TM Forum Case study handbook_2013

CASE STUDYHANDBOOK 2013

Sponsored by:

GrEATEr bUSinESS AnD iT AGiliTY foSTErS innovATion

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16 stories of world-beating innovation and success

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Advisors:Keith Willetts, Non-executive Chairman, TM ForumMartin Creaner, President and Chief Executive Officer, TM ForumNik Willetts, Chief Strategy Officer, TM Forum

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CASE STUDYHANDBOOK

WELCOME

Page 4 Crossing the chasm to digital servicesBy Nik Willetts, Chief Strategy Officer, TM Forum

FRAMEWORX

Page 6 What is TM Forum Frameworx and how can it help you?TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices provides the blueprint for effective, efficient business operations

DIGITAL SERVICES

Page 8How to succeed – and fast – in M2M through conformance with standardsHow Hughes Telematics, Inc. was able to accelerate its innovative business model and generate millions of dollars of extra revenue

Page 10 Managing the service lifecycle brings in more than €30 million a yearSAPO’s Service Delivery Broker has furthered its success in introducing digital services

Page 13 Catalyst proves Bandwidth Exchange commercially viableBT Group championed the Bandwidth Exchange Catalyst project and in a live demonstration showed how new revenues can be generated for service providers Page 15 Multi-faceted transformation leans on standards to help one of the fastest ever-new network buildsCertified Frameworx-conformant solutions helped Telekom Malaysia keep integration to below 20 percent

Page 19 The unstoppable growth of Media Networks in Latin AmericaMedia Networks (a division of Telefónica Digital) is making money from new digital services by exploiting assets and local market conditions, and moving to the cloud

2 Picture perfect: Monetizing mobile video streamsIndia's Reliance 3G has diversified into mobile data services, in particular, mobile video

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Page 24Defining products within hours, cutting launch costs by 75 percentTTNET's wholesale re-engineering of its OSS/BSS systems and capabilities resulted in being able to launch new products in just two hours

Page 28 Achieving business effectiveness with a solid BSS foundationMalaysia’s Celcom Axiata migrated its prepaid services to a Frameworx-conformant Next Generation Intelligent Network – which has paid real dividends, including a 20 percent increase in prepaid revenue

1Leveraging Frameworx to develop new business models and revenue-generating servicesSaudi Mobily (Etihad Etisalat) used the Frameworx-aligned Next Generation Service Delivery Platform (NGSDP) to embark on a far-reaching business transformation strategy.

Page 35China Telecom shows the importance of product lifecycle management in the digital worldHow efficient product lifecycle management, including standardized interfaces, helped reduce integration costs by 48 percent and halved the time to market in some areas, while providing more consistent data across systems

BUSINESS & IT AGILITY

Page 38 Saving up to 2 percent of total revenues through revenue assuranceTelefónica Latin America turned to TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model and Business Process Framework (eTOM) to boost its bottom line

Page 41 Business assurance automation takes business decision-making to new level The Business Assurance Automation Catalyst was championed by Optimus Portugal, Swisscom and Telefónica’s O2 Slovakia.

Page 43Adding $146 million recovered revenue to the bottom lineQtel Group made a commitment to a three-year program based on TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model and business benchmarking studies and is still reaping new benefits

Page 46 Assurance starts with sound advice and practical helpThe Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company used Frameworx as it embarked on an ambitious business transformation initiative

Page 50 Cloud Catalyst demonstrates that fore-warned is truly forearmedThe Resilient Cloud: Maintaining Service in the Face of Developing Threats Catalyst, championed by Telstra, explored responding proactively to threats in order to maintain critical services.

Page 52End-to end resource management improves service and customer satisfactionChina Mobile boasts the world’s largest mobile network and its largest mobile customer base. We tell how plans to offer a range of 4G and mobile Internet services have spurred it to develop a more efficient, flexible, scalable and easy-to-integrate OSS.

Page 56 Process-oriented governance delivers better control and efficient, end-to-end operationsUPC Netherlands used Frameworx to help it upgrade its networks to greatly increase bandwidth to customers

Page 58 Frameworx enables rapid launch of new cable services, maintains operational excellenceCox Communications, Time Warner Cable and UPC/Liberty Global championed the Frameworx for New Cable Services: Rapidly Design and Fulfill New Services Catalyst project

Page 60 Reaping the benefits of deploying Frameworx across many operating companiesWhy France Telecom-Orange reinforces the use of TM Forum Frameworx across all its operating companies

Page 62 Upgrading Integration Service Layer protects investment, cuts costs and increases applications’ stability and availabilityTelstra undertook a complex upgrade of its Integration Service Layer WebSphere Process Server, the flagship integration layer that brings together the operator’s BSS and OSS domains

Page 65Boosting customer experience management through index-linked processesThe Advancing Customer Experience Management with Analytics Catalyst project showed just what a key role analytics can play in keeping customers happy

Page 67Index


Crossing the chasm to digital servicesFew industries in history have faced so many threats and opportunities at the same time. As the global communications market approaches saturation point and messaging and telephony become commodity services, a new breed of competition has emerged – enabled by that high level of penetration and the proliferation of connectivity.

