The incredible shrinking interval

To reduce the time it takes to provision a service order, carriers should consider harnessing the power of advanced workflow technology.

With dominant market leaders and aggressive new entrants battling for customer mindshare, today's service providers must use radical, new business models and advances in IT to keep customers and increase profits.

One operational cost that remains extremely high is the provisioning of services to customers. Current service activation processes are complex, with many manual steps and long cycle times. In addition, today's service providers are saddled with non-integrated front- and back-office systems, legacy applications and inconsistent operational structures. These disparate systems cannot communicate with each other, often extending the "provisioning interval" - the time required to provision an order from start to finish.

As the competitive landscape continues to grow in the telecommunications industry, extended provisioning intervals caused by the inefficient use of resources - financial, equipment and human - will result in lost customers, directly affecting a service provider's bottom line.

To battle the rising costs associated with provisioning intervals, service providers demand software solutions that positively affect their provisioning infrastructures - enabling greater efficiency, significant cost savings and improved responsiveness. To better manage the complexity of work that affects the bottom line, telcos need process-centric workflow solutions that are tailored to solve today's provisioning inefficiencies and flexible enough to adapt to issues they will face tomorrow.

Workflow software can help

The process of provisioning telecom services is complex because many opportunities for errors exist. When a new order is placed or an existing order is modified, numerous departments and systems need either to review or work on that order. As more service providers enter this market, service provisioning has been thrown in the forefront of the customer retention battle.

Reducing provisioning intervals remains an equal challenge to established telcos and industry newcomers. Established telcos, such as RBOCs, incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) and interexchange carriers, must contend with integrating disparate systems and ensuring smooth interdepartmental communications. Start-up telcos such as competitive LECs must also work to address challenges from the ground up, while attracting new customers with less expensive products and services. To succeed in this competitive marketplace, telcos must ensure communication between departments to prevent missed handoffs and dropped balls as they fulfill service delivery requests accurately and on time - every time.

Thanks in part to competition, service providers now have an opportunity to harness the power of advanced workflow technologies to reduce provisioning intervals and improve customer service. Workflow software grew out of this specific business need for solutions that streamline and better manage business processes and their associated information.

Service activation is a good example of a mission-critical business process: It is a complex sequence of actions, taken in a specific order, that are necessary to achieve a business goal. The definition of actions and the order in which they are performed is controlled by conditions or rules, usually determined in advance by company procedures. Implementing workflow software ensures that the right people or systems perform the right actions at the right time, reducing the time a process takes to be completed accurately.

In addition, the ability - at any time during the process - to determine the status of a specific order, track the remaining steps to be completed for that order and provide real metrics as to when the customer should expect the request to be satisfied gives a service provider a competitive advantage. In the end, the bottom line need for workflow software lies in its ability to deliver a competitive advantage to the telco implementing it. By capturing and managing mission-critical processes, workflow software becomes a powerful tool that allows service providers to more effectively and consistently provision orders, therefore serving current and future customers better.

A new provisioning process

Rather than designing provisioning systems from the switch back up to the order entry stage, telcos should consider applications that execute the provisioning process from the beginning, where the order starts. By basing an application on advanced workflow technology, the provisioning process can be proactively managed as a real and more competent process.

With the changing landscape of today's market, telcos must look for a completely open systems solution that graphically models, precisely executes and comprehensively reports online provisioning processes.

Many of today's provisioning systems are closed, hard-coded, proprietary and application-specific, which does not allow them to be extended easily. On the other hand, an end-to-end workflow solution supports the development of modular and open systems, built according to overall business needs rather than those of a specific department. A carefully designed workflow solution supports the transition from closed departmental systems to modular and extensible enterprise applications. Bridging the gap between departments such as sales, customer care, operations and billing allows a more efficient service delivery process, subsequently reducing the provisioning interval.

Process-centric workflow systems originate with a process map that defines telecom services by modeling the steps required to provision that service (Figure 1). All process maps are drawn using graphical tools, rather than hard-coded in a proprietary product. This makes defining processes - and adding new products and services - more straightforward.

