Summary

The client, a major German telecommunications company, is a provider of broadband Internet, fixed telephone & mobile services, digital television, and on-demand entertainment for residential and business customers. The client’s Billing team wanted DigitalSkunks to help it migrate its Billing Mediation & Revenue Assurance platform to a next gen solution that would take into account the rapidly growing digital traffic and convergence of networks in the telecom industry.

In DigitalSkunks, the client found a partner who could create an implementation strategy and framework. It could help client’s team in anticipating future business requirements, and identify and resolve gaps in systems capability.

DigitalSkunks set up a highly skilled project teams in a very short period of time. The migration strategy developed by DigitalSkunks proved to be highly successful despite the technical complexity of the legacy architecture. The implementation was smooth and within the stipulated timeframe.

Background & Challenge

The client is the second largest communications services provider in Germany, offering innovative and enhanced products for broadband, digital television, radio, cable, pay TV and telephony. The client offers an innovative product mix to a rapidly expanding customer base and invests heavily in its infrastructure to cater to the growing demands of its customers.. As part of this infrastructure development strategy, the client leadership took the decision to migrate from existing legacy platform and applications to new solutions that met its business objectives.

It was critical to capture all current system requirements from the existing platform to ensure continuity for the new solution. The new product would also have to be future proof in order to roll-out new features with agility.

One of the objectives was to migrate the existing Billing Mediation and Revenue Assurance Platform to a new breed, NGN compatible solution. The NGN concept takes into consideration new realities in the telecommunication industry such as the need to converge and optimize the operating networks and the extraordinary expansion of digital traffic such as multimedia and mobile usage. NGN also aims to tackle important concerns raised from the use of current IP-based services like QoS and security.

The client chose to implement MediationZone solution provided by DigitalRoute.

The implementation of the new platform and the migration from the legacy platform, however, posed several challenges.

• The functional requirement document (FRD) had a multitude of gaps and needed many iterations until all business needs were covered.
• Test cases that were accurate and comprehensive enough to cover all aspects of the product perfectly needed to be developed
• Changes owing to ongoing implementation had to be incorporated into testing and benchmarking activities.
• Data integrity and consistency had to be brought into the target solution.
• Short implementation timeline did not offer any downtime window for the Go Live.
• The project was executed over several different time zones leading to reduced communication.

Solution

DigitalSkunks was able to leverage its deep telecom domain knowledge and technology expertise to deliver a smooth transition of a complex platform. our team defined a test strategy, performed migration and and with the roll-out of the new platform delivered a business-enabled Solution that helped its client to attain sustainable growth with operational efficiency & business profit take-outs.

• DigitalSkunks applied 2-fold Quality Assurance project. It conducted detailed business process validation in conjunction with review of functional requirements
• DigitalSkunks team developed complete defect/bug documentation for clear understanding, easy reproduction and quick resolution.
• Mediation Platform Test scripts verified by client technical team were automated for efficient verification of each iteration deployment by the vendor.
• DigitalSkunks developed a proprietary Test Call Data Record (CDR) generator for validations of Revenue Assurance platform that helped in preventing and diagnosing the anticipatory issues.
• Successful data migration from the source platform to the target platform ensuring data consistency and integrity.
• Onshore and offshore project teams leveraged online tools and followed best practices to collaborate on project deliverables as well as on knowledge transfer

Outcome: Digitalskunks played an important role in ensuring a smooth migration of the Mediation platform. The client engagement team found that it could completely rely on as a skilled partner who is capable of handling system integration challenges.

• Our automated testing process ensured an overall reduction in the cost of testing.
• Our due-diligence and attention to details during requirements gathering process supported an accelerated development cycle
• Development of test scenarios and stringent testing methodology ensured early identification of issues, accurate bug detection and fixing
• The onshore-offshore model ensured higher productivity and shorter implementation cycle and highly efficient reporting
• The test team was enabled with faster detection of discrepancies in the amount of call minutes and data volume to be charged to end-customers.
• Development of a comprehensive concept of: any service, any subscriber, any location.