TM Forum Casestudybook May 2011

Spring 2011 | www.tmforum.
org
Your guide to achieving a better bottom line
Service providers worldwide share their Frameworx success stories
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
Sponsored by:
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Your guide to achieving a better bottom line
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Page 4
What can Frameworx do for you?
Page 7
China Unicom
Turning chaos into harmony generates a
billion dollars
Page 10
Qtel Group
Revenue assurance program aims to
deliver $105 million annually to bottom line
benet
Page 14
Saudi Telecom Company
Taking a customer-centric approach to
strategic goals
Page 16
Mobitel
Simpler IT speeds up new service
provision, drives take-up
Page 20
Qwest cuts operational costs, gets
products out there faster
Page 22
Colt Technology Services, Telekom
Malaysia, Aircel
Certied solutions speed up time to market
for service providers
Page 26
Telekom Slovenije
Customers rst: an object lesson in
achieving multiple goals
Page 29
Vodafone D2, Telefnica and T-Mobile
Automation affords big gains in efciency,
security and compliance
Page 32
AXIS
Integration combats erce competition
in Indonesia
Page 35
Magyar Telekom
Better service provisioning and activation
create foundation for growth
Page 38
Pakistan Telecommunication Company
Limited (PTCL/Ufone)
Enabling consolidation and growth to go
hand in hand
Page 40
GTEL Mobile
Fast deployment and differentiated
products bring rapid success in Vietnam
Page 42
PT Inovao
Simpler network changes bring major
benets
Page 46
European operator
Consolidated BSS produces magic numbers
Page 48
Microsoft Business Online Services
Transforming IT systems to support new
business models
Page 50
Leading Indian service provider
Measuring success through an open
process architecture
Page 53
South East Asian operator
How to save a million dollars a year
Page 53
Views from the top
Industry leaders highlight the business
benets of using TM Forum standards
Page 58
Fall 2011 edition of TM Forum Case
Study Handbook
How to submit entries to the next issue
4 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Welcome to the spring edition of the TM Forum Case Study
Handbook 2011. Here you will nd real-life case studies on how
service providers from very different markets around the world
have beneted from using the Forums comprehensive suite
of tools and standards, Frameworx, as well as best practices
developed by our members, plus collaboration initiatives and
our Business Benchmarking Program.
Read how China Unicom has reaped around $1 billion in
cost savings and new revenues so far, while a Frameworx
deployment helped AXIS to offer tailored bundles in the ercely
competitive Indonesian market, resulting in it signing up 2
million more customers in three months.
Qtel Group, which has a presence in 17 countries, has
gained $50 million in bottom line benets since it launched its
three-year revenue assurance program, based on the Forums
Revenue Assurance Maturity Model, in 2010. The plan is to
add $105 million in bottom line benets each year from 2013 in
recovered and assured revenue.
In Europe, Frameworx helped Mobitel reduce the signing
up process for new services from up to 45 hours to minutes.
As Botjan Robenik, IT director, Mobitel, says, Adopting
the industry standards means using the best practices from
around the globe, which help us run optimally. Also, [our parent
company] Telekom Slovenije owns other mobile operators
that can now easily adopt our solution because it is based
on industry standards. This means our knowledge can be
leveraged for additional benets.
In the U.S., to reduce investment risk and prove the viability
of what it wanted to achieve, Qwest and its partners turned
to Frameworx and the Forums Catalyst program before
it embarked on the transformation. Within a year of the
deployment, Qwest saw a 4 percent increase in revenue, a
5 percent cost reduction, a 25 percent improvement in new
product deployment cycle times, and a decrease in unique
provisioning and assurance job steps.
An Asian operator is saving $1 million in procurement alone
annually, while rolling out 3G. This is due to better visibility of
its network assets, and massive savings due to automation
replacing many manual tasks, both facilitated through deploying
Frameworx.
This Case Study Handbook shows, in the most pragmatic,
real terms, how and why Frameworx and the Forums best
practices are applicable to many sectors and situations as the
digital ecosystem develops.
We hope this edition whets your appetite and starts you
too wondering what Frameworx could do for your business.
Or if youve had some success of your own with Frameworx,
or through the Forums other activities, that it inspires you to
share your story with others in the next edition of the Case
Study Handbook. Please see the panel on page 58 for details of
how to submit entries and what we are looking for.
TM Forum: enabling change
Successful business transformation involves complex decisions
at every turn. To succeed, you need the right strategy, a clear
view of change needed in your business, and technology
solutions that deliver results. Whether you are introducing
a new service portfolio, rationalizing existing systems or
transforming business operations, TM Forum provides its
members with thought-leadership, best practices and the
Frameworx suite of standards proven to deliver success every
step of the way.
As the case studies in this handbook illustrate, Frameworx
offers the standards and tools to dramatically reduce costs
and risks associated with the business and IT design, and
implementation stages of change shown below.
What can Frameworx do for you?
Business strategy
& objectives
Strategic planning
Business planning
and design
Business & IT design
Operational
impact analysis
Organization
impact analysis
Information
support systems
Procurement
Implementation
Implementation
Introducing Frameworx
Already adopted by 90 percent of the worlds largest service
providers, TM Forums Frameworx suite of standards provide
the blueprint for effective business operations. They enable you
to assess and improve performance using a proven, service-
oriented approach to operations and integration, which allows
you to focus on growing your business.
Frameworx components
Frameworx enables a service-oriented, highly automated and
efcient approach to running a service provider's business
through the following components:
The Business Process Framework Efcient, clear and
effective business processes are critical to delivering
innovative services quickly, at the least possible cost. This
Framework provides a comprehensive, industry agreed,
multi-layered view of the key business processes a service
provider needs to run their business. Aligned to ITIL, and
supported by off-the-shelf tools, the Business Process
Framework provides:
a comprehensive, multi-layered catalog of the business
processes required to run a service providers business
guidelines and standard process ows ensuring your
processes are efcient and effective across the enterprise
business-to-business processes giving you standardized
processes across a value chain of partners.
The Information Framework End-to-end service
management means the consistent use of data across
the enterprise. The Information Framework provides a
comprehensive, industry-agreed denition for information
that ows through the enterprise, and between service
providers and their business partners. Supported by off-the-
shelf tools, the Information Framework provides a common
information model, reducing complexity and allowing for the
denition of standardized integration points. The Framework
enables business agility through:
an agreed enterprise information model for end-to-end
service management, dened using business-oriented
Unied Modeling Language models
an extensible, proven and exible information model
supporting federation, enabling rapid introduction and
management of new technologies and services
a clear, common language between buyer, supplier and
business partners.
The Application Framework Understanding how your
business processes are implemented in your software
architecture is paramount to success. This Framework
provides a model for grouping processes and their associated
information into recognizable applications. It provides a
common language and identication system between buyer
and supplier for all application areas. It gives you:
a coordinated systems map showing how your business
processes are implemented across applications
support for enterprise architecture design through
understanding of your systems architecture versus a
standardized map
support for procurement through a consistent denition
of an application, the functions it should perform and the
information it needs.
The Integration Framework Automation of business
processes enables you to reduce costs signicantly and
deploy new services rapidly. But automation requires
interoperability between systems across the entire enterprise
and an extended value chain of partners. The Integration
Framework denes how the processes and information
behind these systems can be automated by dening
"Already adopted by 90 percent of the worlds
largest service providers, TM Forums Frameworx
suite of standards provide the blueprint
for effective business operations."
6 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
standardized, service-oriented, architecture-based interfaces
called Business Services (NGOSS Contracts). The Integration
Framework includes:
a taxonomy for services and guidelines for the
development of Business Services
model-driven tooling for the machine assisted production
of standard interfaces
a repository for Business Services.
Business Metrics Understanding the performance of
your business is a critical aspect of managing transformation.
Knowing how you compare to the industry in key operational
areas will guide your transformation investment.
TM Forums Business Metrics, mapped to the Business
Process Framework, provide a way for you to measure
success based on a balanced scorecard that covers:
revenue and margin a view of scal performance
customer experience measures that impact the end-
customers reaction to the service offering
operational efciency a view of cost and expense drivers.
Frameworx support
TM Forum provides a comprehensive set of supporting
services to make Frameworx adoption easy for our members.
Our Frameworx Conformance Certication and RFx
programs make it easy to assess and procure products and
solutions conformant with Frameworx, while Conformance
Implementation Certication allows service providers to verify
their internal business processes and data model against
the standard.
Other important supporting services include an extensive
library of Guidebooks and Best Practice Guides, an
online member support community of more than 50,000
professionals, a Help Desk, professional Training and
Certication and Benchmarking services.
You can learn more about Frameworx at tmforum.org/frameworx
Frameworxs benets at a glance
Developed through industry collaboration, Frameworx
helps you:
Understand your customer
Frameworx drives customer satisfaction and loyalty by
providing a common model for your customer
management information
Innovate and reduce time to market
Frameworx allows you to identify and capture new
opportunities helping you to rapidly deploy services
through streamlined, end-to-end service management
Reduce operating costs
Frameworx reduces operating costs by enabling highly
efcient and automated operations with a proven suite of
industry standards
Reduce integration costs
Frameworx reduces the cost, risk and complexity of
integration by providing standardized interfaces and a
common information model
Reduce transformation risk
Frameworx reduces the risks associated with
transformation and change programs by delivering a
proven blueprint for your business
Gain independence
Frameworx gives you greater independence and
condence in your procurement choices through
procurement guides and conformance certication
Gain clarity
Frameworx brings clarity to procurement and
implementation of complex systems by providing a
common, industry standardized language
Build essential partnerships
Frameworx enables you to build effective partnerships
quickly and easily, by providing a common language for
your business and integrated systems.
Turning chaos into harmony
generates a billion dollars
Summary: China Unicom is the countrys second largest mobile network operator with more than 160 million
subscribers, as of August 2010. Before the Unied Voucher and Top-up Management Network Solution
project, China Unicom had 55 different interactive voice response lines, 120 accounts receivable systems, and
200 different kinds of vouchers for topping up service accounts across the mainland. In addition, operations
in each region were unique for different user types and services (wireless, wireline and broadband). To
streamline the service operations from end-to-end, the operator developed the Unied Recharging Service
Network, using TM Forums Frameworx, to integrate these disparate channels and provide a consistent user
experience. Using Frameworx cut two months off the design phase of the project, which spanned over 268
BSS/OSS systems. The service has achieved 99.9 percent service availability and gained around a billion
dollars a year in new revenues and cost savings.
China Unicom needed to streamline its various service top-up
operations and offer a consistent, simple customer experience.
Before starting its Unied Recharging Service Network project,
there were 55 separate interactive voice response (IVR) service
numbers for customers to call, 120 accounts receivable (AR)
systems and 200 different types of recharging voucher cards in
use across the mainland.
The recharging processes themselves varied widely across
China Unicoms 31 provincial subsidiaries: Operations in each
region were unique for different user types and services
(wireless, wireline and broadband).
This situation caused all sorts of problems for the service
provider and customers alike. For instance, there was no
single voucher that could be used by a customer to recharge
all the services on offer and customers who used services in
one province couldnt top up their accounts while in another.
Nor was there a unied portal for recharging through multiple
channels, such as SMS, online, and IVR.
As Haoyang Lu, Planning Division, Information Department,
China Unicom comments, The projects goal was to turn this
situation from chaos into harmony.
He notes, It was a very big challenge to provide a
consistent recharging service for customers and different
service accounts across the country, requiring the integration
of multiple, distributed, province-centric systems. With so
very many systems involved, it was a huge task to streamline
all operations from end-to-end, and in particular revenue
management was a difcult but crucial area.
First such support system in China
Indeed, such was the complexity and scale of the project, its
no surprise that the Unied Voucher and Top-Up Management
Network Solution is the rst such service support system
implemented in China. It unied the management of customer
interfaces nationwide, across multiple access channels
including the web, WAP, SMS and IVR portals. It also
standardized the operators business processes across the
country to provide customers with a consistent recharging
experience.
China Unicom chose to use TM Forums Frameworx to make
the huge integration project easier and quicker, and to lay the
foundations for future developments. Processes from the
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CASE STUDY
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Business Process Framework (eTOM) were used to dene the
unied recharging processes and to resolve process design
issues, mainly in the domain of the fulllment assurance and
billing (FAB) process blocks that is, customer interaction,
billing and revenue management.
The architecture design was based on the Information
Framework (SID), which was also used to resolve system data
model inconsistencies, especially for designing the core parts
of the recharging and account model. China Unicom took future
developments into account with its design, thinking ahead to
other possible transformational projects and trends.
The Application Framework (TAM) acted as a reference to
identify and dene the scope of the technical solution; that
is the integration relationship and the system processes,
and interfaces between the customer interface, customer
relationship management (CRM), billing and AR system. The
Application Framework also dened system requirements and
corporate system specications.
Service contracts
China Unicom used the concept of service contracts, derived
from the Forums Integration Framework, to dene in detail
the services passing through the exposed interfaces and to
streamline process interactions and monitoring.
It also used Frameworxs methodology of service denition
and the service oriented architecture (SOA) governance to help
with the design of an holistic SOA-style architecture for the
integration of multi-system networking.
The use of the service contracts concepts and the
methodology derived from Frameworx and the Integration
Framework cut the design time by two months, resolving
holistic architectural issues and the processes and service
denition. From this, China Unicom developed a distinct
heart-beating mechanism that spans more than 268 BSS/
OSS systems that also draws on the Forums service level
agreement management and SOA governance. It is designed
to guarantee the end-to-end service quality an average of
99 percent service availability by dening and monitoring
distributed key performance indicators.
The heart-beating mechanism collects self-status information
from management module deployed in the recharging network
nodes in the 31 modules. It also collects status information
about the local BSS/OSS systems in each province by initiating
simple service transactions.
The central management system deployed collects
relevant information of each provincial node through periodic
management messages over HTTP protocol. Meanwhile, the
central system broadcasts the status information about the
provinces to each province. The communications within the
network of distributed BSS systems is organized as a set of
short connections, with a lot of built-in redundancy; that is
information is not lost if a single built-in link goes down.
China Unicom set up a star-like BSS network, linking multiple
distributed BSS/OSS application systems (such as portals,
CRM, business intelligence, settlements and intelligent
network elements) across the whole country.
This BSS-oriented networking infrastructure improves
the agility of ITs support capability greatly, acting as the
foundation for nationwide process orchestration and better
business support. The core part of this solution is a centralized
consolidation plane (centralized transaction switch) for service
and data switching, and routing. It is the primary application
infrastructure for the integration architecture in the future.
Haoyang Lu says, With the help of TMF Frameworx
standards and best practices as references, we achieved
our project goal within a short time. Most importantly, all the
project team could refer to a common methodology and unify
thinking through the project lifecycle by referring to Integration
Framework model, which is more relevant to the BSS domain
of service providers rather than the general IT technical
domain.
The project was implemented successfully and by the end of
June 2009, the daily peak workload on the centralized switch
was 1.25 million transactions, with an average response delay
within the recharging network of 400 ms. At the time of China
Unicoms submission to the TM Forum Excellence Awards
2010, the operation had been up and running for over 7,000
hours without any faults.
Roaming rewards
Customers now have a consistent and convenient way to
recharge their own or others' service accounts and can pay as
they go while roaming in other provinces. The current monthly
recharge value passing through the system is around 1.2 billion
Yuan ($180 million).
In summer 2010, roaming recharge accounted for 35 percent
of that total with around 45 million people using the roaming
recharging service. China Unicom expects this to rise to 420
million Yuan a month, making an annual total of 5.04 billion
Yuan ($758 million) revenue that it missed out on before due to
the lack of support for roaming.
Costs slashed
Previously, the level of voucher commission was diverse
and too high in some provinces, resulting in the average
commission being 3 percent of the value of the voucher. By
introducing the One Voucher card the average commission
is 2 percent. As sales of the cards run at some 25 million
per month, annual sales are around 300 million and so the
commission saved is 300 million Yuan ($45 million) annually.
Other savings have resulted from the One Voucher card too
the cost of producing the vouchers has fallen, due to the mass
manufacture of one type of card, and costs have also fallen due
to implementing a centralized operational model. China Unicom
is producing around 480 million cards annually with a direct cost
saving estimated at 1.8 billion Yuan ($270 million).
The new, easy to use service was promoted by TV ads
starting in December 2008. From the start, customers were
keen to use it. The average number of recharging transactions
increased by 50 percent. For instance, in Hong Kong, the
service became the primary way of topping up accounts soon
after its commercial opening on April 1, 2009, with 40,524
transaction there that month, with a value amounting to 4.3
million Yuan. Within another month, this had risen to 170
million Yuan.
China Unicom is beneting from being able to manage
its business more effectively as a result of the project as all
the data concerning the status of the recharging vouchers is
collectedly centrally, quickly and accurately. Now the operator
has up-to-date information about the cards, nationwide, as
needed, and also controls the overall commission rate of
voucher brokerage dynamically, which was unimaginable in
the past.
Plans for the future
China Unicom plans to track developments in TM Forums
Frameworx and other projects relevant to SOA to enhance
its overall BSS infrastructure. It also plans to improve its SOA
architecture and governance, partly to make it more exible
and easier to add other BSS service processes to, and partly to
improve the operational stability of its IT infrastructure.
The most recent stage of the project has already brought
more features of SOA architecture into the network hub,
including more SOA functionalities, such as service publishing,
service proxying, service invoking, service management,
service assembling and orchestration. These new features
make the network more aligned with SOA principles and enable
the centralized management to carry out service lifecycle
management across the whole network. Also, more IT systems
services are being deployed on the distributed BSS network.
Perhaps most excitingly of all, China Unicoms plans to
integrate the recharging network with more service portals and
turn it into a centralized payment hub are progressing rapidly.
The unied recharging system has linked into China UnionPays
member banks network and the centrally-deployed Portal
of China Unicom. Haoyang Lu says, We will hook up later
with our mobile micropayment system and other value-added
service platforms to broaden the scope of its applications. TM
Forums Frameworx and best practices provide us with good
references on which to base technical decisions.
