Transform order-delivery experiences & automate
How can CSPs approach transforming service delivery?
Context
- Service delivery within CSPs gets increasingly complex.
- Layer upon layer of processes and systems built to support products become constraints.
- Slow, inflexible with high order-fallout.
- People need to fill in gaps resulting is growing Opex costs.
- Constrained, unable to respond to business goals: new products, higher quality, faster, lower price
- Exiting & traditional order-management / workflow systems, not helping.
SIMON Benefits
- Easy introduction into complex environments.
- Create a clear view of everything that is important. Bring immediate insight into end-to-end performance and process.
- Enable action: Get your agility back. Pragmatic workflow and automation.
- Start by creating value: deliver on new asks in parallel. Then terraform existing services: bring value to legacy services and enhance operations.
- Start benefiting from digital optimization and digital customer experiences.
Gradual build up of complexity
Most established operators of technology based services make their money by connecting many customers to a network or service platform.
Services are most often composed of equipment, networks and platforms configured to enable specific customer value.
An operator will typically offer a range of services across domains (for example: mobile, FTTH, fixed access, Internet, MPLS VPN, VoIP, Hosting, Security, etc).
But every service is different. Each underpinned by some form of build practice (people, processes, systems, data) which prescribes tasks which need to be performed onto broad array of equipment / networks / platforms.
A mature operator could well have:
- Around 12 major practice patterns (associated with primary technology);
- more than 200 service practice variations;
- tens-of-thousands of orders in progress;
- pipeline of new products in development
- backlog of operational enhancements desperately needed.
NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
During product development the service-delivery team develop an understanding of how technologies combine within your existing eco-system and make whatever changes are required to organisations, processes and systems.
Most new products result in:
- Extension of scope and functionality in core IT platforms.
- Addition of new technology and systems.
- Creation of new process and modifications to some common processes.
As experience delivering a new product grows, incremental provisioning / fulfillment optimizations are identified.
It is often very tough to make even small adjustments to streamline delivery.
MOST NEW PRODUCTS FAIL
Most product business cases also included a base assumption that the “build” operation will achieve economies-of-scale for each service.
According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, 80% of new consumer products fail.
In our experience, this characteristic is true for CSPs. A high proportion of new products / technologies don’t result in the commercial success envisaged. They do not reach a point of “constant returns to scale”.
What happens most of the time?
- You invest in developing a new product, supporting technology and the delivery capability.
- Demand for the product is weak.
- Some product is in commercial operation, but the number is much lower than planned. Sub-scale.
- It is very difficult to decommission the services you have sold. It can be expensive and challenge your credibility.
- Result:
- Costs and complexity get baked in.
- Many products exist as a “hidden tax” within the business.
TECHNOLOGY CHURN IS MESSY
CSPs are also faced with technology induced churn. Customers migrate to a product enabled by a new technology.
For example, an existing MPLS network will be re-contracted onto a solution based on SDWAN technology.
This migration between products is much more complicated than adding a new customer as many more use-cases need to be supported.
Almost all “build” teams get constrained
Against this backdrop of ever increasing complexity, a service-delivery team are given targets to:
- Support new product delivery,
- Deliver increasingly more services,
- Reduce the cost of fulfilment,
- Speed up service delivery,
- Improve the quality.
In most cases the cost is expected to remain flat or decrease. With a “do more with less” or “zero based budgeting” mandate. A scarce system.
WHAT NOW?
We would advocate:
- Understand the dominant end-to-end patterns and flows within your environment.
- Attach instrumentation /analytics to flows and surface performance insights.
- Identify problems. Easy to spot: delivery bottlenecks, redundant activities, high-average task durations and high-order-fallouts.
- Identify areas with the greatest leverage and make an improvement. Projects where a small change will result in a large benefit.
What recommendations are typical?
- Simplify business processes – fewer, leaner steps. Rooted in outcomes.
- Increase automation.
- Make manual tasks more efficient.
- Increase quality of task outcomes – reduce fallout is critical.
- Decommission products, processes and systems.
Where is the catch?
Projects require adaption of core IT systems performing workflow, order-management, automation.
Can you make the necessary changes?
Or have you lost your agility and are unable to take reasonable action.