When an order comes in, the system "kicks off" a copy that represents the customer's order. Work is sent to individuals, automated agents or programs that perform the required work, delivering all the information needed to perform their job. This information can include the firm order commitment date or entire files or documents of information, such as scanned images of the order itself. This process must be able to change on the fly to accommodate modifications and supplemental orders that inevitably occur (Figure 2).

Managing supplemental and change orders often provides the greatest challenge in meeting firm order commitment dates and in shortening intervals. This is because these procedures often are done manually, introducing added cost and the potential for errors. So as the order complexity grows in relation to the number and type of services that are potentially bundled together, it is impossible to determine all the possible combinations and permutations of bundled services.

The rapid nature of change in this environment makes maintenance of the business process a major challenge. A modular system of business logic is needed to capture the individual services and features so that a change in the offering affects only a small part of the overall order fulfillment process. When an order is received into the workflow system, it is decomposed into the various services and features, and then the corresponding sub-process templates are selected from a library for dynamic insertion into the process for that particular order.

A step ahead of the customer

Many of the problems associated with long provisioning intervals can be attributed to poor order quality that requires rework. Across the industry, order error rates of more than 50% are common. These high error rates delay the provisioning period and have a direct effect on customer satisfaction because of delay or errors that aren't ultimately trapped for correction.

A workflow system will not only speed up the handoffs and support the automation and correction of mundane and wasteful errors, it also will collect the metrics for timely analysis to spot both negative and positive trends and behaviors. Capturing metrics is essential to determining potential bottlenecks that often affect intervals, but the real value in workflow solutions is the ability to provide real-time monitoring capabilities that identify potential problems before a customer is affected.

In a classic provisioning example, often the first task that must be completed is validating the order, ensuring that the information introduced by sales or customer care is accurate.

Several carriers are applying process-centric workflow tools to address this area, which often has been neglected but can have the greatest impact on reducing intervals. When initiating the process, a user selects a customer's requested service for an order. If the customer chooses several bundled services, the tool will select from a process library containing the predefined process maps that correspond to the services ordered, building a unique order for that particular customer (Figure 3). Once the order is taken, the process used to fulfill it is started. Each task in the process has a series of dependencies; some tasks must wait until others finish, while some can be executed in simultaneously.

Using an automatically generated to-do list, telco employees receive work in their lists based on their skill set. When a task is ready to be performed, it appears in the to-do lists of all workers that have the skills to perform that task. In the previous example, a worker would be presented with the order ready to validate and all the tools and information needed to complete this task. Once this task is completed, the next tasks move from the "wait" state to the "ready" state. The order then is routed to the next task in the process. In the example, this includes sending the order information to an ILEC, validating the information for emergency medical allocation and assigning the necessary equipment.

A person does not assign equipment, an automated agent does. In this case, the agent queries an inventory database to see if the appropriate equipment is available. If sufficient resources are available, the agent completes the task and proceeds to the next step. If the inventory was not available to satisfy the request, the agent places the order "in jeopardy," applying predefined rules to determine what escalation would best solve the problem. In many cases, the business rules would call for the insertion of additional tasks that would assign work to those individuals best equipped to solve the problem.

System adaptability

Enabling management to track all aspects of the provisioning process, reallocate work and manage users and work groups is essential in streamlining the provisioning process and reducing interval time. For example, a jeopardy report lists all outstanding orders that have exceptional circumstances - the kind of circumstances that cause orders to miss their firm order commitment date. Other reports must summarize everything in the provisioning process - from when an order was completed (and by whom) to when individual tasks became ready to be performed. It is important that this information is tracked, and it becomes useful when determining the health of a service provider's business.

Providing clear solutions to the line provisioning problem facing telecom service providers will enable them to more easily define their commitment to customers throughout the next several decades. In doing so, service providers will turn telco processes into corporate assets. Today, advanced workflow technology is helping telcos worldwide solve one of their most important business problems with automated line provisioning applications. As these technologies demonstrate their value, the benefits flow straight to the bottom line: greater productivity, faster time to market, increased revenue and improved profitability.

Every organization's business processes are a vital asset to be managed. They can be part of the solution or part of the problem. They can be ad-hoc and dependent on the experience of individuals, or well-defined and easilytransferable to new people. They can be an obstacle or an enabler to productivit y. Ultimately, they can be a competitive advantage or a disadvantage.