"Perhaps most excitingly of all, China Unicom's plans
to integrate the recharging network with more portals
and turn it into a centralized payment hub
are progressing rapidly."
10 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Revenue assurance program aims
to deliver $105 million annually to
the bottom line
Summary: The Qtel Group has grown rapidly from a single country operator with 500,000 customers in 2005
to a global player having presence in 17 markets in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia with
a customer base of 69 million today. Key markets include Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia and
Indonesia, through companies operating GSM networks and WiMax infrastructures. The operations in the
different markets are very diverse in terms of maturity. For instance, Indosat in Indonesia is more than 40
years old while the operation in Palestine was launched in 2009. Qtel International is the centralized managed
services arm, charged with increasing shareholder value across the Qtel Group from driving synergies,
standardization, and the use of best practices. Lee Scargall, Group director of enterprise risk management,
Qtel International, turned to TM Forums Revenue Assurance Maturity Model as the basis for a three year
program, starting in 2010, to add $105 million annually to the bottom line by 2012.
Lee Scargall joined Qtel International, at the end of 2008, to
work at the head ofce in Qatar. His role is to drive and exploit
synergies across the diverse operations, an important part of
which is standardizing toolsets and processes. He says, I
went straightaway to TM Forums Revenue Assurance Maturity
Model, which is part of the Forums Business Benchmarking
program (see page 13). Scargall had taken part in benchmarking
studies before when working for a previous employer and
understood the benets it can deliver.
He explains, It is something we needed to do as a Group
because some companies were mature in terms of their revenue
assurance capabilities and some were not. In 2009 we started a
maturity assessment across the Group to help us identify gaps
and weaknesses to gure out what steps we needed to take in
terms of improving our people, tools, processes, organization
and inuence (see Figure 1 on page 11).
It quickly became apparent there were no standard toolsets
across the Group, processes were inconsistent, and controls
inadequate. Scargall says, Some of our companies were very good
at revenue assurance and had toolsets and robust processes, while
others had no revenue assurance measures in place.
Having carried out the assessment, Scargall proposed a three
year program to move everyone up to Level 4 of the Maturity
Model, which, he explained, would deliver more than $105
million annually straight to earnings, before interest, taxes,
depreciation and amortization. The Qtel board agreed to the
proposal and provided the funding to roll out the program,
although it is completely self-sustaining.
Typically, Qtel International pays for a short term pilot for an
operating company to showcase the benets of using specialist
toolsets, then the operating company decides whether to
enter into a commercial arrangement with the supplier. Scargall
explains, The whole thing is part funded centrally, and part
funded locally to ensure ownership remains at the operating
company going forwards after a trial.
We set each operating company a target to detect and
recover leakage that is linked to the TM Forums Maturity
Model assessment; so if a company is at Level 1, then we
expect a 1 percent detection rate, if at Level 2, then a 1.5
percent detection rate and so on.
Every operating company submits a monthly report about
how much leakage was detected and recovered, and to which
leakage point, as described in the GB941-Annex D guidebook:
more than 100 leakage points have been identied by TM Forum,
so each incident is logged against one of the categories.
Scargall says, We look at all the incident information from all
the operating companies, we track it, check whether incidents
are open or closed, how much revenue is at risk, what the
recovery rate is, and so on. In other words, head ofce tracks
all the incidents relating to revenue leakage across the Group,
and can help the operating companies to manage them by
providing advice and assistance.
David Stuart, assistant director of revenue assurance and
fraud management, Qtel, adds, This holistic approach at the
head ofce allows us to identify those leakages that would
impact more than one operating company. For instance, if
one operating company reports a systemic leakage and we
have the same system in ve other operating companies, we
will distribute the incident information to the others to ensure
closure across the Group.
Qtel International acts on each of the ve aspects identied
by the Forums Revenue Assurance Maturity Model (for more
detailed information, see our Business Intelligence Quarterly
report on Revenue Assurance, published in November 2010,
which is free to members from our website.
Scargall says, On the tools side, we have a signed two
frame agreement to standardize the reconciliation software
suppliers across the entire Group. We like a dual supplier
approach to toolsets because it ensures there is always
competition on price, and the operating companies have a
choice of option A or option B which strengthens buy-in at the
local level. They feel more part of the procurement process
rather than having a single supplier imposed upon them.
Concerning our people, we have established a training academy
in Doha, Qatar, that educates our staff in revenue assurance
using the TM Forums training program for which we receive Forum
accreditation. Our aim is to see all of our staff becomes accredited.
We also provide best practice guidance across the Group, and
weve implemented a wiki where staff can exchange information
and ideas. In addition, we have also enabled tweet alerts, and online
chat capability so we can share information across the Group in
real-time. This is particularly important when we are dealing with
Figure 1: Likelihood to impact the bottom line
RA people
RA organization
RA inuence
RA process
RA tools
Overall
RA maturity
0 20 40 60 80 100
69%
69%
72%
81%
81%
81%
Source: TM Forum
"We have established a training academy in Doha,
Qatar, that educates our staff in revenue assurance
using the TM Forums training program for which we
receive Forum accreditation. Our aim is to see all of
our staff becomes accredited. We also provide best
practice guidance across the Group."
12 www.tmforum.org
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
fraud, so having the ability to share vital information quickly can
be critical in preventing leakage.
He continues, The more you know about fraudsters activities
across different territories, the stronger the position you are in to
counter them. Developing a Group mentality is very important,
people need to feel they are part of one team all moving in the
same direction, and we want to embed this in our culture.
Scargall is encouraging competition among the operating
companies by setting up a league table around revenue
assurance targets. At the same time, he fosters a sense of
community, in part by holding Group revenue assurance forums
for some 30 people in total, sharing information benets
everyone around the Group, he states.
The heads of revenue assurance are the greatest inuence and
we all meet twice a year in a different location. We discuss the hot
issues and how best to work together. Between the meetings,
we have regular phone calls and on-site, follow-up visits.
We also work to raise the prole of RA with the local
management teams to gain recognition and support for what
we do: we need the CFOs, CTOs, and CIOs to all work together
to realize the potential benets of a successful RA program
across the Group.
The Qtel Group is making excellent progress towards its
goals. Scargall says, We are exceeding our targets in terms
of revenue recovery, with over $50 million being added to the
bottom line in the rst year of our three year program.
There is no complacency however. Scargall acknowledges
there is much more hard work left to do. We are making
good progress and report back to the steering committee each
month. This is a big program and theres signicant nancial
benet for the Group. The operating companies appreciate the
leadership and co-ordination from head-ofce, he says.
He continues, We are also trying to standardize our
processes, establish centres of excellence across the Group,
and take the experiences of what is being done well and apply
it elsewhere. We have a range of operating companies that are
at Level 1 and 2, and the only way were going to get everyone
to Level 4 is by being more proactive.
Since embarking on the program in 2010, there has been
a noticeable improvement to all ve aspects of the Maturity
Model, with the operating companies beginning to rise to Level
3. As Scargall concludes, Reaching Level 4 across them all is
the goal for the next two years.
We are exceeding our targets in terms of revenue
recovery, with over $50 million being added to the
bottom line in the rst year of our three year program."
TM Forum Revenue Assurance Maturity Model
The Revenue Assurance Maturity Model is part of the Forums Revenue Assurance Solution Suite
(see http://www.tmforum.org/KnowledgeDownloadDetail/9285/home.html?artf=artf1442).
The Model (also known as GB941-B) offers a best practice approach. It provides a standardized way of
establishing how well developed the aspects of the revenue assurance (RA) are within an organization. It
enables service providers to identify weaknesses and standardize processes to maximize efciency while
keeping costs down.
Five distinct aspects have been identied to help understand how RA matures (see Figure 2). How
advanced each aspect is determined using detailed questionnaires. The Forum conducts the Revenue
Assurance Performance study in addition to the Revenue Assurance Maturity Model for organizations
whose maturity is more advanced.
1. Ad-hoc, chaotic. Dependant on individual heroics.
2. Basic project/process management. Repeatable tasks.
3. Standardized approach developed. Designing-in control commences.
4. Leakage quantitatively understood and controlled.
5. Continuous improvement via feedback. Decentralized ownership, holistic control.
Figure 3: The phases of revenue assurance maturity
1. Initial
2. Repeatable
3. Dened
4. Managed
5. Optimizing
Organization People Inuence Tools Process
The organization of
RA responsibilities
reects how well
aligned the objectives
of individuals and
the business are
to the goals of RA.
Organizational t
reects the business
culture and how
well it is suited
to adopting RA
objectives.
The maturity of RA
can in part be gauged
from the human
resource dedicated
to it or providing
secondary support.
Instigating, managing
and delivering
change is a sign of
maturity. Inuential
RA delivers nancial
rewards to the
business and is
a mechanism to
continuously improve
its performance.
The use of tools
is one of the most
tangible guides to RA
maturity, depending
on how well the
tools are designed
and used, and the
synergy between
them. Their most
effective use meets
multiple business
objectives.
RA is a high level
process, containing
many detailed
processes, that
should be improved
constantly.
In addition, the Model has ve levels of RA maturity, as shown in Figure 3, to help a company establish
where it is and where it needs to go to improve constantly.
Figure 2: The ve aspects of revenue assurance maturity
Source: TM Forum
Source: TM Forum
14 www.tmforum.org
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Taking a customer-centric
approach to strategic goals
Summary: A conversation with the CTO of a large European service provider changed Mohammed
Al-Hakbanis approach to Saudi Telecoms back ofce systems, from viewing them as a cost center to
seeing them as the key to achieving strategic goals. By using TM Forum standards, benchmarking metrics
and best practices, his companys transformation project demonstrated their benets in only 16 weeks.
As he says, One of the most impressive aspects of this project is that, with the support of TM Forum,
we were able to determine which transformations were low hanging fruit projects whose benets
would subsidize follow-on work so that early projects could become self-sustaining.
Leading the investigation into the value of TM Forums
Frameworx for his company Riyadh-based Saudi Telecom
Company (STC), the largest telecom company in the Middle
East Mohammed Al-Hakbani, Operation Support System
(OSS) Director within the Network Sector, recalls a particularly
important day. We had been introduced to the CTO of a large
European telecom provider, and he explained to us the strategic
importance of OSS/BSS systems to his company indeed OSS/
BSS transformation was central to his companys shift from a
technology-centric to a customer-centric organization. Now, I
had been thinking of OSS/BSS as a cost center, not so much
as a way to help us realize our strategic goals. So this meeting
became a turning point that has since guided the Company
towards signicant benet.
STC was privatized years earlier, in 1998, marking the
beginning of a period of signicant company transformation
that has included organizational change, strategic investments
outside the Kingdom, and technology and infrastructure
investments in all aspects of the business. Like most telecoms
operators worldwide, the move to a customer-centric focus
required changes not only to technology, but also to software,
culture, and processes. With the help of TM Forum, the
company is now able to adapt industry best practices to its
own unique needs; driving improvements in several customer-
experience related key performance indicators (KPIs), as well as
reducing implementation time for complex new initiatives.
Al-Hakbani, who was the program manager for the companys
OSS transition, relied heavily on TM Forum. The Forum gave
us access to the experience of hundreds of service providers,
providing best practices, benchmarking data, and specic
standards and data models that helped us to coordinate both
technical and process transitions.
For example, explains Al-Hakbani, STC chose to introduce
a new Fiber to the Home (FTTH) product line. As part of the
design of new systems to support FTTH, STC was faced with
an important choice regarding how to orchestrate the various
systems that needed to be coordinated when provisioning
new FTTH service. STCs options were to use orchestration
functionality inside its own inventory system as had been
done previously for its DSL service or to spend the time and
effort creating dedicated, centralized orchestration functionality.
Reducing risk, making informed decisions
In retrospect, it is very clear that our choice to orchestrate our
process ows through a central information bus was the right
choice, recollects Al-Hakbani. But at the time, the benet
was not so clear. The initial project was more expensive, and
required changes to systems that had worked for years.
He adds, TM Forum benchmarking data and Frameworx
best practices were critical in helping us make the right
decision. They helped us and our executive management to
understand the substantial downstream capital and operational
benets that will be driven by this investment, as well as the
less tangible benets to STCs customers experience.
Another example is STCs trouble management process,
also enhanced through the companys membership of
TM Forum. Increasing customer satisfaction by resolving
trouble tickets ahead of time resulted in saving cost and
improving STCs brand perception. STC used the Frameworx
trouble management process to identify opportunities for
improvement, and then to demonstrate the potential benets of
the improvements to managers responsible for implementing
trouble ticketing processes.
A nal example is STCs performance assurance management
process, which also gained through the companys membership
of TM Forum. With the introduction of a complex service such
as IPTV, where customer experience was essential in reaching
and maintaining the companys customer satisfaction goals,
STC used the TM Frameworx trouble and performance process.
Frameworx and best practices
Al-Hakbani explains that his company values hard numbers that
quantify business benet: We are very pleased to have been
awarded the TM Forums prestigious Operational Excellence
Award in 2010 for a transformation project that demonstrated
benet in only 16 weeks. In this project, STC worked with
IBM, and began with an assessment of current processes,
applications, and architecture against TM Forum Business
Process Framework (eTOM). One of the most impressive
aspects of this project is that, with the support of TM Forum,
we were able to determine which transformations were low
hanging fruit: projects whose benets would subsidize
follow-on work, so that its early projects could become
self-sustaining.
STCs transformation team mapped all OSS processes to the
eTOM model, in Level 3 as well as some in Level 4 and 5. As
part of this project, STC also used the Information Framework
(SID) for data integration. Internally, all vendor proprietary
interfaces are mapped to the Information Framework. In
addition, STC is pushing its vendor partners to be compliant
with the Information Framework. STC uses TM Forums
Integration Framework (MTOSI and OSS/J) for inter-working
between different vendors, technologies, and systems in its
service assurance implementation. STC is also collaborating
with other vendors that comply with TM Forum Integration
Framework and its interface standards.
In addition to adopting Frameworx, STC is now involved
in the TM Forum Benchmarking Program. Our use of the
Forums benchmarking data is particularly important at STC,
explains Al-Hakbani, who now tracks several benchmarking
KPIs including: mean duration to fulll service orders,
percentage of orders delivered by committed date, mean
duration to x customer reported troubles, fulllment process
cost as a percentage of operating expenditure (OpEx), and
assurance process cost as a percentage OpEx. By tracking
these numbers and using them in its decision-making, STC is
able to become a more rigorously managed organization.
Results Summary
In summary, STC has realized a number of benets from
Frameworx and the companys TM Forum membership.
They are:
n saving signicant potential downstream costs through
understanding, and then implementing, TM Forum
Frameworx architectural best practices including Information
Framework (SID) and TM Forum interfaces (such as MTOSI,
and OSS/J);
n cultural and process change management support;
n support in identifying low-hanging fruit transformation;
projects, which produced the maximum value in the shortest
amount of time, thereby optimizing cash ow;
n identication of which KPIs, of the many thousands that it
could have tracked, were the most valuable in converting to a
customer-focused business.
Future
As the benets of TM Forum-inspired initiatives continue to
be measured, STC will use them to justify further investments
that incorporate Frameworx best practices, standards, and
benchmarking information. Al-Hakbani explains that working
with the TM Forum is critical to our ability to cost-justify
ongoing investments in industry best practices. As our
thinking about the strategic nature of OSS/BSS investment
matures, understanding other service providers experiences in
recouping the cost of these projects many times over is very
important to us, because it will make the benets of this work
very clear to our executive sponsors.
Look to STC to leverage its excellent technical staff as well
as the passion of its OSS/BSS leadership to continue to push
new boundaries. Particular initiatives will include an increasing
use of software services, and continued development of its
business process management infrastructure.
16 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Simpler IT speeds
up new service provision,
drives take-up
Summary: Mobitel, Slovenias biggest wireless communications service provider, operates in challenging
conditions. It is facing increasing competition, is heavily regulated and must comply with complex
governmental processes before it can provide customers with new products and services. In addition,
Mobitels OSS/BSS applications were developed in silos and it relied heavily on manual processes.
Nevertheless, it has transformed itself, now delivering unique and customized products and services
to the market, and will do so even more as it merges with its parent company, the incumbent xed
communications services provider, Telekom Slovenije (see page 26). For example, it will begin to offer
combined xed and mobile bundles starting July 2011. Little wonder Mobitel decided to adopt a service
oriented architecture along with TM Forums Frameworx and streamline its IT and application infrastructure.
It worked closely with IBM to gain greater operational exibility, business agility, and the ability to respond
to customers more rapidly. Mobitel reaped benets almost immediately.
Mobitel was established in 1991 and is the biggest provider of
mobile communications in Slovenia. Mobitel is part of Telekom
Slovenije, which has some 3 million subscribers across ve
countries. Mobitel itself has about 1.5 million subscribers, but
what it lacks in size, it makes up for in innovation. Arguably, it
leads the worlds service providers in many application areas.
The telecoms market in Slovenia started out as a heavily
regulated industry. Mobitel, under its parent company Telekom
Slovenije, was the original mobile service provider in Slovenia.
At the end of 2003, Mobitel had approximately a 73 percent
market share, and competed against three other providers.
As Mobitel faced increasing competition, the company
realized it must reduce costs and streamline its processes to
enable it to react to competitive threats quickly. It needed to be
able to launch new products and services in days, not weeks or
months. The executives at Mobitel decided the best approach
was to implement industry standards and service oriented
architecture (SOA) principles and TM Forums Frameworx is
an enabler of SOA.
Mobitel has now automated and manages its complex
processes, SOA-based integration to various systems, and
OSS/BSS applications after adopting a business process
management platform (IBMs Dynamic BPM), combined
with IBM WebSphere Telecom Content Pack (WTCP).
WTCP provides prebuilt accelerators aligned to TM Forums
Frameworx, and an SOA-based approach to accelerate its
time to market and optimize the business costs involved in
generating new products.
