Qwest, partners close gap between sales, service delivery

One of the biggest challenges in delivering a complex network service is turning the "agreement" hammered out by a telco sales team and a customer into a provisioned and delivered service

Qwest--along with vendor partners Netformx, Subex and salesforce.com-- will demonstrate critical improvements to these so-called “lead-to-order” processes in a Catalyst demonstration at next week’s TM Forum show in Orlando. The project, dubbed
“Effective Sell and Fulfillment of Advanced Network Services and Solutions,” aims to improve the carriers’ lead-to-order process and streamline accompanying order-to-cash process using the “Corporate Sales Management” release of TM Forum’s Applications Framework (also known as TAM).

“There’s a real challenge for service providers in that there exists a disconnect among their sales teams, product organizations and implementation teams,” said CEO Ittai Bareket, Netformx, whose pre-sales design tool, DesignXpert, will be used for discovery, design, configuration, quoting and proposing of network solutions in the Catalyst. Subex will provide the deployment tool with Vector, a catalog-driven service fulfillment solution, and NetProvision, a solution to automate the activation of complex enterprise network services. And salesforce.com will act as the “glue” between Netformx and Subex as the CRM piece, enabled by its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud applications for sales and customer service.

“When you are selling an MPLS or managed services solution, a data sheet and price are usually dictated to the sales team without much visibility into specifics. That triggers a lot of back-and-forth questioning about product definitions, rules and requirements that create errors in provisioning,” explains Bareket.

He notes that the rejection rate for MPLS deals can be as high as 21 percent, where one out of five orders are not delivered on. But using the automation showcased in this Catalyst, he contends that percentage can be reduced to less than one percent, thus potentially saving operators tens of millions of dollars by actually deploying what has been sold.

To mitigate or eliminate errors, the Catalyst aims to stave off the well-known back-and-forth phone calls, emails and questioning that hinders the lead-to-order process by integrating applications and creating rules and requirements visibility for sales engineers and account managers. “Often, there are between 10 and 14 applications per proposal, none of which are integrated,” noted Bareket. “We noticed that service providers needed a discovery tool capable of enabling ‘what-if’ scenarios that help improve design accuracy and right-first-time initiatives for eliminating errors when handing information over to provisioning.” To that end, this Catalyst demonstrates how Neformx captures customer requirements and uploads them to salesforce.com so there is visibility into quotes, graphical design of the solution, line items, etc. “We tie a real design and amount to a sales opportunity,” said Bareket.

With this “validated design,” provisioning errors are mitigated or eliminated because design already adheres to product definitions, rules and requirements outlined by the service provider. “These rules are automatically uploaded to ordering, pricing and CRM systems so all involved in the lifecycle can view and share information in an automated fashion,” notes Bareket, explaining that information is uploaded to salesforce.com for collaboration among constituents involved in the lead-to-order process, after which, Subex takes over to complete the provisioning piece.

According to Bareket, the end result of the Catalyst is an improvement of sales productivity and design accuracy, as well as expedited time-to-revenue and streamlining of order management and provisioning.