Traditional systems cannot keep up, unlikely to help
At the core of most established providers is some form of order-management / workflow system, typically forming part of some complex, expensive, fragile, set of inter-connected systems.
These traditional order-orchestration / workflow systems have not dealt well with the snowballing complexity we described above.
It is estimated that order fallout is some environments is as high as 70%, leading to delayed or lost revenue.
SOLUTIONS EVERYWHERE?
Many of the large global software companies built impressive new order management / fulfilment platforms.
Most common themes and capabilities:
- Catalogue based (build up a library for reuse)
- Embrace agile and collaboration (product development is slow because it is waterfall)
- Standards (TMForum)
- Sexy design-time user interface
Unfortunately, new offers are incremental extensions of process-engine technology and business model which has been identified as end-of-life. While it is important to bring agile and collaborative methodologies to “design-time” activities, operations teams are still mechanistically compromised.
SIMON, data driven delivery
Insights into this complexity from our customers inspired us to conceive a data driven “delivery-enablement” platform, called Simon.
While we can go on and on… the following six benefits are worth highlighting.
BENEFIT 1: INTEGRATION HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER
- Connect in easily to popular CSP / Telco systems.
- Embrace your Excel and custom databases.
- Connect to APIs in minutes.
- Zero-touch interoperability with Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs systems.
As a data-driven platforms, Simon behaves more like a “Business Intelligence” technology than a traditional order-management system.
Initially it might make sense to deploy Simon as an SaaS overlay:
- Lightly connecting to primary data sources.
- Deliver immediately on a few new asks in parallel to existing systems.
BENEFIT 2: SMART STABLE FOUNDATION
Data must form the foundation of any transformation. But first it needs a make-over – cleaned, cut and shaped into a capable base.
- Smartly transform and aggregate your data so it is brutally simple.
- Easy, open access to transformed data.
- Find, navigate and act on relationships and associations which where invisible.
BENEFIT 3: INSIGHT INTO PERFORMANCE
Once data is connected into Simon, a range of instrumentation and analytics becomes available.
“we need to let the data speak”
Get visibility into what is important. Quickly identify problems like:
-
- delivery bottlenecks.
- redundant activities.
- high-average task durations.
- high-order-fallouts.
BENEFIT 4: INSIGHT INTO FLOW
Digital footprints in your data is used to extract the processes actually being followed in your business. Understand where delivery is delayed and things are going wrong.
“data has a better idea”
How often is work completed out of sequence?
In which tasks is the most time lost?
Process Mining is a process analysis method that aims to discover, monitor and improve real processes (processes not assumed) by extracting knowledge easily from available event logs in the systems of current information of an organization.
It goes beyond the pure presentation of the key data of the process, recognizing the contextual relationships of the processes, presenting them in the form of graphic analysis in order to diagnose problems and suggest improvements in the quality of the process models.
With Process Mining it will be possible to detect or diagnose problems based on facts and not on conjectures or intuitions. Process mining seeks the confrontation between event data (observed behavior) and process models (hand-made or automatically discovered).
Process mining is integrated into Simon. In smart graphical views you can see the sequence and timing of task completion.
Bring immediate insight into end-to-end performance and process.
BENEFIT 5: TAKE ACTION
Simon gives you your agility back.
- Create new flows and automations in minutes.
- Easily reuse what you configure across different services.
- Process library with out-of-the-box processes based on industry best practices, including access, network, voip, cloud, mobile and SME.
Within a graphical user interface, a sequence of desired activities and actions are mapped to your data, resulting in a workflow or automations.
Configure these to meet your requirement and publish.
Simon’s data-engine enables:
True rapid prototyping of flows
Configure, see, change, see, when ready push the change of all users.
Small purpose built flows.
Easily tackle tedious tasks with small time-saving automations between applications.
Ready-sequencing
Speeding up delivery through parallel tasking.
Continuous improvement.
Process mining holds up a mirror and shows you what is going on.
BENEFIT 6: DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Simon will get you in control of your data.
By looking at data from across your business, understand how you customer wishes to be serviced.
- Understand the existing services used by a customer
- Navigate how do you best establish and run the project.
- Achieve a shared single-view of all build and run.
- Interact and collaborate with the customer.
Our Chatbot and Interactive Digital capabilities will transforming how you think about Customer Experience during service delivery.