Botjan Robenik, IT director, Mobitel, led the push to
implement an SOA. He says, I approached Mobitels
executives with the idea that SOA is a clear must for the
future. You have to have an SOA to enjoy a clean IT structure.
SOA enables us to orchestrate the entire IT landscape and all
its applications using a single business support system. It was
only after we had obtained funding and implemented the SOA
technology that we began to realize the potential for business
optimization.
Mitja Stular, CTO, Mobitel, agrees with Robenik: SOA
increases our efciency. It brings a kind of organized distributed
modularity into our network. Previously, we had many, many
modules which were programmed in Java and C++.
The new approaches are already proving benecial, as
Mobitel is merging with its parent company Telekom Slovenije,
which provides xed line services in Slovenia, and starting in
July 2011, will offer xed and mobile service bundles. To do
that and offer new and innovative services and other bundles,
the merged entity will rely on the new products and concepts
enabled by the transformed order management process.
As Klavdij Godni, CEO, Mobitel states, We implement the
services of the future today, bringing the convergence of voice,
data, Internet, video, television, advertising, local services and
social networks. We achieve this by integrating with many
established technologies, products and service suppliers in the
industry.
Selection process
Mobitels primary reason for adopting a BPM and SOA approach
was to separate business processes from the business
applications so that business agility could be improved. TM
Forums Frameworx was adopted as the basis to provide a
standards-based implementation model based on SOA and
telecom industry standards, enabling Mobitel to reduce the risk
of a vendor-specic implementation model.
Mobitel then prioritized the business processes that needed
to be transformed, focusing on the those that were most
important to meeting its core business objectives. SOA maps
IT services to business goals to help rationalize and optimize
business processes by identifying and minimizing redundant
or inefcient tasks. It also reduces operating costs, which in
tough economic times is very important. With the promise
of business optimization and the cost reductions it brings,
Robenik obtained buy-in from Mobitels business units.
One of the rst aspects of its business that Mobitel chose to
transform was order management, specically customer order
handling. Right from the start, Mobitel was committed to using
TM Forums Frameworx in its IT transformation program and
chose IBM as a partner to convert its existing infrastructure
using its Smart SOA approach.
Tangible benets
The IBM WTCP provides prebuilt process models, business
services, messaging schemas and other content based on TM
Forums Frameworx, and supports the WebSphere Dynamic
BPM platform. By adopting this Frameworx-based approach,
Mobitel has enjoyed the following benets:
n 40 percent less expenditure on professional services;
n 80 percent saved through the reuse of artifacts;
n 45 percent shorter delivery cycle for the ongoing
maintenance and new releases of processes;
n 40 percent reduced total cost of ownership.
Mobitel began work on the customer order management
function after a business value assessment was completed
in collaboration with a team of business and technical experts
from IBM.
Klemen Dragar, IBM client executive, says, We created this
assessment with staff from Mobitel working alongside our
telecom industry experts to draw up a transformation roadmap.
We needed to understand what Mobitel wanted to accomplish
as a business and how quickly they needed to achieve their
goals.
We helped them assess the costs and lead times
required for process transformation using their existing
systems and compared that cost to using a SOA approach
using IBMs Dynamic BPM capabilities and our accelerators
for implementing Frameworx process models, data models,
application maps and a technology neutral architecture. It was
clear SOA would create big nancial benets and we would be
able to measure the benets to Mobitel.
Tackling the rst process
Customer order management at Mobitel was a heavily manual
process, which took a long time to complete and was prone
to errors. In addition, Mobitel is obligated by law to provide
a contract with the consumer, veried by a signature, before
18 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
provisioning or placing an order for any service.
In the past, this manual process meant that the store keeper
had to call the credit card company to verify that the person
was who they claimed to be, then the signature had to be
sent to Mobitels back ofce to be scanned and fed into the
document management system. From there the customer
information was manually entered into the order management
system.
In addition to verifying the signature, the would-be
customers physical address had to be already listed in the
governments database. Not surprisingly, on average, it took
up to 45 hours for a customer to register for and receive a new
service.
Electronic signatures
Now, after streamlining the order management process, the
customer signs their name electronically on the new point
of sale terminals (which have electronic forms built in that
are lled in on screen) and provides all the other necessary
information on the spot. This information is sent straight to
Mobitels back ofce with all the credit details.
IBMs WTCP helped accelerate implementing this new
process, by providing out-of-the-box SOA-based business
services that are mapped to the Forums Application
Framework (TAM) to abstract the functions exposed by the
OSS/BSS systems. It also provides the business service
interfaces from the Information Framework (SID) used by
business data objects, and the business processes based on
the Business Process Framework (eTOM).
The Information Framework was used to describe the
process by which the electronic form and signature were sent
to the order management system. It was implemented by
integrating the existing order management system, Mobile
Mercury, with the WebSphere BPM platform, using the same
processes. Mercury allocated tasks to the back ofce staff,
and then measured how long the process took. Every task was
created in the business process management platform, and
monitored and measured.
The whole business process is driven by a series of screens
so that when all the manual steps are completed, the order
handling process then invokes various technical processes.
These are exposed as business services in the service
management and resource management layers, and had been
deployed previously.
The Information Framework-based order process still requires
some manual intervention for exceptions, but getting the right
tasks to the right people has reduced the cycle time, as proven
by the measuring and monitoring key performance indicators
that are used iteratively to rene the process using the BPM
platform.
Once Mobitel is comfortable with the initial deployment, the
system will move to a higher level of automation. Approaching
the project incrementally ensured continuity and helped staff
develop their skills on the new tools. It also helped the team
identify gaps in the process, enabling process re-engineering to
meet the demands of the local situation.
The screens used by the back ofce staff are all wizard-
based, making for a better customer buying experience in
terms of consistency, and ensuring that Mobitel complies with
government rules related to pricing and discounts.
Sustaining the change
Now, through a BPM and SOA competency center, Mobitel
develops new business services that encapsulate the
integration functions out of the OSS/BSS applications once and
reuses them many times as developers access the services
they need. The center has a big impact on the deployment
of new processes and their upgrades, on the initial phases
of modeling and service naming, and the use of appropriate
standards.
Robenik says, By using the IBM WebSphere Business
Modeler, the business people have a way of communicating
with IT, providing ideas about what the business processes
should look like. Our business people used the IBM
WebSphere Business Monitor to measure our human tasks
and our different key performance indicators. This bidirectional
communication between IT and the business units gives us
more agility in the market and helps us lower costs.
Migration of services to the WebSphere platform has
reduced the number of servers and operating costs. We also
can introduce new services faster such as a self-service
portal, and a new billing and CRM application, so were
providing better support to our customers, who are happier as
a result.
Swami Chandrasekaran, Chief Architect, IBM Industry
Solutions Services, adds, The Frameworx standards
including the Application, Information and Business Process
Frameworks, and the WebSphere Telecom Content Pack were
key enablers for Mobitel. These elements combined helped
create the big picture, the vision, and allowed everyone to
visualize the consolidated OSS/BSS target architecture, where
we were going, to get their minds around it.
A lot of education was involved we built dedicated teams
to work on the enterprise business architecture, all using
standard interfaces and information models. WebSphere
Telecom Content Pack is aligned with the Information, Business
Process and Applications Frameworks, which enabled the
Mobitel team to accelerate the deployment of the automated
order management solution.
The future is exciting for Mobitel, as it prepares to merge
with parent company Telekom Slovenije, and offer combined
xed and mobile bundles and yet-to-be-created product and
service offerings. To do this, staff will use the standards-based
processes and concepts that enabled it to transform the order
management system to improve customer service and speed
up order delivery times.
Robenik concludes, Adopting the industry standards means
using the best practices from around the globe, which help
us run optimally. Also, Telekom Slovenije owns other mobile
operators that can now easily adopt our solution because it is
based on industry standards. This means our knowledge can be
leveraged for additional benets.
"Telekom Slovenije owns other mobile operators that
can now easily adopt our solution because it is based
on industry standards. This means our knowledge can
be leveraged for additional benets.
20 www.tmforum.org
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CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Advances in the communications industry such as innovative
business models, expanded value chains, converged services,
and complex new technologies constantly challenge a
service providers ability to offer a high level of customer
experience and efcient operations. Don Toland, director of
program operations for Qwest Communications, knows those
challenges well.
We see products not just converged from within the
telecom industry, but we also see them coming from outside
the traditional telecom space, cloud services being a perfect
example. In years past, the cloud was viewed as an IT
service, however now its seen as an extension of our hosting
operations. To support new services such as cloud, Qwest
realized we needed a service delivery solution that would
consistently federate our network and software services into a
common platform and optimize service delivery.
To reduce investment risk by assuring business goals
were achievable prior to committing funds to a full-scale
implementation, Qwest turned to TM Forums industry-proven
Frameworx standard as it planned and implemented its new
service delivery platform. Qwest used the service layer of
the Business Process Framework (eTOM) to model proposed
telecom and cloud services, and Information Framework (SID)
to rationalize product and service denitions. TM Forums
Service Delivery Framework was used to address service
lifecycle requirements.
In addition, Qwest and its business partners prototyped
and demonstrated their proposed solutions using the TM
Forum Catalyst Program a collaborative approach to solving
critical industry challenges. The Catalyst process not only
demonstrated feasibility, but also conrmed compatibility
across Qwests business partners.
Qwest cuts operational costs,
gets products out there faster
Summary: Qwest wanted to transform its service delivery to shorten the time-to-market for new products,
including cloud services, reduce its operating costs, and have visibility and traceability from products to services
to resources. It was also determined to reduce individual service component redundancy and enforce Qwests
high standards for the overall customer experience. To reduce investment risk and prove the viability of what it
wanted to achieve, the operator and its partners turned to TM Forums Frameworx and Catalyst Program before
it embarked on the transformation. Within a year of the deployment Qwest saw a 4 percent increase in revenue,
a 5 percent cost reduction, a 25 percent improvement in new product deployment cycle times, and a decrease
in unique provisioning and assurance job steps.
Reducing risk
To transform service lifecycle and service delivery
methodologies to meet rapidly changing industry and business
pressures, Qwest needed to:
n streamline service delivery processes;
n speed concept-to-cash cycle times;
n create visibility and traceability from products to services to
resources;
n reduce individual service component redundancy;
n deliver best-in-class service levels.
Following Frameworx best practices and standards, Qwest
implemented the following solutions to meet its service
delivery transformation goals:
n order management: automated sales order entry and order
status visibility; centralized service and product
specications; conguration tools; consistent product and
service orders; accurate quotes;
n product information manager: product lifecycle management
and workow; rationalized product and service denitions;
real-time product denition simulation and validation;
n active service catalog: logical integration of product and
service layers; model resources and services; drive
provisioning workow automation and inventory; rapid
update of product offerings.
Toland recounts the successful adoption of Frameworx,
saying, Qwest rst needed to ensure our approach for
addressing operational and service challenges was headed
in the right direction. To start, we presented our concepts
to the TM Forum Community via a Catalyst proposal. After
a critical review of TM Forum Frameworx standards and
extensive participation in the feedback forums with vendors,
we prototyped and demonstrated our solution Service Model
Catalyst: Enabling the Cloud Services Supply Chain at the
Management World event in Nice.
The Forum offers an unparalleled venue for establishing
standards, for testing proposals in a Catalyst, and for
demonstrating the real solution in a business environment.
Using this process, Qwest condently justied its anticipated
return on investment, and was able to accurately break down
and verify the operational expenses of each anticipated service
deployment.
Toland stresses the critical importance of TM Forums role
in its service delivery transformation: The Forum helped us
establish a strong direction. We adopted Frameworx best
practices and standards, tested our proposal in a Catalyst,
demonstrated practicality, justied ROI, and moved forward
with an implementation. TM Forum was essential at every
step along the way.
As Toland notes, TM Forum excels at bringing the right
people together to actively debate and develop ideas, giving
you practical advice on your direction before you invest.
The results
Qwests approach to participate in and contribute to the TM
Forum Community led to a deployed service delivery platform
that exceeded expectations, with both quantiable and
repeatable results.
Toland conrms, Frameworx absolutely enabled us to
shorten product denition, deployment, and assurance times,
improve our cycle times and operational environment, as well
as decrease provisioning time. The result was faster delivery
of consistent, reliable, and competitively priced services
the real measure of our success with excellent customer
experience.
Qwest believes TM Forum Frameworx Business Process
Framework (eTOM), Information Framework (SID), and Service
Delivery Framework are exactly what it needs to achieve
practical application and fast return on investment.
Within the rst year, Qwest used Frameworx in conjunction
with its own proprietary methods to realize a 4 percent
revenue increase, 5 percent cost reduction, 25 percent cycle
time improvement for new product deployment, and an overall
decrease in unique provisioning and assurance job steps.
Toland stresses the real value of TM Forum is when a
company participates in all aspects of the Forum, building
strategic partnerships through the TM Forum relationships.
One of the benets of the Frameworx community is working
hand-in-hand with vendors.
Evaluating vendor technology and service provider ideas in
a Catalyst Project is extremely valuable as they work together
towards desired solution results. Not everything the company
does can be in the open light of the Forum, but Qwests
partnering success lies in focusing on vendors who adhere
to TM Forum Frameworx, and who can demonstrate reliable,
compliant interfaces with Qwests systems and applications.
Throughout this process, Qwest collaborated with a wide array
of vendors, including: BT, Cisco, Comptel, Verecloud, Progress
Software, Tribold, and Voss.
The vendor community has played a signicant role in this
project. It embraces TM Forum for its standards which reduce
development costs and because it is a great marketing
opportunity for them, he points out. The communication
giants support of TM Forum Frameworx is absolute.
Toland asserts, We strongly encourage other members
to engage in the international Frameworx community. Not
one of us stands alone in this converged environment, so the
better we are at establishing common standards, the faster
we can make traditional geographic boundaries irrelevant. TM
Forum does a great job of looking at whats coming down the
road, implementing standards, and facilitating among all these
different roles and disciplines. When you can get an industry
to agree on a baseline data model as TM Forum has done with
Information Framework, its just a Herculean task.
Core company divisions such as enterprise Business
Markets Group, IT Operations, Products, Network Engineering,
Channel Operations, and Finance all worked together to
achieve Qwests service delivery platform success. The
company continues to strategize, innovate, and streamline
its service delivery methods with expert support from the
international TM Forum Community.
What the future holds
Now that Qwest has deployed its service delivery platform,
it will look at the upfront sales process to improve sales
effectiveness, and at solution design to take in and fulll
orders faster. Plans are also on the horizon to focus on real-
time events, on-demand customer congurations, and using
business analytics to explore cross-selling opportunities.
Toland understands the value the Forum offers to Qwests
future. He says, If you make the effort, theres a lot of depth
to what TM Forum puts together which can be leveraged for
the growth and success of your company.
22 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
In March 2011, Oracle Communications Rapid Offer Design
and Order Delivery (RODOD) solution received TM Forum
Frameworx Solution Conformance Certication. More precisely,
the RODOD solution scope was assessed for compliance with
the Business Process Framework (eTOM) 8.0, Levels 1 through
3. It is the rst solution to be certied by TM Forum.
The productization and certication of solutions should lead
to higher business value for customers, and facilitate and
accelerate the adoption of Frameworx.
Oracle choose to embark on this rigorous process because
service providers prefer to procure standards-based products
to reduce risk, increase speed of service deployment
particularly concerning the time and effort taken in integration
and lower costs. This also frees up service providers
resources so they can concentrate on areas of differentiation.
The scale and scope of the problems caused by legacy
systems, proprietary interfaces, and inconsistent processes
is demonstrated by the fact that, according to Yankee Group,
the average time it takes a service provider to launch new
services ranges from 90 days to a year, while the average time
taken to modify offers is highly manual and varies from 10 to
20 days. As service providers need to offer more services and
promotions quickly just to compete, the situation is only going
to get worse.
TM Forum's Business Benchmarking Program has found
that it takes the best-in-class about two hours to make new
pricing or tariff changes for small variations or bundle updates.
However, the average is four months.
For all types of orders (regular services and bundles), the
Program has found that the best in class has a 4.4 percent
rework rate, while the average score is 13 percent, up by more
than 50 percent on the previous year. This is a worrying trend.
KRC Research estimates 25 percent of data service orders
Certied solutions speed up time
to market for service providers
Summary: Three service providers Colt, Telekom Malaysia, and Aircel explain why they chose to use a
solution that has now received TM Forum Frameworx Solution Conformance Certication (Business Process
Framework Release 8.0 eTOM Levels 1 through 3). Advantages include faster time to market, less time and
effort spent on integration, reduced risk and lower costs.
are cancelled before they are fullled. Vanson Bourne says
77 percent of service providers acknowledge that delivering
bundled products and services has increased operational
complexity, while 86 percent report an increase in transaction
failures.
Many initiatives that are described as BSS/OSS
transformation programs are not strategic overhauls, but
tactical improvements. Operators continue to struggle with
slow offer design, high order fallout, poor order lifecycle
visibility, costly in-ight order changes, and high operation
expense.
To address these issues, the horizontal Level 1 processes
included in the Business Process Framework 8.0 Certication
cover marketing and offer management and customer
relationship management. The vertical Level 1 processes
include product lifecycle management, fulllment and
assurance.
Level 2 processes that are involved in the Certication
process include product and offer development and retirement,
customer interface management, selling, order handling, and
problem handling.
At Level 3, some 24 processes were involved in Oracles
certication process. For example, under product and offer
development and retirement, they include the development
of detailed product specications, and the launch of new
products. Level 3 processes that fall under order handling
include determining customer order feasibility, authorizing
credit, issuing, tracking, managing, completing and closing
customer orders.
Here three service providers explain, in their own words, the
value of greatly reduced integration time and effort in BSS/OSS
transformations, including less risk, lower costs and faster
time to market.
Colt operates in 13 countries, and runs a 25,000km network
that reaches 100 cities and includes metropolitan area
networks in 34 cities with direct bre connections into 16,000
buildings and 19 data centres. The company offers IT managed
services, data and voice services to major organizations,
midsize businesses and wholesale customers.
