Background

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 is consistently improving and investing in its infrastructure to cater to growing and divergent needs of its rapidly expanding customer base. With that business objective, the client took a key decision to migrate from existing platforms, applications and products to new solutions.

The goal was to migrate the existing legacy VOIP switches to newly configured next generation switches that have higher capacity. The new VoIP switch concept takes into consideration new realities in the telecommunication industry such as the need to optimize the operating networks and expand VoIP lines to enhance customer experience. Switch Migration also aimed to handle important concerns raised from the use of legacy switches like capability and compatibility with other advanced devices.

Challenges

• Almost 0.75 million customers were required to be migrated in a specified 6 hour window during the work week.
• Retrieval of customer data according their regions using some backend actions (Using SQL Queries and some other server data) followed by preparation of input files which include live customer data.
• Ensure that all lines that were planned for migration were idle during that time. In the even a line was used by a customer then migration activity had to be abandoned for that specific customer in order to avoid the occurrence of any failure.
• In case any migration failed (work order failure) team had to troubleshoot in the same night window and take appropriate action. The failed work orders had to be fixed on the same day and this required close coordination between client technical team and our team.
• The entire process was deemed very sensitive as it required almost 24 hours of continuous involvement among the various project teams.

Solution

• DigitalSkunks deployed an experienced team with deep domain and systems knowledge coupled with technology, processes and employed automation.
• Through the use of the proprietary tool-set, the migration of switches was simplified and automated significantly.
• In the first step, all the data was exported from the source and is imported into the tool-set. By importing the data and merging with the previous data pools, available resources in the destination switches were identified and assessed and corresponding recommendations regarding the migration were derived.
• Subsequently, subscriber data with required information of the destination switches were allocated. Once the mapping was completed, the migration files were created with the corresponding delta data and are exported into the destination switch.
• For quality assurance purpose, DigitalSkunks team validated the migration live data for all customers on a daily basis.
• Actions were performed in a pre-determined and agreed manner in order to reduce the complexity of work flow.
• The process also required a final check for legacy switch status and corresponding new switch status to ensure successful migration occurred.
• Post migration problems reported by customers were negligible, and our project team worked closely with the Customer support team to resolve trouble tickets.

Outcome

• The customer was extremely satisfied with the overall support provided even though customer services not impacted majorly.
• Customers were successfully migrated to new VoIP switches on network with a failure rate of less than 0.01%.
• Our team worked closely with customer to ensure failures or issues were fixed within the next cycle of executions.
• One of the biggest accomplishment for the project team was the simultaneous migration of B2B customers along with B2C customers.