Sprint, Netformx speak at MW Dublin about automating ordering and provisioning

Today, Netformx CEO Ittai Bareket and Sprint Advanced IP Engineering Manager Mike Hill presented at TM Forum Dublin in the Delivering Agile IT & Operations Forum'sImplementing IT & Operational Excellence Summit.

“Automating the requirements-to-order and provisioning processes helped us identify a disconnect between our pre-sales team and the delivery of MPLS [transport, SIP trunking, gateway services to partners, etc.], wireless services and managed services, not to mention the equipment which sometimes was or was not sold as part of the transaction,” said Hill. “We found that pre-sales teams were selling a product and solution that were sometimes difficult to deliver.”

Sprint therefore set out to streamline and bring the knowledge of the product managers to its pre-sales engineers. “We wanted them, when sitting in front of a customer, to generate an optimal proposal that would turn out to be accurate and profitable. We wanted lots of options to be available singularly or bundled together. If they wanted to deploy collaboration UC solutions, a hosted or managed solution, or to run on MPLS, we wanted the pre-sales folks to have as much information as they needed at their fingertips to close the loop, and to close the deal,” said Hill.

To automate the process, Sprint and Netformx design experts and architects sat down with system engineers to determine common definitions and best practices for selling and delivery of services across the board. “Once we understood the language, the inter-dependencies among offerings, the workflows and processes, we set out to create ‘what-if scenarios in a box’ to help pre-sales engineers initiate and close deals,” explained Hill, noting the experience from system engineer, to implementation project managers, and onto operations and IP services managers were all considered and evaluated closely.

“We knew we didn’t want to take a week or two every time a customer wanted a modification. We didn’t want product managers to have to crunch numbers and go back to the customer location over and over again.”

To that end, Sprint and Netformx teams worked to establish documentation around the entire workflow, as well as clear definitions for products and services. This helped determine best practices and helped the teams to build a centralized repository for data valuable to activation and provisioning. “The goal was to make it easy for pre-sales engineers to pull the data that was of most value to them and what they were trying to achieve. Once proposals were accepted by clients, we wanted information to go automatically to activation and provisioning without any re-keying of information. In other words, we wanted to close the loop without having swivel-chair management or manual entry of data in Excel spreadsheets,” said Hill.

Hill notes that the sales engineers can now accomplish in three or so days what used to take as many weeks. He attributes the success to close evaluation of the requirements-to-order process on the front-end of the sales process, and then improving the ability to discover, design, configure, quote and propose tailored, converged solutions for each enterprise customer.

“It’s our engine, our knowledge base, and our ability to collaborate and integrate with each service provider that helps us determine what equipment from a multi-vendor environment will be germane to the service in question, and to ensure ‘private content’ is going to help the sales folks build visualization and graphical representations of data that will aid in demonstrating to customers the capabilities of their products and services,” said Bareket. He noted that associating a service provider’s service with specific pieces of equipment requires an expansive knowledge base. “By having expertise around all the possible equipment combinations and the service provider products and workflows, it can all be brought together in a dynamic, automated manner,” he added.

Bareket believes a “comprehensive design approach” that is truly end-to-end in nature is the only way to join private content with the pre-sales processes, applications, and provisioning that goes into selling and delivering a service.

“We can now do design variations on the fly while sitting in front of a customer; no longer are the gyrations of running back and forth to the office necessary. It’s all done on a laptop as the customer needs,” added Hill.

In the summit, Sprint will highlight how it has overhauled its requirements-to-order process and opened collaboration between the customer-facing and back office teams. The end result has been an improvement to the overall enterprise customer experience and more accuracy when creating sales proposals and network designs.