The importance of speed to market is underlined by Greg
Branch, director of architecture, Colt Technology Services. Colt
was facing BSS/OSS challenges concerning order management
because, as Branch explains, As we move into providing
cloud IT services to our customers, there is a demand for a
much greater degree of automation in the way we provision
those and we need to be able to combine the provisioning of
the cloud IT services with the network services as a single
integrated solution.
He adds, We have to be able to assemble those solutions
in a managed way and deliver them in a way that meets
our customers high demands. Colt chose to use Oracles
RODOD solution because it meets its requirements of
matching our need to offer assembled solutions made up
of technology components. Then, having placed an order,
it breaks it into those components, builds an orchestration
plan for the delivery of the solution, and invokes the delivery
workows for each component in turn those delivery
workows being integrated with our service platform to
automate the delivery of tasks.
The main thing is around speed to market. In our existing
systems it can sometimes take months to launch a new
product because of the changes that we have to make in
multiple disconnected systems. By being able to launch a
service on a single integrated platform, we expect that time to
reduce to weeks, or sometimes even days. The rst service
we are launching on the platform was implemented from start
to nish in three to four months.
The main thing is around speed to market. In our
existing systems it can sometimes take months to
launch a new product because of the changes that we
have to make in multiple disconnected systems. By
being able to launch a service on a single integrated
platform, we expect that time to reduce to weeks, or
sometimes even days."
Colt greater speed to market
24 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Telekom Malaysia (TM) describes itself as Malaysias leading
provider in information communications technologies offering
xed, Internet and mobile services. Its High-speed Broadband
Systems was rolled out to 750,000 premises during 2010.
Nizam Arshad, VP, IT, Telekom Malaysia Group, spoke at
Management World in 2010, to share the IT transformation
project we have at Telekom Malaysia, lessons learned, and
the challenges we faced in order to bring forward a new IT
platform for the company and its customers. The program is
an 18- to 24-month program. We are about midway done with
it, weve rolled out one release and well have two or three
more releases this year [2010]. We started off with more
consumer [offers], moving forward into small and medium-
sized businesses, government, and enterprise services.
Today we have lots of systems supporting the services
we offer to the market. There are gaps in some of them and
certain solutions are quite old; they have been implemented
for many, many years. The challenge we have today is that
everything that comes out is a bundle of services and you have
certain platforms that are fairly easy to deploy, but you have
other platforms that are difcult, and it is challenging to deploy
these new bundled services.
We need a more end-to-end capability that will allow us to
bundle all of our services, for our internal users, for the call
center and operations, as well as for our customers. This is
something we are deploying in Telekom Malaysia today.
The RODOD requires a lot of ow-through provisioning,
activation process and now we have been able to deliver that
in some of the services. But, for the most part, where there
are bundled services, it is fairly challenging. So what we are
doing, even for our rst release, is a triple play service that
we offer to the market. In order to do that, we require a set of
tools that are fairly integrated, that we can build and use for
the current offer we have, and also in the future for the new
services that are coming onboard.
The customers demands are going to be more and more
challenging. This allows us to deliver something to the market
quickly and efciently. To do that we require a different set
of tools what we have today doesnt allow us to do that.
By deploying the Oracle automated management, the EI
[Enterprise Integration] solutions and the SDP [service delivery
platform], this allows us to go to market much faster, deliver
the services, and be more competitive in the marketplace.
Today, most of the offers that go out will be bundled
services, which generally require several weeks or maybe
months to deliver the more complex services. With the current
solutions from Oracle, those systems allow us to deploy
something fairly quickly it could be a week, or it could be two
or three weeks. If its a conguration thats required quickly, it
could be done within a day.
The customer imposes upon us more visibility and control
in the way we deliver the services to them and with Oracle
order management, we are able to decompose these complex
products and services, and each step of the way, the status
of that particular order is oated up to the CRM [customer
relationship management] layer. That gives a lot more comfort
and condence to the customers, that we are delivering the
service in the time level we are committed to. It has given us
more visibility in the way we deliver all the services to them.
Telekom Malaysias IT transformation
Aircel is a mobile services provider in India with over 35 million
mobile subscribers. It offers pre- and post-paid services.
Ravinder Jain, CIO, Aircel, explains about his use of
standards, The service relies on the entire Oracle [RODOD]]
communications suite, weve just gone live with it. It gives us
a lot of advantages in terms of service providers who come
on board and provide their services to us, so the boarding
of these content providers becomes seamless and much,
much faster because the SDP is pre-integrated with all these
southbound network elements and all the northbound classic
OSS and BSS.
The role of order management becomes more vital, for
example, when we were launching our eat-all-you-can service
which is caller ring-back tone the customer is free to
change that ring-back tone as many times as they wish in a
day, or a week, or a month. They can choose to change every
minute if theyd like to. That was really impacting our network
and we wanted a robust order management platform that can
really manage this kind of situation.
One of our major criterion was to have an end-to-end view,
be it an operational view or a billing view or a service view, all
three parts of the organization must have a consolidated view
and the tool must provide it. That was one of the criteria.
The second criterion was scalability, we were looking for
a solution that can really deal with a very large volume. For
example, today we need to handle hundreds of thousands
of orders an hour processing performance, close to 800,000
orders, so that is a huge volume to deal with.
The third criterion was for us to have end-to-end mapping
of all the offerings we have, and it must reduce the design
time, the implementation time, the delivery time, and, at
the end of the day, it must have a very low number of order
fallouts and offer less operating cost.
So we went through the entire technology commercial
process, where we looked at the various products that are there
in the market and we found that Oracle OSM [central order
management and orchestration engine of the RODOD solution]
really gives us end-to-end visibility of the order management.
What I really liked about Oracle OSM was the way the
orchestration and decomposition happens at the network level
itself, completely independent of the CRM and billing, so you do
not have any dependency and it works as a component that is
tightly integrated with these two. It has its own business logic to
orchestrate and decompose all your orders.
The third criterion was for us to have end-to-end mapping of all the offerings we have, and it must reduce the
design time, the implementation time, the delivery time, and, at the end of the day, it must have a very low
number of order fallouts and offer less operating cost."
Aircel faster offer creation, less order fallout
26 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Why did Telekom Slovenije embark on such an ambitious
initiative?
Telekom Slovenije was privatized in 1994, having been the PTT
in our country. It remains the largest operator, with about 2.3
million mobile users and 1 million residential and commercial
subscribers. We also offer VoIP, IPTV and Internet services.
In 2006, our legacy OSS systems, especially in our service
fulllment stack, were in silos, with hundreds of one-to-one
interfaces between systems, which created huge complexity.
We were managing thousands of service specications,
although each was similar to the next. We also had data and
process challenges inventory was of particular concern and
our processes were highly manual and inefcient.
We needed to expand into many new services such as
ber to the home, Ethernet, virtual private networks, and next
generation networks and realized that the systems we had
could not easily support that growth. We also did not have a
customer relationship management system (CRM), but knew
that wed have to build or buy one in view of our increasing
focus on customers. So we began several interrelated projects,
for fulllment automation, plus the introduction of a geographic
information system (GIS), improvements to trouble ticketing, a
data consolidation initiative, and a BSS project addressing order
management, billing, and CRM.
Where did you begin?
We knew we wanted to transform the systems shown in the
Figure 1.
We used Frameworx specically the Business Process
Framework (eTOM), Information Framework (SID), Application
Framework (TAM) and Integration Framework to help us to
Customers rst: an object lesson
in achieving multiple goals
Summary: In 2006, Telekom Slovenije began a rigorously managed OSS transformation project that impacted
a number of different systems. Every department involved in this project was given specic, measurable
targets. When the project was completed, dozens of benets had indeed been achieved, including 90 percent
automation of the service design process, order-to-bill time reduced by 30 percent, truck rolls decreased by
between 9 and 13 percent, and operational expenditures in some areas lowered by 10 percent.
Dr. Lorien Pratt spoke with Gorazd Hribar Rajteri, head of IT OSS at Telekom Slovenije, to nd out about some
of the success factors in this major undertaking.
Figure 1: Transformed systems
decide which products to select from the market. We wanted
products that were open, standardized, interfaced well with
other solutions, and that would not take too much time to
introduce into our environment. The Integration Framework in
particular guided us towards a network model that is technology
agnostic, which means that it has considerable future value for
us in managing complexity and in continuing to decrease time-to-
market for new product offerings.
We organized our objectives into four broad categories to:
INVENTORY
PROVISIONING
TROUBLE
TICKETING
FAULT
MANAGEMENT
GIS
SLA
MANAGEMENT
WO
MANAGEMENT
PRODUCT
CATALOG
PROCESS
AUTOMATION
DOCUMENT
MANAGEMENT
DATA
WAREHOUSE
MEDIATION
RATING
INVOICING
A/R
BILLING CRM OSS
decrease provisioning time; decrease costs (by reducing operating
and capital expenditure); increase service quality and customer
satisfaction; and increase revenue (by avoiding leakage).
Then, individual projects were given key performance indicator
(KPI) targets to meet, such as reducing the number of truck
rolls or increasing eld force productivity according to certain
measures. Detailed objectives (both quantitative as well as
qualitative) were outlined within business process areas (such
as to decrease mean time to provision, service design unit
costs, time-to-market and so on) and for IT systems (including
minimizing the total cost of ownership, Frameworx compliance,
automation level, and performance).
For our provisioning improvement project, our goals were to
decrease provisioning time for all services to improve customers
experience and shorten time-to-market for services. Finally,
we worked closely with our vendors including Telcordia and
our Slovenian research and development partner Medius, who
helped with deployment.
Those are a lot of goals to handle at once, how did you do it?
Yes, our CEO once said that the project was like, Trying to win
the 100 meter race while changing our running shoes.
One of the ways that we addressed the challenge was with
a number of strategies around our personnel. We created a
separate project for every product, and a separate business
case justication for each. Over 200 people were assigned to
various project teams, and we mixed up our personnel, with no
more than 25 percent of people remaining within their original
area. We created a project coordination group and an integration
testing group, and froze or postponed non-critical work during
the transformation effort.
As the provisioning project got under way, the Application
Framework and Integration Framework both helped to reduce
the time and effort for decisions around our solution architecture.
We used a functional domain decomposition that largely
followed the Application Framework, and followed many of the
architectural guidelines of the Integration Framework.
Specically, the Application Framework domain denitions
guided us towards decoupling the product and service
specication catalogs. We rationalized our service specications
design, which enabled a high level of automation. This reduced
the proliferation of thousands of sales bundles into a much
simpler service catalog and network factory.
Did this effort produce any measurable benets?
Yes, we achieved the 30 percent reduction in order-to-bill
time through our technology agnostic approach: we were
able to automate design and assign for several mass market
services, including POTS, ISDN, broadband, and FTTx. Along
the way, our improved service design process and technology,
and provisioning improvements reduced truck rolls by 9 to 13
percent.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning that order-to-bill is not the
same as order-to-cash. The rst difference is in time delay, which
is conditioned by payment terms agreed with our customers
in our case between eight and 90 days after the invoice is
produced. The second difference is in the amount since we are
facing bad debts. As neither payment terms, nor bad debts are
system-dependant, we prefer using the order-to-bill terminology.
It is hard to quantify what the cost of our project would
have been without TM Forum guidance, but judging from
architectures I have seen elsewhere, Id say that, overall, our
effort was reduced to about a third of what it would have been
without the use of the TM Forum. We also reduced the risk to
the project, in my opinion.
What risks were involved?
One risk we identied early on was the integration between the
order management and other systems for managing the service
orders lifecycle. To mitigate that risk, we dened interface
contracts based on Integration Framework concepts, adjusted to
Telekom Slovenijes particular needs.
Another decision that we made was to adopt a common data
language down to the detailed functional requirements level as
well as in interface agreements. This also helped us to bridge the
language of the IT and business worlds. Here, we were informed
by the Information Framework, although again we created
extensions specic to our own needs.
Do you have any advice for other CSPs undertaking similar
efforts?
It was hard for our people to visualize that success was possible
with such a big transformation until our executives began
to spend time going from project to project, explaining its
importance.
We realized that resistance to change is natural, and so
explaining the benets to key people, using the same people
28 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
for the old and new applications, and ensuring that our users
were well educated, turned out to be very important as we
retired the legacy applications.
A number of architectural changes simplied these issues as
well. Today we have established a service oriented architecture
for our infrastructure which has measurably improved
system interoperability. As a result, we now have over 1.5
million objects in our centralized GIS showing our network,
representing over 26,000km of routes. Among other things,
this replaced a stack of documents over 47 meters high.
Where does the project stand today?
At Telekom Slovenije, we call ourselves the rst
Communications Experience Provider. This reects our focus
on the importance of our customers. This project achieved a
number of goals that support this overall company mission.
We can now launch products much faster than in the past:
the new architecture has reduced our time-to-market by
several months. Once a product is launched, we also have
enhanced and faster self-care options, based on zero-touch
provisioning. After an order is entered, we can now provision
data services in three days fewer, on average, than it used to
require. In particular, our VPN provisioning time is down by 30
percent and was reduced by four days.
Once the customers product is up and running, we are
able to provide better service quality because we now have
automated service impact analysis and root-cause analysis
through our cross-domain fault diagnosis system. We can also
offer customer service level agreements, which increase our
market share and revenues.
We expect that our centralized inventory system and a
reduction in unnecessary fault investigations will also decrease
our fault localization time by 25 percent, which means that
when we do have a problem, our customers experience of
downtime is reduced.
Did these customer experience improvements come at a
cost to your organization?
Actually, our operational expenditures are lower today because
of the efciencies of the new architecture. For instance, our
operational expenses for each service order is down by 10
percent because of automation of labor-intensive tasks. We
can do unbundled service availability checks required by our
regulator for 15 percent less cost. Finally, our maintenance
costs overall for commercial off the shelf products have been
reduced by 15 percent.
Thank you for your time to help us to understand your
project.
Thank you. We look forward to continuing to work with the
TM Forum, especially learning from other service providers as
we move forward with new initiatives.
Telekom Slovenijes advice on inventory, product, and service catalog best practices
As part of our deployment, we chose to position Telcordias Granite inventory and CNUM at the heart of our OSS. Our rationale: a
reliable inventory of all network resources, services (such as ISDN, IPTV, LLU, VOIP, Metro Ethernet, VPN ) and implementation of
a catalog of service and resource specications is a pre-requisite to efciency, automation, and, ultimately, to cost savings.
During Telekom Slovenijes provisioning improvement project, we dened more than 5,000 different inventory models (in
Granite language templates) covering the physical resource layer (racks, shelves, cards, ports), the logical resource layer
(including logical connections, channels, clouds, and other logical capacity) and the service layer (service specications). After
our successful data migration, the Granite inventory was populated with Telecom Slovenijes complete network, including
copper, ber, and the MPLS backbone.
Our approach to deploying a service catalog was especially powerful. We modeled our service specication as a technology-
agnostic abstraction of a network service, hiding all technological aspects and decisions. This enabled us to keep the number
of different specications relatively small to around 30. In contrast, the product catalog contains thousands of product
specications.
A product activator module within our order management system decomposes product orders into service orders. As a
result, service order orchestration ows are generated on-the-y as a composition of atomic building blocks, usually containing
micro-ow denitions and provisioning rules per service specication (such as POTS activate, IPTV modify, and so on). We
consider this a state-of-the-art architecture with the exibility that we need for future growth.
Before developing the single access mechanism, users had to
log into each system separately, creating potentially serious
security breaches, and wasting a lot of time. In addition, the user
account security audit process was largely manual, and so was
time-consuming and error prone, in itself creating a business risk.
To address these issues, the operator team worked with
TM Forum, along with vendors IBM, Wipro, Ericsson, Nokia
Siemens Networks, and others. Ultimately, the TMF615
(Operator User Management) and JSR91 (Interface Program
Enterprise Identity Management) teams were able to
demonstrate a number of benets through deployment of
systems based upon these standards, including:
n completely automating the daily audits of users who have
access to sensitive systems;
ncompliance with audit and security requirements at local,
group, and government levels;
nreducing user provisioning time by 79.2 percent;
ncutting by more than 90 percent the time needed to audit
security of the entire OSS system user account lifecycle, as
measured at Vodafone D2;
ngreatly reducing exposure to security concerns surrounding
the release of sensitive information to unauthorized parties.
Solution overview
The TMF615/JSR91 solution is summarized in Figure 1 through
Figure 4. Figure 1 shows the traditional approach used by
communications service providers (CSPs) to authenticate access
to disparate OSS systems. As can be seen here, both users and
user audit personnel must log into every system manually.
Figure 2, in contrast, shows that a User Identity Management
System (UMS) centralizes this process, with big reductions in
the time taken to gain authorized access, the complexity of the
process, and vulnerabilities in security.
Automation affords big gains in
efciency, security and compliance
Summary: Vodafone D2, Telefnica, T-Mobile, and a number of other multinational communications service providers
took the attitude that a business problem shared is a problem addressed in a shorter time, that costs less in
money and effort. To comply with challenging global security and regulatory requirements, they needed a common
mechanism for staff to enter password and login information once to gain access to multiple OSS systems.
They collaborated through TM Forum, using its standards to speed up processes by as much as 98.1 percent.
Figure 1: A disparate, inefcient approach to user and authentication/
authorization management
Figure 2: A centralized User Identity Management System (UMS) allows a
single source of access, but multiple protocols must still be maintained
OSS
System A
OSS
System B
OSS
System C
OSS
System N
OSS
System N
+
OSS
System N
++
Operator
OSS
System A
OSS
System B
OSS
System C
OSS
System N
OSS
System N
+
OSS
System N
++
OSS
Identity
Management
System
OSS
Active
Directory
OSS
Central LDAP
target system specic protocols
Operator
or System
Approver
30 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Figure 3 shows that, with the addition of the standard
interface to OSS authorization, as provided by TMF615,
this process can be improved through the removal of the
requirement for OSS-specic adapters, conguration parameters,
data dependencies, and transport protocols.
