DigitalSkunks and asked it to provide post go-live support for their BSS Stack systems (mainly for billing, logistics and provisioning). In addition, DigitalSkunks was tasked with the following:

• Support internal and external users as well as vendors during migration
• Lead migration individually or connected in a release
• Problem Management, Change Management and Incident Management connected to applications
• Provide 24 by 7 support at the end of each month to resolve any critical customer impacting issues that may arise due to the execution of month-end processes.
• Process correction and data cleansing for established use cases identified as part of incident management

Solution

• DigitalSkunks consolidated a team of experts with a variety of skills, including network and operating system knowledge, to cover a mix between network, operating system, database and application issues, with various operating systems based on AS400/LINUX/UNIX/WINDOWS environments. The applications consisted of legacy CRM and Billing client/ server, e-business and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, among others.
• The core team worked closely with the business and IT teams and created a plan for prioritized issues identified for resolution. This helped in creating a systematic plan to reduce backlog with identified work streams within the team which were responsible for problem management, issue management, monitoring and prevention.
• The team also identified the scenarios and workflows in the system that lead to data inconsistencies and created a data cleansing work stream which helped in preventing the subsequent issues that may occur due to these data issues.
• The project team conducted an analysis of process workflow to establish support plan.
• A Ticket Pre-analysis was designed and implemented to optimize ticket handling and response times.
• DigitalSkunks established a framework and methodology of working with system vendors and incorporation of functional tests within L2, L3 support.
• Several ad-hoc reports were created for various business requirements.
• Month-end support 24X7 was setup to provide support emerging from the critical business functions like billing & revenue management and to customer service after each release. This helped in not only preventing escalations for many issues but increased the responsiveness to the bug fixes leading to improved collaboration with other business units with IT.

Outcome

• The project resulted in incident backlog reduction to 53% within first 6 months time. Also FTR’s declined by 72%, Response to Incident reduced by 86%.
• The rigorous methodology applied by the project team brought down escalations per release/per month end to 64%.
• DigitalSkunks implemented Agile Change Management and standardized ITIL processes for the Incident and Problem management while applying eTOM principles within the scope of customer processes.
• Several reports were developed in order to track KPIs related to incident management.
• DigitalSkunks accomplished onsite to nearshore ramp up and offshore stabilization in 12 months’ time with 15 FTEs with the help of bilingual knowledge management systems and tools.