Dec 9, 2002 12:00 PM,

ACTERNA CREATES NEW GROUP TO CUT FIELD SERVICE COSTS

Tim McElligott

Acterna's formation of a new workflow solutions division caps a string of organizational moves the test equipment company has made in the last year to leverage its acquisitions and substantial Tier 1 market share.

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The new group, which is designed to drive cost out of field service operations and improve quality at the same time, also has its first marquee customer in Sprint's local service division.

The creation of the new division comes at a critical time for the company. Acterna launched its Vision360 operations support system (OSS) application platform for cable networks in June and continues to make changes to that group, including downsizing. The company recently divested its wireless test division through a management buyout.

Bruce Hembree was named general manager of the workflow solutions unit, which has approximately 35 people from various divisions within the company. Hembree said that while OSS is the linchpin of workflow solutions, a separate division was created to develop a hybrid solution that all types of service providers — including cable operators — could use.

Workflow solutions is developing a suite of applications called Techsync that combine its portable test gear, software and services to focus on carriers' challenges in field services.

“In this day and age, not having a product value that is tied to the business is suicide,” said Paul Bugala, analyst at IDC.

Sprint's manager of field operations, Rich Nelson, said Techsync has helped the company reduce repeat troubles on its 8.2 million access lines by 7% and improved the number of troubles occurring within five days of a new installation by 16%.

Part of the routine for carrier technicians is performing POTS completion testing — a series of standard performance tests — upon completion of a service order. “The problem is knowing whether our technicians were in compliance with that requirement,” Nelson said.

Acterna's Techsync solution forces technicians to do their job the way it was intended: by tying their test tools back to the trouble ticket, work flow and other back office systems through software partly developed by Sprint. Technicians can't close out a work order until the test results are received in the back office.

“Techsync integrates the field technician into the overall process so he can be more productive,” Hembree said.

However, the system is more than a taskmaster for Sprint's 4000 technicians. By tracking repeat cases and their causes, as well as the time it takes to clear certain troubles, Sprint will use coaching reports it developed based on that data for its technicians' personal development. The company also expects to make significant progress on the age-old quest to reduce the number of truck rolls and mean-time-to-repair.

“Mean-time-to-repair is one of the few [service level agreement] metrics that really works on a customer,” Bugala said. “It shows customers that their SLAs mean something,”

With the performance data it has already collected, Sprint is developing a probability analysis tool that can predict whether a given facility will require a return visit. The tool also will be used in the company's cable analysis center to determine and prioritize underground cable replacement.

Acterna points to Sprint as an example of how test and measurement and traditional OSSs can work together to solve business issues rather than technical problems.

“It provides a sustainable process the operator can use to drive both the consistency in the process and the quality they need,” Hembree said.