Finally, Figure 4 shows an additional scenario, where
standards dened in TMF615 allow a CSP to use a single,
global UMS to access multiple local systems, with further
benets described below.
The remainder of this article describes the problem
addressed by TMF615/JSR91 in more detail, along with how
these standards deliver these important benets of security
and efciency.
Overcoming the identity management challenge
CSPs worldwide are challenged by the need for effective
identity management. They are faced with a large number
of users of increasingly complex OSS systems, and a user
population of globally distributed user groups in many
countries, across different continents. In response, CSPs are
seeking solutions that increase security while simultaneously
reducing the time required to operate OSS systems, and for
administrators to audit users access to those systems.
In particular, CSPs need to deploy processes to detect and
remove dormant and orphaned accounts as soon as possible.
They also need to certify that accounts satisfy certain legal
requirements on a regular basis, and to reduce or eliminate the
use of shared accounts (where two or more individuals share
a single login and password). However, many OSS systems
do not support these functions, and when it is provided, it
is not centralized or standardized. This creates unnecessary
complexity, security vulnerabilities, and inefciency.
The solution is found in a centralized UMS, as is provided
by several vendors solutions, including IBM. An important
part of an effective UMS deployment includes a standardized
mechanism for communicating centralized user information
to disparate systems. This approach brings big business and
operational benets, as described above.
Figure 4: A two-tier (global/local) UMS supports large CSPs with multiple
units/groups
Global
Identity
Management
System
Operator
or System
Approver
OSS
System A
OSS
System B
OSS
System C
OSS
Identity
Management
System
Operator
SPML
Figure 3: Adding TMF615 protocol allows only a single protocol to serve
multiple OSS Systems
OSS
System A
OSS
System B
OSS
System C
OSS
System N
OSS
System N
+
OSS
System N
++
OSS
Identity
Management
System
OSS
Active
Directory
OSS
Central LDAP
only 1 protocol for all different systems
Operator
or System
Approver
The role of TMF615
TM Forums TMF615 uses the open standard called SPML V2.0
to dene a communications protocol between a central UMS
and a local OSS or local user management system (UMS-L).
This protocol supports ve functions: create, modify, delete,
lookup, and audit. The standard denes how these functions
operate in the following use cases:
ncreate a user;
nassign account to user;
nassign a role to a user;
nretrieve users details;
ndelete users account and entitlements;
ndelete user.
Global, country, and local advantages
A second arena in which standard protocols and architecture
for UMS deployment can help service providers is by providing
a mechanism for communication between what is called a
global user identity management system (UMS-G) which is
used across the CSP and a local UMS that is used within a
particular group, country or geographic region (UMS-C).
Large operators may also employ a third tier of local UMS
called an UMS-L which provides the next level of access to a
particular set of systems.
To support this multi-tiered UMS scenario, TMF615 also
describes each level of functionality and species how the user
functions described propagate from one to the next.
TM Forum Interface Program
In addition to dening a standard automated interface to be
used by service providers who want to manage their systems
using a centralized UMS, the TMF615/JSR91 team dened
a second standard to enable the creation of a standardized
trouble ticket which initiates a manual process for those
vendors that do not participate.
This standard the JSR91 denes the Interface Program
(TIP) Trouble Ticket (TT) interface, which integrates automated
and manual processes to enable user management and audit
on non-participating systems.
Vodafone D2 has deployed this as an application-level
gateway which transforms the TMF615 provisioning request
into TIP trouble tickets. They are then tracked and routed
through the existing TIP TT network (called Vine).
In conclusion
Using the translation to JSR91 TIP Trouble Ticket application
program interface means the provisioning process for all OSS
applications can be set up completely independently of support
from TMF6515. This can reduce the user lifecycle audit time by
98.1 percent. A big win for all concerned and a new standard in
the industry.
32 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
In February 2008, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) entered
Indonesias mobile market through its rst foreign subsidy,
PT Natrindo Telepon Seluler (NTS). From April 2008, NTS
has traded under the brand name of AXIS. It held 2G and 3G
licenses across many major towns and cities, and its vision
was to offer innovative, affordable services using an intelligent
network (IN) system and a exible marketing strategy, AXIS
had attracted 1.2 million subscribers by the end of 2008, but
problems were looming.
The most important was declining customer loyalty, the
direct result of two main factors: rstly, subscriber numbers
had grown 50 percent annually for seven consecutive years,
resulting in a penetration rate of 37 percent among the
nations 200 million people. At which point, a massive inux of
competitors had hit the Indonesian market, all with the same
plan of attack slash tariff rates to lure subscribers from rival
operators.
Secondly, with a gross domestic product of $2,000 per capita,
Indonesian subscribers are relatively price-sensitive and willing
to shop around, which contributed to nearly 95 percent of
subscribers choosing prepaid vouchers to pay for their mobile
service. This led to unusually high levels of churn.
Integration combats erce
competition in Indonesia
Summary: AXIS enjoyed huge initial success in one of the worlds largest mobile markets, Indonesia, which it
entered in 2008. However competition was erce, with all service providers trying to win market share through
very low tariffs in a slowing market. Also, with 95 percent of the population opting for pre-paid, the churn rate
was unusually high. To combat these conditions, AXIS decided to launch post-paid as well as pre-paid services,
and, in part by exploiting the attributes of 3G, wanted to offer tailored bundles to consumers and business
people. To do this it needed an open, integrated IT architecture that could accommodate new elements as well
as reuse as many as possible of the 13 different systems run by ve different vendors on its networks. The
project had a tight deadline of six months, which it met using Frameworx to simplify and speed up necessary
analysis, integration and implementation. New services can now be introduced within a week instead of two
months, and the popularity of the new service bundles were such that in the two months after commercial
launch, AXIS added 2 million customers to its base of 6 million, and has improved customer retention.
To gain mass loyalty, AXIS decided on a new strategy to
offer new 3G-based services and post-paid subscriptions
to lure high value customers. This demanded end-to-end
interoperability through cross-network and BSS integration,
streamlining the companys entire network, and converging pre-
paid and post-paid services.
Moreover, AXIS needed to keep the solutions total cost of
ownership low and move fast to gain the advantage of being
the countrys dominant pre-paid and post-paid operator ahead
of its competitors. The companys leaders set the ambitious
deadline of October 15, 2009 to develop an integrated, exible,
open IT architecture that could support their business goals,
giving the AXIS and Huaweis IT teams fewer than six months
for the entire project.
This was a major challenge as AXIS had ve different vendors
who owned a total of 13 different subsystems on its network.
They ranged from customer relationship management and
enterprise application integration to SAP, customer loyalty
management, mediation, provisioning, card management, and
data warehouse management.
This meant the business and operation management system
was very complex and inefcient, with multiple interfaces, which
Figure 1: Business processes in the service oriented architecture
made it expensive to maintain and run. In addition, accountability
was often hard to ascertain and changes took a long time to
implement. Day to day operations had a high error rate.
As AXIS would be maintaining all these legacy vendors and
services, it chose Huawei to implement the Convergent Billing
Solution (CBS) and system integration for the new architecture.
"Through this strategic partnership with Huawei, AXIS will get
a robust solution to achieve a higher post-paid customer base
through its innovative and affordable products in Indonesias
market," said Erik Aas, President Director and CEO, AXIS.
Huawei needed to ensure that everyone fully understood
the diverse business challenges and goals of AXISs various
departments, holding between 400 to 500 meetings with
AXIS staff throughout the project. Many took place in the rst
few weeks, as the design team and engineers got to know
all key personnel from AXIS accounting, customer care, and
marketing, as well as the departments in charge of IT and
networking operations.
Huawei worked closely with AXISs technical staff to create a
blueprint and build methods into the plan such as supplemental
solutions for alarm reporting, backup procedures, and security
protocols to avoid common pitfalls. The nal version of
this blueprint guided the two teams transformation of the
compartmentalized IT structure into an integrated, efcient
system.
The blueprint took just three weeks to nish about half the
average industry time. Moreover, thanks in part to the quality and
completeness of the blueprint, the two companies cooperated to
complete the systems integration in under 13 weeks, and they
launched the services commercially in fewer than six months.
The two companies knew from the start that they needed
a standard way of evaluating existing processes and dening
new ones, and they turned to TM Forums Frameworx.
They used the Business Process Framework (eTOM) as the
guideline for processes and Information Framework (SID) for
interface design.
Some of the existing systems were reused and needed to
work with Huaweis new convergent systems including an
Online Charging System (OCS) and billing system. To ensure
they interconnect smoothly and operate with the existing
systems, they were all were integrated using Huaweis BSS
integration framework.
This BSS integration framework has hundreds of common
business processes built-in that refer to the Business
Process Framework with a common data model based on
the Information Framework. Huawei analyzed processes to
determine the requirement and identify inefcient processes,
resulting in a requirement specication from which new
processes were dened.
See Figure 1: for how a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
was used in Huaweis integration framework. The dened
business processes were key to the architecture. It executed
an overall assessment among multiple layer systems based on
future business processes.
Operational
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34 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
After the business processes analysis, the Forums
Information Framework and the Huaweis BSS integration
framework were used as the basis for designing standardized
interfaces with reusable components. To achieve this,
Information Framework business entities and their associated
attributes were used to simplify the integration of applications.
As the framework denes, a layered model was used to
partition the information and data into domains, aligned with
Business Process Framework high level concepts, such as
customer, service and product. The benet of this approach
is that each domain possesses a high degree of cohesion
between business entities within the domain, while having
loose coupling with entities in other domains.
This approach greatly reduced the interface analysis, and the
interface interconnection and maintenance cost.
Huawei shortened the project deployment time by
overlapping the initial training stages with the nal stages of
system integration, and called on local Huawei resources from
its two training centers in Jakarta. The supplier also started
testing system integration and user acceptability before
completing integration, saving several weeks in the process. By
the nal stages of the project, more than 100 IT staff from both
teams were working simultaneously to ensure they met their
deadline.
Results in record time
Through its new open IT architecture, AXIS was able to offer
convergent pre-paid and post-paid billing and service options.
There was a big choice of service bundles for all sorts of
callers, individuals or families, corporate and community
organizations. Marketing could offer short promotions and
bonuses to attract high-value customers, and has opportunities
for upselling and cross-selling.
Subscribers signed up in record numbers. In the rst three
months after commercial launch, AXISs subscriber base grew
from 6 to 8 million a monthly growth rate of 11.7 percent
versus 2.6 percent per month during the six months prior to the
deployment. At this rate, AXIS will reach its network capacity of
15 million before 2010 is out a challenge it is happy to face.
Customers also like the convenience and transparency of
online account management and inquiries, and better service
due to the increased operational efciency. This is clear from
the improved customer retention rate in what remains a
ercely competitive market. In addition, time-to-market
takes one-eighth of what it had been down from two months
to a week for new services.
The overall gains for the operator include less time and effort
spent on data interface analysis, and the simpler integration of
Huawei products with partners solutions.
There has also been a substantial reduction in day-to-day
operational issues, although the operator is able to make
maximum reuse of existing systems, which protects its
investment. The system can also scale easily due to its open
architecture, which requires less maintenance.
The service provider has been able to converge its pre-paid
and post-paid services, and the systems greater exibility is
enabling the AXIS to move towards its goal of being market-
driven.
"Huawei has been an important strategic partner of AXIS
since our birth, says Johan Buse, Chief Marketing Ofcer,
AXIS, and we are delighted to extend our cooperation for the
development of this innovative new billing system."
"Subscribers signed up in record numbers. In the
rst three months after commercial launch, AXISs
subscriber base grew from 6 to 8 million a monthly
growth rate of 11.7 percent versus 2.6 percent per
month during the six months prior to the deployment."
Magyar Telekom (MT) is Hungarys largest telecom provider.
It provides xed and mobile telephony, data transmission,
and IT and systems integration services to consumer and
business customers. MT is also the majority stakeholder in
Crnogorski Telekom in Montenegro and Maekdonski Telekom in
Macedonia.
Launched in 2008, MT started by collaborating with HP
Solution Consulting Services (SCS) to transform its business
structure, processes, and technologies, and implemented a
unied activation and provisioning framework for all services.
MTs Service Provisioning Automation project (SPA) converted
a home-grown legacy provisioning system to a single platform
for provisioning and activation of multiple product lines. OSSs
slated for conversion included service design and resource
assignment, order entry, service activation, and upstream
systems notication.
Completed in Q2 2009, the project realized a number of
measurable benets, including:
nService activation time was decreased by 20 percent;
nThe ratio of successful automated activations was improved
by 30 percent;
nTime-to-market was decreased by 10 to 20 percent by
implementing a customer relationship management (CRM)
system that is independent of product structure for the
provisioning system, and clear service and resource-facing
service denitions;
nIntegration time and effort of new network management
systems (NMS) was decreased by 30 percent;
Better service provisioning and
activation create foundation for growth
Summary: Magyar Telekoms project to convert a legacy provisioning system into a single platform
successfully enables the provisioning and activation of multiple product lines. The implementation relied
heavily on TM Forum Frameworx and is delivering many benets. They include cutting service activation by
20 percent and increasing the ratio of successful automated activations by 30 percent. Time-to-market for
services was reduced by up to 20 percent, while the time needed to integrate new network management
systems fell by 30 percent. When manual interventions are needed, they take 70 percent less time. The
deployment of a zero-touch home gateway has lessened eld force activity by 30 percent. New and existing
services are being migrated to the new platform, and customer relationship management will be enhanced to
support trouble ticketing and the management of service level agreements.
nManual conguration times when needed were
decreased by 70 percent;
nField force activities decreased by 30 percent due to zero-
touch home gateway deployment.
MT also attributes a number of benets to the use of TM
Forum standards, including a 25 percent reduction in denition
and detail design, and an overall 10 percent reduction in
development time. Substantial risks were also mitigated.
The project was a nalist in the TM Forums 2009 Excellence
Awards, and won Global Telecoms Business magazines 2010
innovation award for xed infrastructure service management.
An overview of the project is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Service Provisioning Automation project overview
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Billing
Billing activation
CRM
CRM processes
Sales / Customer Care Front-end Self Care Front-end
Feedback
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36 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
SPAs goals
Before launching the SPA project, MT was experiencing increases
in service provisioning complexity due to more personalized
services, hybrid networks, and end-to-end service guarantees.
The company recognized that its goal of deploying next
generation services required a modernized service provisioning
infrastructure that supported fast and accurate activation.
To reduce these complexities, as well as to achieve a number
of customer experience and efciency goals, MT sought a zero-
touch, right-rst-time, automated fulllment stack to optimize
the entire service delivery process, from service design and
resource assignment, to order entry, service activation, and
upstream systems notication.
Magyar Telekom engaged HP Solution Consulting Services
to provide guidance on designing the optimum processes
and solution as well as to deliver the project. HP focused on
provisioning redesign, interface standardization, application
integration and overall project management.
HP SCS consultants used COSMOS, a methodology
capturing the industry standard to design a single,
consolidated platform, explains Thomas Bertram, CTO,
Magyar Telekom Group.
The company set a number of goals for the project,
including efciency improvements, increased visibility into the
provisioning workow, greater customer satisfaction, reliability,
and a single solution that could support multiple offerings over
MTs wireline, wireless, and coaxial networks.
Universal and uniform service layer
When the SPA platform project was launched in 2008, it was
tasked with achieving these goals through the use of a uniform
and universal service layer that connected the CRM and
resource layers. It also needed to integrate the processes from
MTs T-Home, T-Mobile, and T-Systems branches and support
automated decision processes that allow business users to
control policies, rules, treatments, and information access.
There were a number of so-called non-functional
requirements as well. These included producing a carrier-grade
system using best-in-class practices and using a modular
architecture in line with TM Forums Business Process
Framework (eTOM) and Information Technology Infrastructure
Library (ITIL).
MT chose HPs Service Activator product as a basis for its
deployment.
A typical SPA provisioning and activation process
A typical provisioning and activation ow is as follows:
1) A customer speaks to the call center, and a request is captured by CRM. It validates the request from a marketing and sales
perspective, and initiates the creation of a new connection or the provisioning of a new service on an existing connection. If
needed, CRM will also initiate a technical feasibility request. The provisioning workow engine, which is built on the HP SOSA
bus, analyzes the type of workow to be triggered (new, modify, delete, migrate, and so on).
2) The service decomposition module breaks down the sales products and converts it to technical service orders.
3) The provisioning workow engine invokes capacity allocations in the technical inventory system. Batch processes ensure that
all product catalogs, technical inventories and service catalogs are in synch. If the allocation fails, the service planning module
supports manual allocation and planning, along with modication of the automated capacity reservations. Several versions can
be designed and posted back to CRM. After a successful automatic capacity allocation, the decomposition module determines
the necessary provisioning ow, whether fully or partially automated.
4) The provisioning workow engine transfers allocation information to CRM.
5) If a manual activity/work order is required, the provisioning workow engine invokes the workow management system to
initiate eld force interventions and manual work orders. These are transferred back to CRM after manual activities have been
fullled.
6) The provisioning workow engine initiates HP Service Activator to start micro-workows for activating resource-facing
services. All exceptions, trial-loops, undo and rollbacks are managed by the workow module of HP Service Activator.
7) HP Service Activator manages activations with element managers and network management system.
8) CRM is notied with activation status as needed.
9) The provisioning workow engine initiates update of the sold product in CRM and billing.
10) The provisioning workow engine instructs service level management to update service level agreement parameters.
OSS
Sold
Products
Order
Figure 2: SPA Solution Architecture SPA project details
MTs SPA solution architecture is shown in Figure 2. As can
be seen here, a business workow engine orchestrates orders
and CRM, which are then decomposed so that the appropriate
inventory resources are allocated and reserved. It initiates
eld force tasks as appropriate for physical tasks, as well as
conguration and activation at the logical level/layer. Orders
are handed off to an activation-specic workow bus, along
with HPs Service Activator, which then coordinates the order
through various resource management systems, involving more
than ten major systems in all.
TM Forums Business Process Framework provided
signicant value in the design of this architecture; orchestration,
decomposition. Other processes from the Business Process
Framework described the primary handoffs between CRM,
product lifecycle management, and SPA processes.
The interfaces at these handoffs were described using
the TM Forum Information Framework (SID), which guided
the architectural choice of separating product, service, and
resource, which were extended to meet MTs particular needs.
In addition, the Information Framework provided a starting
point for the common data model used throughout the project:
Business Process Framework processes and Information
Framework objects were used for detailed process and
interface designs.
There are also a number of personnel benets arising
from the use of TM Forum standards. The use of TM Forum
Frameworx helped management convey the quality and
professionalism of the solution design methodology and
operational model. Clear denition of different application
responsibilities helped to reduce frustrations that would
otherwise be felt on such a substantial transformation project.
Diagrams derived from Information Framework and Business
Process Framework helped to communicate project plans with
stakeholders.
The OSS team claims that creating the processes and data
structures for this project from scratch would have taken much
longer than re-using Frameworx.
SPA project status today
After a year of deployment, MT is today building on the SPA
program with further fulllment improvements. A number of
legacy services and technologies are being migrated into the
new system. These include CATV, SatTV, VoCATV, DVB-S,
DVB-C, mobile voice and data and other value added services. In
addition, CRM will be enhanced to support trouble ticketing and
the management of service level agreements (SLAs).
Information Architecture used by Magyar Telekom
Products are offered to
Magyar Telekom's customers.
Products contain services or
resources in any combination.
Products can be material
(a device) or immaterial (an
implementation plan) or
any combination of them.
Products contain at least one
service component and have
a sales price.
Services are developed
by Magyar Telekom or its
partners and combined
into products for sale. The
same type of service may
composed into different
products and have different
price as an instance.
Resources represent physical
or logical components of
services. Resources are
typically devices, applications,
licenses in IT or NT domain.
Product
Product has CFS Product
has PR
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Product
PR Host RFS
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Catalogue
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Management
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Activation
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Resource Management Systems
AAA HDM IMS ANMS
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38 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL/Ufone) is
the countrys only integrated communications service provider
(CSP) that offers bundled voice, data, Internet, and TV services.
Since PTCL was privatized in 2005, it has initiated a series of
modernization projects. Today, it is Pakistans largest broadband
service provider, with over 400,000 subscribers across 1,000
cities, and has 80 percent market share. It is also the countrys
rst 3G wireless broadband provider.
In 2008, PTCL chose to work with a number of vendors and
TM Forum to create a new Network Operations Center (NOC)
because it knew it was about to experience rapid growth and
needed to be more streamlined and agile operationally. As it
turned out, PTCL tripled its broadband subscriber numbers
and doubled its broadband coverage in 2009. The NOC
consolidates what were previously several dozen separate
element management system functions, which didn't provide a
centralized view of the companys network.
A central NOC is now located in Islamabad, with regional
NOCs in Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Karachi. Together, they
control, monitor, and manage the PTCL network through a
centralized platform. The projects benets include:
n 40 percent reduction in time to restore cut ber optic cables,
with associated operating expense benets;
n 30 percent fewer wireless local loop, broadband, and MPLS
outages, due to the faster resolution of ber cuts;
n an estimated 5 percent indirect reduction in capital
expenditure in the transmission/digital cross-connect domain
due to improved visibility of network resources and their
utilization;
Enabling consolidation and
growth to go hand in hand
Summary: Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited is the countrys largest communications service
provider, offering voice, data, Internet, and TV services. It chose to use TM Forum Frameworx to help it
consolidate its network operations when facing a period of rapid growth in its drive to improve the reliability
of the network and its customers experience. As a result it suffers 50 percent fewer network alarms,
has 30 percent fewer outages across multiple networks and the time to x cut ber cables has fallen
by 40 percent. It has also enjoyed a 5 percent drop in indirect costs thanks to better visibility across its
infrastructure.
n 50 percent fewer network alarms, increasing service
availability.
In addition, the NOC provides full visibility into cross-domain
performance, trafc, and trends. This supports network
planning for expansion and optimization, along with improved
visibility into operational data for networks and operations,
supporting better decision making.
Centralized NOCs project history
PTCLs xed and wireless network consists of multiple
technologies, including time division multiplexed and next
generation network (NGN) C4 and C5 switches and routers,
synchronous digital hierarchy, dense wave division multiplexing,
narrow wave division multiplexing, IP, and wireless local loop.
The network includes equipment and software from vendors,
including Siemens, ZTE, Loop Telecom, Tellabs, CA Spectrum ,
Tekelec, and Huawei.
Before 2008, the companys network was managed in 40
separate operational centers. There was no central NOC
providing network management for fault resolution, nor had
it root cause analysis capability. This resulted in lengthy time
periods for service restoration: a serious issue given the
frequency of ber cuts across the country, and an impediment
to PTCLs goals of providing excellent customer experience.
For this reason, the centralized NOC project had a number
of business goals, to achieve its ultimate aim of expanding
its market leadership in Pakistan. It also sought to improve
productivity and business agility while simultaneously reducing
costs. Disaster recovery through the NOC was also a priority.
To achieve these goals, the centralized NOC project included
organizational as well as technology changes across multiple
business units. Software was deployed to monitor and manage
the multi-technology and multi-vendor network; and to carry out
performance management for NGN, transmission, and signalling
domains as well as to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs)
for effective management of PTCLs operations.
Frameworx aids transformation
Frameworx played a central role in the project. TM Forum
processes allowed the company to create process abstractions
such that both national and regional NOCs are treated as
one virtual entity: the same processes apply regardless of
technology, location, domain, or vendor.
In addition, PTCL says Frameworx supported lower costs
throughout the project, based on the deployment of automated
instead of manual procedures, standard process denitions,
reusable processes, and the use of commercial off the shelf
software. Automation efciencies derived, in particular, from
automated problem detection, trouble management, and the
automated escalation of issues.
Specic Frameworx benets were right across the board.
The Application Framework (TAM) enabled PTCL to identify
applications and to assess vendors' capabilities, thereby helping
the service provider draw up a technology roadmap.
The Business Process Framework (eTOM which is mapped
to the Infrastructure Technology Information Library
ITIL) helped optimize fault management and performance
management processes. It also provided more meaningful
KPI metric data for the implementation of service quality
management to drive a customer centric operational model.
In particular, it provided the processes needed for:
n weekly and monthly performance and health checks;
n network monitoring;
n issue detection and resolution;
n alarm management;
n performance management;
n trouble ticketing;
n work order management;
n outage management.
The JSR91 standard was used to implement interfaces
between fault management and trouble ticketing systems to
simplify managing problems, as it is more exible, and less
costly.
The use of TM Forum MTNM model is expected to reduce
integration costs and risks since the OSS and network
management systems already support the interface.
Project status today
PTCL announced its new NOC in November of 2008, and the
project was a nalist for TM Forums Operational Excellence
award in 2010. Building on this work, PTCL designated 2010 as
the Year of Customer & Employee Care, with a strong focus
on quality of service for the companys customers. Along with
hundreds of retail outlets, four contact centers, and multiple
touch points to serve its customers, the companys newly
enhanced NOC allows it to provide a more reliable network
underlying its quadruple play of services to both consumers and
business customers.
Moving forward, PTCL sees the NOC platform as essential
for its goal of diversifying future services to increase revenues,
and to provide statistics to support ongoing trend analysis and
network reengineering.
PTCLs parent company operates in 19 markets worldwide,
and has a growing global footprint. PTCL itself has many
customers with business outside of Pakistan, and is working
to globalize its brand. To support these developments, PTCL
is looking to expand its use of Frameworx components in the
years to come. This will include improvements to inventory
management and order fulllment processes, as well as data
modeling based on the Information Framework (SID).
40 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Fast deployment and
differentiated products bring
rapid success in Vietnam
Summary: GTEL Mobile was established in July 2008 as a joint venture between Vietnams GTEL Corporation
and Vimpel Communications Group, a leading provider of telecoms services in Eastern Europe. As a brand
new operator, its priority was to quickly build an operational business support infrastructure with integrated,
value added services. It planned to capture market share and create brand awareness in the Vietnamese
market through differentiated price plans and services. Key objectives included real-time rating for all
accounts, hybrid pricing models, real-time credit control for postpaid accounts and a single product catalog
with a focus on ease of use. Deployment began early April 2009 and was ready for service by July. It signed
up more than 700,000 customers in the rst two months through its Big Zero marketing campaign.
GTEL Mobiles rst goal was to launch and grab market share in
Vietnams highly competitive market. As a brand new operator,
its priority was to build an operational business support
infrastructure with integrated value added services quickly to
capture market share and to create brand awareness through
differentiated price plans and services.
Key objectives included real-time rating for all accounts,
hybrid pricing models, real-time credit control for postpaid
accounts, and a single product catalog that was easy to use.
GTELs business model called for non-discriminatory
customer care, meaning a centralized view of customers
accounts regardless of payment type across multiple
customer touch-points. They include the web, interactive voice
response, and call center. To achieve this, business processes
needed to be aligned across critical business functions such
as rating, charging, provisioning, ordering, customer care, and
billing.
Fast deployment
Given that GTEL wanted to launch as quickly as possible, it
decided it needed a solution that would provide products built
in to minimize integration efforts and time. Such a solution
would also enable the CSP to add rich functionality through
conguration. GTEL wanted to focus on the product offering
plan, rather than spend time on integration and customization.
GTEL chose IBM and Comverse at its partners, because both
had proven track records. IBM was chosen as the lead partner
to integrate the Comverse ONE Billing & Active Customer
Management solution and the many value-added services of
the Comverse HUB: SMS, MMS, mobile Internet, ringtone
solutions, and voicemail platform.
The Comverse solution incorporates many of the Application
Framework (TAM) components in a pre-integrated fashion
to streamline the end-to-end ow of the Forums Business
Process Framework (eTOM) business processes and elements,
since all components speak the same language.
Some of the key business processes provided by the
Business Process Framework included: customer interface
management; order handling; bill/invoice management; bill
payment and receivables management; rating and discounting;
and the management of bill events.
Additionally, the solution leverages an organized product
catalog/customer service management data model and
single logical data model, which have been mapped to the
Forums Information Framework (SID) to ensure a common
understanding of terminology and concepts across the
systems components.
The solutions architecture not only increases operational
efciency by reducing complexity, but also ensures an
enhanced and consistent end-user experience across all
customer touch-points. All of which contributed to an extremely
fast implementation of all the BSS requirements, (including
customer care, point of sale, inventory and service activation),
prepaid billing, and other value added services (SMS, MMS,
mobile data, voicemail, and others).
The results
The implementation began early April 2009 and was ready for
service by July 2009 a total of 16 weeks from the receipt of
the purchase order to going live.
So far, GTEL says the results have been outstanding, with a
BSS that can handle 2 million customers with complete BSS
functionality including real-time rating, charging, promotion,
value added services integration, and point of sale integration.
As a Vimpelcom company, GTEL is promoted under the
Beeline VN brand name and its main offering is called Big Zero.
After launching in July 2009, Big Zero attracted more than
700,000 active subscribers within two months.
The Big Zero price plan gives subscribers free on-net calls
after the rst two minutes of a normal price phone call. It is
backed by the solutions features, which include concurrent
tariffs and multiple balances.
"Some of the key business processes provided by the
Business Process Framework included: customer
interface management; order handling; bill/
invoice management; bill payment and receivables
management; rating and discounting; and the
management of bill events."
42 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
What were the business issues you wanted to address?
The project has developed a mediation and autodiscovery
solution for the IT and telecom networks to detect
inconsistencies between them and a centralized inventory
(CMDB), then to build a reconciliation model between the
networks database and the centralized inventory.
The idea was that we could detect inconsistencies and
update the network or the centralized inventory accordingly.
The centralized inventory contains information about all the
network elements and the relationships between them and
the service components. This information is crucial to feed all
service provider operation processes.
Why was this so important?
Communications service providers (CSPs) need to automate
processes and reduce human intervention. Centralized
inventory will keep the information necessary to support
process automation, namely service and resource inventory.
This information has to be reliable to avoid errors and the
introduction of manual tasks. An example is that when CSPs
need to make conguration changes, they have to know which
services would be affected and how they would be impacted.
Inconsistencies cause problems with provisioning,
performance and problem management: The combination of
human errors, high volumes of data and the complexity of the
data result in inaccurate data. This in turn means it takes longer
and costs more to plan and build the network, to manage
network capacity, deliver new services on time, and maintain
the network effectively.
Inaccurate data can also prevent you from being able to
change service characteristics in real-time to meet clients
needs or stop you managing the quality of service, which also
means not having the information needed to validate service
level agreements (SLAs).
Put another way, it means greater capital (CapEx) and
operational expenditure (OpEx), and dissatised customers.
What approach did you take?
We developed the solution based on our suite of integrated
OSS products, which we call NOSSIS, following international
best practices. We were keen to use standard compliance and
TM Forums Frameworx. NOSSIS uses TM Forum reference
models: the Information Framework (SID), the Multi-Technology
Network Model (MTNM), the Business Process Framework
(eTOM) and the Application Framework (TAM).
In this case we use our commercial off the shelf products:
Network Activator for autodiscovery and network mediation;
and a NETWIN module for reconciliation.
Simpler network changes
bring major benets
Summary: PT Inovao is the technology company of Portugal Telecom (PT) and leads its innovation on
IT and telecoms. OSS Solutions is one of the most important product areas and with its suite NOSSIS, PT
Inovao is expanding its business into new markets like Brazil and Africa. To help implement operational
processes efciently and reduce costs, PT Inovao provides a solution based on a single mediation system
for IT and telecom networks with autodiscovery and reconciliation functions, that ensure a centralized
inventory more accurately reects the network. The aim is to reduce problems in provisioning, performance
and problem management processes, caused by network inventory inconsistencies.
Jorge da Silva Gonalves, Director of OSS department at PT Inovao explains to editor Annie Turner how
using TM Forum standards, documents and best practices smoothed the way and the benets they delivered.
We chose to use TM Forum information models because they
are standard and generic, and you can apply them with several
network technologies including SDH, MPLS, IP and so on.
They are independent and can be used equally for the IT
world and telecoms, which is very important as one of our
key objectives was to have a single mediation system for the
telecom and IT networks to simplify reconciliation and to keep a
centralized inventory for both worlds.
Why is having a single system for the IT and
telecom networks a priority?
Today is no longer possible to dissociate IT and telecom
networks, as services are supported on both technologies.
CSPs need a centralized inventory with IT and telecom data
in order to have all service relationships. This was the main
driver to develop a single mediation and reconciliation system.
Another important issue was cost reduction. You dont need
different teams to run them and you only have a single system
to work with. Gaining this efciency was very important for our
customers.
Can you give more detail about your use of
TM Forum standards?
Yes, for Network Activator, which spans fulllment and
assurance, we relied on the OSS/J Order Management
Interface (see box copy below for more information).
The Network Activators main functions are multi-service
activation and mediation, providing an abstraction layer for
the OSS, prioritizing and scheduling orders and services, and
autodiscovery.
These matter because they bring a lot of benets to
customers such as enabling the faster integration of new
network elements and IT platforms, provisioning with zero
touch ow-through, and more exible congurations for new
services. The combination of the Network Activator's functions
also enables automatic activation, discovery and inventory
reconciliation processes.
The Network Activators Northbound Interface is service-
agnostic as the Order Management OSS/J applications
program interface (API) is based on TM Forums Information
Framework (SID). This means new services can be introduced
without changing the interface and that it can handle real-time,
synchronous operations and bulk, asynchronous operations
(see box on page 30).
The autodiscovery Database is based on Information
Framework and MTNM information models. This enables the
support of any type of Entities (IT or network).
What was the result of you using the TM Forum best
practices, documents and standards?
To begin with, we have a exible solution that can be
congured to provide similar treatment for both the IT and the
telecom networks. There is no need to pay for extra product
software to introduce new networks, only conguration is
required
The MTNM model allow us to support many network
technologies, IP, MPLS, SDH, Ethernet, PSTN, GPON (Gigabit
Passive Optical Network) with technology plug-ins that can be
congured in a standard way.
Through the OSS/J Order Management API we have an
abstraction layer which provides open, standard interfaces for
other systems.
What is OSS/J?
OSS/J delivers Frameworx-based interfaces implementations (OSS/J applications program interfaces) and design guidelines for
the development of component-based OSS systems. OSS/J technologies provide the foundation for unifying legacy systems
and new applications quickly, and at low cost.
The OSS/J APIs are multi-technology based and include Java, XML, and Web Services integration proles. Each integration
prole consists of specications, a reference implementation, and a conformance test suite (TCK). All OSS/J APIs are publicly
available at no charge. OSS/J became part of the TM Forum Interface Program (TIP) in April 2008.
44 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
The Information Frameworks role in more detail
The information model built on the Forums Information
Framework is made up of a package of customer services
(CFS), which may need network services (RFS). These
in turn are implemented by logical resources (LRs).
Entity specication enables the creation of a library of
RFS descriptors, which are composed of LR descriptors
(think Lego with the service elements acting as a set of
relatively simple building blocks that are interchangeable).
The information model uses Multi Technology Network
Management (MTMN, the latest version 3.5 is designated
TMF608 by the Forum), a set of documents which dene
the information exchange, or interface, between Network
Management Systems (NMS) and Element Management
Systems (EMS) enabling the management of SONET/
SDH, DWDM, ATM, Connectionless (Ethernet), as well as
ASON Control Plane based transport networks.
Is the project ongoing and what do you still
hope to achieve?
We continue to develop the project in line with our roadmap,
for example, we want to achieve a complete solution that
provides network operations with real-time information about
any differences between the real network and what we have in
the centralized inventory.
We need to give operations the choice between making a
change in the network or the database. At the moment, we can
only detect the inconsistencies and make the updates starting
from a manual action. Our goal is to build in intelligence so that
we can look into them and apply rules to work out whether we
should alter the network or the database automatically. This is
critical because it can be very serious if you get it wrong.
All operators are very nervous about automatic
recongurations because this is very complex and needs a lot
of study, which is why it is usually done with human control.
Why is being able to achieve this level of
automation so important to you?
Because if there are bad congurations in the network, you
can detect and correct them much faster if you can do it
automatically and minimize the service downtime. Also if the
centralized inventory is update faster, CSPs may avoid errors in
provisioning and impact analysis, saving money.
What have you achieved so far and what have you
learned for the future?
We built a single mediation system for autodiscovery and
reconciliation of IT and telecom network, which is a very
important step forward. For the moment, total automation
of the inventory reconciliation process and network
reconguration is our next step and requires further work.
The Business Process Framework (eTOM) is a highly efcient
way of identifying processes and activities that need to be
supported, while the usage of the Information Framework-
based common vocabulary facilitates communication and
knowledge exchange between all stakeholders and this too is
very important.

ENABLING SIMPLICITY
Being a service provider in todays market isnt
easy. Delivering the right level of service, at the
right price - and making a prot is a tall order.
To succeed, your business needs to run with
maximum agility, simplicity and efciency.
As the global industry association focused on
simplifying the complexity of running a service
providers business, TM Forum is collaboratively
delivering the standards that are taking the cost
and risk out of, and putting the exibility into,
running your business.

Visit www.tmforum.org today to join the worlds
leading service providers who are using our
Frameworx standard to enable simplicity.
EnablingSimplicityAD.indd 1 3/3/11 9:33 AM
46 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
The service provider offers services to consumers and
businesses, and its solutions include xed telephony and
Internet access, mobile and TV services in its home country;
mobile services in its domestic market and adjoining countries;
and data services in Western Europe.
Work to re-architect a legacy BSS stack that previously
included solutions from over 30 different vendors and with
hundreds of proprietary interfaces began in 2007. Before the
transformation, operating costs were high, and several months
were required to bring new services or tariffs to market. Some
projects required more than a year.
Now it has a single BSS stack that supports multiple
product areas, and which has an open architecture to facilitate
future expansion. Built on the TM Forums Business Process
Framework (eTOM), and utilizing a number of software
systems from Huawei, the resulting OSS/BSS supports unied
billing, invoicing, bill inquiry, credit control, and charging. There
is also a unied view through several channels including a web
portal, call center, and interactive voice response (IVR).
The project team describes the end result as a 3-3-3 benet,
meaning that small changes to its BSS system that once
took three weeks now take three days, those that took three
months now take three weeks, and those that once took three
years now take just three months.
Motivation for the transformation
In 2007, many operators in the more saturated European
markets were facing serious challenges. The growth in mobile
subscriptions slowed considerably while regulators were
demanding lower tariffs. Customer experience was becoming
a critical competitive factor and, at the same time, operators
needed to offer triple and quad play services to retain market
share.
In response to this challenging set of circumstances, as the
company began to offer an increasingly diversied portfolio of
services, its IT operations were modied to support each one
in turn. This organic growth pattern led to a BSS stack that was
difcult to understand and costly to operate. Specic limitations
included the following:
n Complex legacy BSS with more than 30 systems and
unaccounted relationships resulted in inefcient operations.
n There were separate systems for pre-paid, post-paid, and
Internet services.
n There were different service channels, each with a different
customer experience, which was confusing and inconvenient
for customers.
n This meant limited marketing opportunities and restricted
channel management.
Consolidated BSS
produces magic numbers
Since moving to a single BSS, a European operator has achieved magic numbers: Small changes to
the BSS that once took three weeks now take three days, those that took three months now take three
weeks, and those that once took three years now take just three months. Yet when the service provider
became a subsidiary of a larger operator about ve years ago, its 13 year old BSS comprised more than
30 systems with unaccounted relationships, which made them inefcient. There were different service
channels and experiences for the different services, which was a great inconvenience to customers and
limited marketing opportunities. New tariffs and services typically took from two to nine months to get
to market, while customer care and billing systems were inexible and reaching the end of their lives.
The whole architecture was complex and involved hundreds of proprietary protocols. All this changed
dramatically when the service provider chose TM Forums Frameworx to move to a single BSS with an
open architecture.
n It took a long time to get products to market, with a new
tariff or service development usually taking between two and
nine months.
n Customer care and billing systems had limited functionality,
as they were inexible and reaching the end of their lives.
n A complex architecture and over 200 proprietary interfaces
meant a rigid structure that got in the way of business goals.
Achieving greater simplicity
To address these issues, the operator sought a single vendor
that could integrate billing, customer relationship management
(CRM), contact center, and business intelligence under
a single, open, service-oriented architecture. The parent
company already had a relationship with Huawei, which was
chosen to engage with the subsidiary in a broader scope as
part of its BSS transformation project.
Following the guidance of TM Forum best practices, and
as an important risk-reduction strategy, the solution was
based on service oriented architecture (SOA) and was aligned
to TM Forums Business Process Framework (eTOM). The
Framework helped to identify redundant and missing steps in
legacy business processes.
The service provider also used the Business Process
Framework to create a quantitative assessment of the value,
cost and performance of existing processes. This helped to
eliminate duplication and nd missing steps in processes,
leading to more efcient operations. It also helped to speed
the development of new processes.
In addition, TM Forums Information Framework (SID)
was used to design standardized interfaces associated with
reusable components. The Information Architecture specied
entities, Unied Modeling Language models, and sequence
diagrams. System interfaces were designed based upon
principles from the Forums Integration Framework (TIP).
Information Architecture business entities and their associated
attributes were used to facilitate application integration in an
implementation-independent manner.
As the Integration Framework sets out, a layered model
was used to partition the information and data into domains,
aligned with Business Process Framework high-level concepts,
such as customer and product. The benet from this approach
is that each domain possesses a high degree of cohesion
between business entities within the domain, while remaining
loosely coupled with entities in other domains.
Overall, the total number of system interfaces was reduced
from many hundreds, and the total number of vendors to
fewer than 10.
The Business Process Frameworks benets went beyond
the purely technical. As with many companies, the use of an
established set of guidelines for the solution had an impact on
staff condence as well: its proven nature helped to reassure
the team that the end result would be robust as well as
scalable.
Greater prots
Today, the service providers unied customer view and data
model allow its CRM system to support consumer analysis
and cross-selling for the rst time. In addition, the operators
employees can promote a product, resolve a problem or
introduce a new service, based on a complete view of
customers activities. This has resulted in improved customer
satisfaction overall, and has allowed the company to improve
marketing and sales efciency, ultimately leading to improved
prots.
Customers have access to the same consistent information
via a number of channels, including call centers, IVR, an e-care
portal and an online shop. This approach has reduced costs
and improved the customers experience.
The parent company says the new architecture has given
its subsidiary a competitive advantage. It will exploit this by
rolling out to a number of technologies, starting with pre-
paid wireless, and continuing through a complete customer
lifecycle management solution.
48 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
In 2008, Microsoft launched Business Online Services which
includes online versions of business productivity tools such as
Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Ofce Communications
Online, and Ofce Live Meeting. To accomplish this, the
company integrated eight separate vendor solutions to offer 20
online services in just eight months from project start to nish:
a Herculean task the company says it could not have achieved
without extensive use of TM Forums Frameworx, which
played a big part, right from the start. Indeed Microsoft says
that the use of Frameworx reduced the implementation time to
commercial launch by nine to 12 months.
Project history
In early 2008, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer asked the
companys business groups to launch a number of hosted
services businesses by the end of the year. This required a big
change to the companys in-house systems. Says Eric Troup,
senior principal architect, Communications Sector Developer
and Platform Evangelism, Microsoft, Compared to the software
manufacturing business, a services business is much more
complicated. In particular, to offer a subscription-based service
requires ordering, provisioning, billing, and other functions that
are not unlike those that traditional communications service
providers (CSPs) use to offer subscription-based voice and data
services. These functions were not available in Microsofts
IT systems then, which had evolved to support software
manufacturing and licensing.
The requirement to build such a substantial infrastructure in
such a short time was challenging, to say the least, and so the
company chose to leverage TM Forum Frameworx to make this
new offering possible, efciently and quickly.
The Online Services OSS/BSS team started work in February
2008, and completed architectural and design work in early July
2008. Coding new components, conguring and integrating
Transforming IT systems to
support new business models
Summary: Microsoft decided to become a hosted services provider through a massive, global launch of a
new commercial offering but rst its IT systems had to be transformed to support the new business and
operational models. Microsoft Business Online Services simultaneously offers multiple business models,
and creates opportunities for its partners around the world in new markets, from small and medium sized
businesses to communications service providers. Its extensive use of TM Forums Frameworx and Business
Benchmarking metrics reduced the time to commercial launch by up to 12 months, and has eased the
subsequent integration of new elements and the expansion of its systems and service offerings.
existing components began in July. The new Microsoft Online
Services Customer Portal was live and operational in early
October, and the team ofcially rolled it out for the broader service
provider audience at a TM Forum event in November 2008.
In 2009, Microsoft added the Microsoft Online Syndication
Interface (MOSI) which is a step towards making the process of
implementing service syndication more uniform across multiple
channel partners. Derived from TM Forum Frameworx and
Service Delivery Framework (SDF), MOSI provides business-to-
business (B2B) interfaces for service ordering and provisioning.
For the system integrator, it provides an accelerator for use
when implementing complex bundled services leveraging
existing customer relationship management (CRM), order entry/
conguration, and order management systems.
The role of TM Forum Frameworx
In support of Online Services, Microsofts OSS/BSS deployment
includes service lifecycle management, fulllment, service
assurance, and charging/billing functionality. It includes
third-party systems as follows:
n MetraTechs hosted software package for order-to-cash,
professional services, and hosting;
n RMS deals with credit card charge-backs and credit collections;
n Cybersource provides a secure credit card payment gateway;
n Arvato handles partner payment fees;
n Arvato also provides services for Tier 1/Tier 2 customer and
partner care;
n SAP offers revenue recognition;
n Rightnow supports ticketing and reporting;
n WorldTax provides tax calculation services.
These systems were integrated using Frameworx elements as
follows:
n Business Process Framework (eTOM): Microsoft adapted the
Business Process Frameworks processes into its architecture.
They were modeled in an internal enterprise architecture
planning tool that facilitated a coordinated implementation
across multiple groups.
n Information Framework (SID): This was integral to the design
of contracts between the various components that make
up the Microsoft BSS/OSS to support Online Services. The
Information Framework was the starting point to dene the
data structures associated with the architecture.
n Application Framework (TAM): Microsoft used an internal
enterprise architecture modeling methodology called Solution
Domains. The Application Framework was used as the starting
point to dene the solution domains that Microsoft used to
model the entire BSS/OSS architecture.
n Integration Framework (MTOSI/TIP): Published application
program interfaces (APIs) and MTOSI served as a starting
point for Microsofts implementation. This enabled solution
designers to generate actual contracts between application
framework components when modeling business processes.
In addition, the Microsoft implementation considered the work
of the Architecture Harmonization and TIP in the formulation
of its methodology to design and implement its BSS/OSS
architecture.
n Software Enabled Services (SES) Management Solution
(formerly SDF): Microsoft contributed to and leveraged the
SES to help shape its thinking around how hosted services
are dened. The development of the MOSI specication and
software development kit was directly inuenced by the SES
work. In addition, follow-on work on Service Delivery Platform-
like (SDP) functionality was accelerated by the SES solution work.
n TM Forum Business Benchmarking: At least eight Business
Benchmarking metrics were directly incorporated into the
Microsoft Operations Dashboards to support the initial release.
n MOSI: The addition of the MOSI in 2009 was an important
step towards beginning to automate service syndication
order processing.
Derived from the TM Forum Frameworx and Software Enabled
Services Management Solution, MOSI provides the B2B
interfaces for service ordering and provisioning.
Once the syndication partner adds the Microsoft Online
Services products to their product catalog, it can utilize its CRM
and order entry systems to take and congure orders that
can include Microsoft content in the bundle. The syndication
partners order management system then passes the order to
Microsoft via the MOSI to accomplish provisioning of applicable
Microsoft services and receive status back. The addition of MOSI
cut the associated time for B2B processes by 80 percent while
greatly reducing the number of steps and opportunities for error.
Overall the Frameworx approach underpinned Microsofts new
service offering, enabling the company to:
n Support multiple business models including direct to
subscribers, indirect through partners, indirect through
another service provider, and service syndication offered to
companies and partners in over 100 countries.
n Put in place 7,000 channel partner agreements worldwide to
sell the offering.
n Develop channel partnerships in multiple sectors, including
traditional communication service providers (Bell Canada, BT,
Telenor, TDC, PGi, Vodafone, Orange, Telecom New Zealand,
Telstra); technology distributors (IngramMicro, Tech Data),
consulting and integration rms, and others.
n Bring major benets to Microsofts partners and end
customers, who can rapidly and cost-effectively deploy
software without needing to buy, install, and administer a
server.
Expanded offering
Microsoft is to continue to scale its OSS/BSS platform to meet
global deployment requirements in the more than 100 countries
in which the company operates. Expansion includes the exibility
to handle both subscription and usage-based cloud offerings on
its Azure platform.
Through service syndication, CSP partners are offering
Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS)
bundled with local services to customers such as Small and
Medium Businesses (SMBs). Microsoft has announced the
next evolution of Microsoft Online Services. BPOS will be
expanded into Microsoft Ofce 365, which will bring together
cloud versions of Microsoft's most trusted communications and
collaboration products with the latest version of its desktop suite,
for businesses of all sizes. It will be supported by an evolving
BSS/OSS stack based on the TM Forum Frameworx reference
architecture, which has proven its ability to scale to meet global
demand.
An unexpected benet of this project was the amount of
communications Microsoft received about its use of the TM
Forum Frameworx. The company is now using it more broadly
as part of its Solution Domain Enterprise Architecture Planning
methodology and Microsoft IT is using elements of Frameworx
for a broader range of internal global line of business systems
not related to the Online Services business.
50 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
One of Indias leading operators offers a range of communication
services spanning mobile, wireless, wireline, public booth
telephony and Internet services, based on both CDMA and GSM
platforms. In total it serves close to 40 million subscribers across
the country.
As a well established player, the communications service
provider was going through a phase of high growth in one of
the worlds most dynamic markets, but the rapidly growing
subscriber base was making it a real challenge to maintain
service levels and strengthen its brand.
The client decided to partner with Wipro Consulting to address
the following key issues:
n Non-standard processes were in use across the business,
with varying degrees of maturity.
n There were pockets of resistance from user groups because
earlier standardization efforts had had poor adoption and
success rates.
n Large numbers of processes were either obsolete or out of date.
n Process execution was inconsistent and there were
slippages regarding adherence to the quality of service
specied in service level agreements (QoS/SLAs).
n A lack of proper process controls and metrics resulted in
uninformed and delayed decision making.
n Static process repository and ineffective (manual)
performance measurement systems were subject to
manipulation.
Addressing the issues
To address these issues Wipro worked with the clients business
excellence team to indentify critical business processes from
Measuring success through
an open process architecture
Summary: Wipro helped one of Indias leading service providers align its business process architecture
to TM Forums Frameworx. The goal was to establish standardized processes across business units and
develop a robust, real-time performance measurement system linking operational key performance indicators
to business goals and objectives. In total some 900 processes were aligned to the Business Process
Framework (eTOM). This was key to the operator being able to merge and consolidate between 15 and 20
percent of processes across customer relationship management and resource management and operation.
It also enabled the company to get its wireless services to market up to 30 percent faster and improved
governance and process control through real-time key performance indicator tracking. The company also
built on the Business Process Framework to develop standardized critical business processes that had been
identied across four business units.
core operations customer relationship management (CRM) and
technology (network and IT). The combined team opted to use
the Business Process Framework (eTOM), part of TM Forums
Frameworx integrated business architecture. The Business
Process Framework is based on customer-centric principles and
the project team built on it to support the clients organizational
structure to help it achieve superior levels of quality and
performance.
Wipro Consultings solution followed a four phase approach
towards that aim, starting with process discovery, through which
the team prioritized critical business processes and studied the
state of the process architecture. Next came process analysis
which involved assessing the current state of alignment with
the Business Process Framework, and identifying gaps and
bottlenecks with regard to industry best practices.
The third phase was process harmonization, that is, guring
out the best-t process architecture aligned to the customized
Business Process Framework and the organizations structure. It
also involved publishing process models using common symbols
and notations (Business Process Modeling Notation BPMN).
The nal phase was process controls, which meant dening
key performance indicators for processes and identifying data
sources for enabling real-time monitoring. It also covered
dening and developing a balanced scorecard structure, linking
the organizations objectives with business objectives and
identied measures for senior management.
The role of standards
This solution revolved around aligning the service providers
process architecture to a customized Business Process
Framework process hierarchy, focusing on:
n order handling and fulllment;
n customer request and complaint management;
n problem handling;
n QoS/SLA management;
n service assurance;
n billing and payments management;
n and technology management and operations (resource
management and operation RMO) covering both IT and
network resources.
Short and long term benets
The project delivered both short and long term impacts and
business benets.
The standardized process architecture meant that a total of
900 processes across the enterprise were analyzed and aligned
to the Business Process Framework across the levels of Strategy
Infrastructure and Product (SIP), Operations, and Enterprise
Enterprise
Risk
Management
Enterprise
Effectiveness
Management
Knowledge
and Research
Management
Financial
and Asset
Management
External
Relations
Management
Human
Resource
Management
Enterprise Management
Supply Chain
Development and
Management
Service Development
and Management
Resource Development
and Management
Marketing and Offer
Management
Supplier/Partner
Relationship
Management
Service Management
and Operations
Technology
Management and
Operations
Customer Lifecycle
Management
Strategy, Infrastructure & Product Operations
Customer
Strategic and
Enterprise
Planning
Customized Process
Architecture
Frameworx Business Process Framework
Management. Some 15 to 20 percent of processes across CRM
and RMO were consolidated and/or merged and there has been a
30 percent reduction in getting new mobile services and products
to market.
The new architecture has also meant increased conformance to
external audits and readiness for the TL9000 quality management
system standard, designed to meet the supply chain quality
requirements of the global communications industry.
More effective process performance measurement has
brought increased governance and effective process control
through real-time KPI tracking.
The implementation of the balanced scorecard with real-time
monitoring of measures helps senior management executives
make more informed decisions.
Throughout the whole project, change management created
awareness about building a culture of measuring performance
across the organization.
Process
Control
Process
Discovery
Process
Analysis
Process
Harmonization
Prioritize Critical Business processes
Study As-Is process architecture
Identify key roles & responsibilities
Dene process metrics - CSFs & KPIs
Link KPIs with real-time dashboards
Customize Business Process Framework process hierarchy
Map process architecture to eTOM
Publish standardized processes
Assess current Business Process Framework alignment
Identify process gaps & bottlenecks
Design best-practice processes
Figure 1: Benets realization: Combining Business Process Framework (eTOM)
and Business Process Modeling Notation for Request & Complaint Management
ENABLING INNOVATION
The game is changing for communications service
providers. Cutting costs is merely a ticket to play,
not to grow. The key to growth lies with innovation
underpinned by business agility, smart partnerships
and inspired creativity.
providers business, TM Forum brings together a
community of more than 50,000 professionals on
the cutting edge of innovation. As a unifying force for
the industry, its time for you to join more than 750
companies across 195 countries collaborating to
simplify service innovation.

Visit www.tmforum.org to learn more about
TM Forum membership and how we help you
enable innovation.
How to save a
million dollars a year
Summary: A leading mobile service provider in South East Asia wanted to improve the efciency of its
entire network and service management processes to facilitate the rollout of 3G and leased lines. It saw the
increase in network coverage as critical to maintaining its market leadership, along with improved service
delivery and better quality trouble management. To this end, it deployed a transformational OSS solution,
in which the use of TM Forums Frameworx played an important role, particularly in enabling a number of
vendors to work together, easing integration and providing end-to-end visibility of the converged networks.
The end results include the operator saving up to $1.1 million a year on the procurement of transmission
equipment. Other returns on investment include an 80 percent improvement in data quality and efciency due
to better plant rollout processes, while automated error detection and correction for network management
system issues have eliminated manual tasks 100 percent.
In its quest to extend network coverage and improve
operational efciency, this South East Asian communications
service provider (CSP) transformed its disparate and complex
network management systems through the deployment of a
converged end-to-end OSS solution. This involved upgrading
all the network and service management areas, from
business planning, to network rollout and support in its radio,
transmission, xed, and access networks.
The project included cross-domain integration in its drive
to optimize its assets, and their exibility, and speed up its
3G rollout all while maintaining operational excellence and
fostering interoperability.
The projects scope
The network operator and NetCracker jointly analyzed current
and future modes of operations. They leveraged NetCrackers
best practices for business process re-engineering and adhered
to TM Forum Frameworx, in particular, the Forums Application
Framework (TAM) to achieve the separation of functionality and
management tasks, operations execution, and cross-domain
consolidated management.
The foremost issue was to gain an holistic view of end-to-
end, cross-domain system management, as different parts
of a single process were spread across multiple applications.
This meant the operator had little insight into exactly how its
network was used, and inventory was found to be inaccurate
about half of the time, which wasted a lot of resources,
including unnecessary site visits.
There was also a lack of meaningful key performance
indicators (KPIs), and even so, only a third of rollouts were
completed within predened KPIs.
Another priority was to address the lack of automation in the
execution layer, which meant a lot of manual data collection
and reporting.
Crossing departmental borders
Network rollout is a collaborative process touching many
departments: an effective OSS solution provides visibility into
and aids the integration of network resources and business
processes, and their functions. The deployment of NetCrackers
OSS solution involved 3G cell site planning, installation, and
maintenance, along with backhaul planning, design, provisioning,
and installation. It embraced managing the rollout, from nancial
and asset management, to reporting to government as required
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
ENABLING INNOVATION
The game is changing for communications service
providers. Cutting costs is merely a ticket to play,
not to grow. The key to growth lies with innovation
underpinned by business agility, smart partnerships
and inspired creativity.
providers business, TM Forum brings together a
community of more than 50,000 professionals on
the cutting edge of innovation. As a unifying force for
the industry, its time for you to join more than 750
companies across 195 countries collaborating to
simplify service innovation.

Visit www.tmforum.org to learn more about
TM Forum membership and how we help you
enable innovation.
54 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
and licensing matters, and procurement.
The plan was to establish a single, centralized, integrated
inventory database to provide all engineering departments with
quick and accurate information and to support the operators
multiple businesses. This would also present an end-to-end,
convergent view of the entire network and streamline the
rollout, service fulllment, and service assurance processes to
improve customer satisfaction and business efciency.
The operator wanted to re-engineer business processes and
replace proprietary inventory and work ow systems to enable
the planning, operations, and business departments to see the
entire inventory and, importantly, have visibility into the capacity
management processes, at the time and in the future.
Frameworxs contribution
The deployment relied heavily on three elements of TM
Forums Frameworx. The Application Framework (TAM) enabled
the stakeholders to understand each other (through use of a
common language) while building the solution architecture and,
in particular, while classifying current and legacy systems, and
designing the target solution and a transition strategy.
This was very important, as so many companies worked
alongside NetCracker to bring about the operational
transformation. IBM was a service integrator on the project,
while SAP handled asset management and budgeting.
Performance and fault management applications were dealt
with by partners including Metrica and NetExpert.
Network planning systems involved ACTIX EPS. Other suppliers
that played a part in the project included MapInfo and several
more for element management and network management
applications, from the radio access network to the core
network.
NetCracker and partners used the Business Process
Frameworks (eTOM) Strategy, Infrastructure, and Product
Figure 1: Description of the integration interfaces
CRM Financial & Asset management
GIS
Supplier
Management
Trouble Ticketing
Service Quality
Management
Engineering
Design Tools
Fault
Management
EMS/NMS
Service
Inventory &
Provisioning
Outside
Plant
Discovery
and
Reconciliation
Rollout
Automation
Workforce
Management
Resource
Inventory
Design and
Planning
Conguration
Management
NetCracker
Resource
Activation
Site
Contractor
Field
Engineers
(SIP) processes in the resource layer. The project also relied
on the Business Process Frameworks Operations processes
specically Resource Management and Operations to design
the rollout process.
Moreover, certain general Level 3 sub-processes in the
Business Process Framework were further decomposed to
cover mobile specics, like site search, surveys, contracts, and
so on.
The solution also uses the Forums Information Framework
(SID) as the standard to model managed inventory objects in
NetCracker, as well as in information exchange in the system
integration process. Besides utilizing Information Framework
models, NetCracker also expanded them with mobile specic
resources like cell, sector, cell relationship, servers, and so on.
The success of integration and migration depends on
building a common, exible, and re-useable knowledge domain
that governs and maps disparate data syntax and semantics
(for example, common naming conventions). NetCrackers
data mediation engine and NetCrackers implementation
methodology addressed these challenges.
A million dollars
The new OSS solution has achieved a number of key goals,
starting with more accurate and consistent information about
assets. There is now one data source for applications, with
NetCrackers solution serving as a consolidated inventory,
handling data from more than 10 cross-vendor transmission
network management services (NMS), four radio NMS, and the
core network NMS.
Better support for the discovery and re-allocation of unused
network assets, as well as improved capacity management, has
had a major impact on operational efciency. For example, by
better managing capacity, the transmission provisioning process,
and reservations in the transmission network, NetCracker
is helping the operator save up to $1.1 million a year on the
procurement of transmission equipment.
More accurate inventory information has also reduced
rejections for work orders for eld engineers, caused by
inaccurate inventory, by up to 50 percent. It has also speeded
up the rollout of cell sites through automated control and
management, which uses the single data source which has
reduced delays in management. The average site rollout time
used to be 239 days; by streamlining and managing the business
process, the new OSS has shaved between 10 and 20 percent
off that time, depending on the type of site.
The conguration management for 2G and 3G radio networks
offered by the OSS improved data consistency, leading to an
efciency improvement of 30 percent, while the full automation
of error detection and correction for NMS conguration issues
eliminated all manual tasks literally by 100 percent.
Fewer, more specialized applications
The repositioning of applications for technical operations, and
their integration with control and management, have resulted
in fewer, more effective, specialized applications. They have
delivered cost savings because it is less time consuming to
maintain fewer OSS applications: NetCrackers solution replaced
eight legacy systems and over 100 spreadsheets and other
documents, integrating their data and functionality into the
solution. Some 20 fewer system engineers and business staff
are now needed, again making savings on operational costs.
Faults are detected more quickly through converged, cross-
domain, multiple-technology inventory management.
The service provider has already seen a return on investment
for its rollout acceptance processes and, due to greater
visibility, is able to control and track process KPIs. This has led
to some 60 percent of manual tasks being eliminated in the
rollout acceptance processes. Efciency has been increased by
around 30 percent as redundant steps and checklists have been
removed. In addition much less time is needed to build a process
for new equipment one days conguration instead of three
weeks development.
The projects outside plant rollout processes reduced the
number of manual tasks by 50 percent, while improving data
quality and efciency by 80 percent.
The bottom line is that in addition to saving over a million
dollars a year, this Asian service provider is in a strong position
for continued, efcient, and cost-effective network expansion
due to automation, the reduction of manual tasks, and the
implementation of Frameworx.
56 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Views from the top
about the business benets
of TM Forum standards
At Management World Americas held at Orlando in November 2010, we sent our roving reporter,
TM Forums market strategist, Tony Poulos, to interview some of our members about their use of and
views about using the Forums standards and the benets they deliver. This is what they had to say.
Sunil Lingayat, technical director, Northrop Grumann
TP: Welcome Sunil. Your company is very much involved in
defense and government. Why are you here at Management
World Americas 2010?
SL: Management World Americas for telecom service provider
or cloud service provider really offers a lot of value in how to
deliver a service. There is a lot of work that is being done that
can easily be leveraged, such as Frameworx, that really helps
anyone playing in this space to get a good start.
TP: You are v much involved in the Business Process
Framework (eTOM). When you use it as a part of your business
operation, how does it work out? What attracted you to it?
What are the most important bits you use?
SL: We primarily leverage eTOM [the Business Process
Framework] for building our cloud services delivery framework,
really because its is already a proven framework in the
telecoms space. There are a lot of similarities in offering
telecom and cloud services, so we are leveraging that to get a
good start on building a cloud delivery framework.
TP: Are there any specic areas of the Business Process
Framework that help in terms of defense, for example, security
must be a major issue for you?
SL: Security is a major issue, but what we are more focused
on in leveraging [the Business Process Framework] is the
fulllment issues and monetizing aspects, and also the ability
to break it into the resource, the service and user layers, which
really is a good framework too.
TP: Will you be part of the process of providing input into the
development of the Business Process Framework as you nd
things that need enhancing? Thats how the Forum operates,
building on input from our members.
TM Forums ITIL activities
ITIL advocates that IT services must be aligned to the needs
of the business and underpin the core business processes.
It provides guidance to organisations on how to use IT as
a tool to facilitate business change, transformation and
growth.
TM Forum has been working with itSMF (now itSMFi), the
trade body whose members develop ITIL, to put it and the
Business Process Framework on a converging course. Their
aim is to address any interworking issues, and ensure that
more integrated support is available to users.
TM Forum and itSMF recognize that both frameworks
have strengths that, if combined, would bring major
benets to all the industry sectors involved in delivering
convergent services. Release 8.0 of the Business Process
Framework, launched late in 2008, has direct support for
ITIL embedded in it, as will Release 9.0. Both show how the
two Frameworks can be used together to mutual advantage.
In addition, the two organizations produced a joint Technical
Report on integrating the frameworks.
ITIL has been adopted by thousands of organisations world-
wide, and is supported by vendors and service providers
including IBM, Telefnica, HP and British Telecom (BT).
For more information please contact Mike Kelly, TM
Forums senior technical manager and subject matter expert,
via mkelly@tmforum.org.
SL: I provided some information about how leveraging [the
Business Process Framework] intersects with ITIL, which is
another dominant framework, so hopefully we will be able to
interact more on that.
TP: We are also actively involved in that right now.
SL: Thats right.
Brian Cappellani, CTO, Sigma Systems
We are an OSS [operations support system] vendor. We
provide what we call the service layer abstraction, sitting on
top of the network, abstracting out the complexities of the
network, both from a provisioning and activation perspective
top down as well as from a mediation perspective, from
the bottom up. We use a lot of TM Forum Frameworx, actually.
They form the basis of a lot of the applications and products
that weve built.
From the provisioning and activation perspective, we use
OSS/J, the ordering and activation framework, which was the
JSR264 order management API [application program interface].
Folks on our team helped contribute to that specication and
weve found that it is getting broadly adopted in the OSS eld.
From the mediation side, were actively involved in the IDPR
[Internet Protocol Detail Record], usage management side of
the house. IPDR provides a great framework adopted by a lot
What is IDPR and why does it matter?
Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR) technology enables the collection of metrics on user behavior and simplies the
integration of third party applications. Service usage can be monitored and analyzed to bill a subscriber for their consumption
(such as bandwidth used) or to manage service consumption, abusers of acceptable use policy, Quality of Service, or Quality
of Experience. IPDRs exibility is critical for next generation services, whose usage requirements are difcult to predict and
which could use a variety of complex accounting models. IPDR allows the operator to monitor service patterns and usage, and to
establish differentiated services or service levels, such as with different service level agreements or prices. IPDR can be applied
to capacity management, trafc analysis, user trending, revenue assurance, billing, digital advertising, and other use cases under
exploration by TM Forums Cable Interest Group. IPDR records are created by cable modems, multimedia terminal adapters, set-
top boxes, and other devices, and used by OSS and BSS applications. The IPDR specications provide more robust data than can
be captured with other standards. The IPDR specications include:
n requirements for IPDR collection and encoding, and transport protocols to exchange IPDR records
n IPDR service specication design guidance
n sample IPDR Service Denition Documents.
CableLabs has adopted IPDR/SP as a mandatory part of Data over Cable Service Interface Specication (DOCSIS) and
OpenCable. Other adoptions of IPDR have been made by industry bodies including Alliance for Telecommunications Industry
Solutions, American National Standards Institute, The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers, Java Community Process,
3rd Generation Partnership Project, and International Telecommunication Union. The ongoing development and adoption of the
IPDR specication is made through CableLabs and TM Forum multi-service operator members contributions. In addition to
maintaining the IPDR technology standard, TM Forum hosts an IPDR Users Group that collaborates on implementation specic
challenges. If youd like more information or to join the online community, please go to
http://www.tmforum.org/BestPracticesStandards/IPDR/4501/Home.html
of our customers in the cable space, around not only usage
management, but network capacity planning as well as policy
control.
When [the] IDPR [Organization] became part of the Forum
[back in 2007], it brought a lot of the customers who are using
IPDR with it to the Forum, so we didnt necessarily need to
introduce it to our customers. I think that since IPDR became
part of the Forum, it has raised IPDRs visibility as a standard in
the industry as a whole.
Events like Management World Americas and Management
World [to be held in Dublin in May 2011] are great because
they bring operators together. There is a great opportunity for
learning in all the sessions, but I also really nd, particularly in
the Forum, its the one area where the key issues that the
industry is facing are debated and discussed in a very open and
very constructive manner.
58 www.tmforum.org
CASE STUDY
HANDBOOK
CASE STUDY HANDBOOK
Ian Collins, President, Atria Networks
TP: C you tell me about your company and how it uses
Frameworx please?
IC: We are a telecommunications company centered in Ontario
Canada. We are a Metro Ethernet provider, serving the business
and public sector, and carrier customers our speciality is high
capacity broadband. We are in an amalgamation of several
regional telecom companies and over the last few years, weve
been gathering up about 5,600 route kilometers of ber, about
1,000 on-net buildings and what we needed to do was take a
good look at our business processes and we bought the regional
assets, they all did things eight different ways.
The processes werent aligned with any particular standard per
se and in my experience, weve always used the TM Forums
standards and Frameworx-type of processes, so we wanted to
go back and look at what we do today and then really move our
business processes towards being an industry standard.
It was a long process. It took probably 10 months of working
with our staff to get them rst to understand what the TM
Forum processes would do for them as the business and why
it is important and then education and then actually getting the
work done. Following that we were able to then start looking
at back ofce vendors, but again, we were looking for a vendor
that actually supported the Frameworx standards and could
implement our processes the way we felt they needed to be
done in the business.
TP: are you happy with the results?
IC: Absolutely. Weve recently gone live with it and we feel
weve a very disciplined and a lot more rigor in our programs
now. Our clean order package is truly clean with the right
information and the work ows are working quite well so far.
Fall 2011 edition of TM Forum Case Study Handbook
The next edition of our Case Study Handbook will be
published digitally and printed in time for Management
World Americas 2011 (to be held at the Peabody Hotel,
Orlando, Florida, November 8-10). It will contain a collection
of case studies from service providers around the world
outlining how they derived quantiable business benets
from using TM Forums Frameworx, training, Revenue
Assurance Maturity Model, Business Benchmarking
Program, documents, collaboration and best practices.
If you would like to submit a case study for consideration,
please contact Annie Turner, TM Forums Publications
Managing Editor direct via aturner@tmforum.org no later
than September 5. Members are welcome to enter as
many submissions as they wish, so long as they meet
our stringent criteria of demonstrating quantiable
benets derived from TM Forums standards and other
activities. For more detail, please see
www.tmforum.org/CaseStudies/2212/home.html.
Please note that we will continue to publish case studies
on our website, as usual, so in the meantime, go to
www.tmforum.org/SubmitaCaseStudy/2742/home.html
to get started.
www.tmforum.org

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