Competitive ‘over-the-top’ (OTT) services are exerting terrific pressure on communications service providers. In August 2012, WhatsApp passed the milestone of delivering 10 billion messages in one day. That’s a 10-fold increase in 12 months, and just one of countless examples of the rapid migration away from traditional voice and messaging services. It’s the speed of this change, and the loss of margins it represents, that’s raising temperatures in the boardrooms of operators around the world: the time for reinvention is now.

Connectivity is the oxygen of the information age, and data connections and usage are set to continue to rise exponentially. Yet only providing connectivity will not be enough. It’s the services and platforms running on top of that connectivity that hold the keys to growth as traditional service revenues decline.

The great news is that communications service providers are in a strong position to capitalize on the opportunity beyond connectivity and raw infrastructure. They have established, trusted relationships with the world’s largest enterprises and governments, and have a long history of reliability and technical innovation. They’re well placed to deliver new, vertically focused, digital services ranging from healthcare to anti-fraud products, vehicle tracking to the smart home. In short, the focus must be on making the transition from communications service provider to digital service provider.

The word ‘transformation’ has a long and checkered history in the communications industry. We’ve applied it to everything from deregulation to network, operations and IT system overhauls. Today’s industry faces massive, rapid changes that need a more radical, true business transformation. The role of the service provider has changed from value-chain owner to value-chain enabler, delivering digital services through partnerships and a diverse set of customer and business requirements. In short, it requires a level of innovation and technical agility never seen before.

As the engine room of any service provider, effective IT and operations are critical to success in today’s rapidly changing market. There are two business imperatives in play, equally important regardless of business strategy. First is the need for continuous optimization to maximize margins and deliver services while providing excellent customer experience, all at the lowest possible cost. Secondly, the flexibility and agility needed to stay competitive – whether that’s within an established or emerging service.

Optimization, automation and agility have been and continue to be the ethos behind TM Forum’s approach, activities and assets. As a non-profit, global industry association with more than 950 members worldwide, we have been delivering best practices and standards that solve complex service management issues for more than two decades. Originally created for the communications industry by the industry through our members’ efforts in the Collaboration Community, TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices is now finding ever wider application, for instance in telematics, satellite, cable, energy, defense and healthcare, among other sectors.

The fight of our livesNow we’re approaching our industry’s most significant transformation yet, we’re energized by the challenge and committed to helping our members take on the fight.

Digital services hold new challenges for any kind of service provider. Success requires competency in a broad range of areas. We’ve identified these competencies as critical for any service provider in the digital services value chain:

n Innovation – driving constant innovation at the service, product and package level. n Partnership – finding, establishing and maintaining effective and flexible partnerships.n Cyber security – ensuring customer, partner and business data is secure in an open world.n Revenue and fraud management – ensuring leakage and losses are minimized across complex value-chains.

WELCOME


n Customer experience management – always meeting, or exceeding, customers’ expectations no matter how a service is delivered.

n Big data and analytics – understanding what’s going on with your customer, and capturing new opportunities ahead of the pack.n Business process optimization – constantly optimizing and

automating processes to maximize margins and minimize failure.

n Product lifecycle management – running effective systems to cope with much shorter product lifecycles and dynamic product catalogs.

Of course, these competencies are dependent on well-managed, cost-effective virtualized and physical infrastructure, which scales to meet the needs of your business.

Inspiration and dedicationThe 11 case studies contained within this Handbook showcase the success of TM Forum service provider members around the world as they embrace TM Forum's digital service competencies. With examples ranging from premium content delivery – such as Reliance 3G’s mobile video platform in India,

to Telefónica Digital’s Media Networks in Latin America – to location-based, M2M services and platforms from Hughes Telematics Inc. (HTI – a Verizon Company) – TM Forum’s Frameworx plays a pivotal role in reducing time-to-market, cost and risk, and provides scalability, too.

Of equal importance are six case studies showcasing success across competencies ranging from business process optimization and governance – in the case of UPC Netherlands – through to the on-going, huge success of TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model in delivering real savings and providing business assurance to operators including Qtel Group and Telefónica Latin America. Each of these stories highlights the change underway and the quantifiable benefits of adopting TM Forum’s Frameworx.

No matter what your role in the digital economy, no matter which competency you focus on, the Forum is committed to bringing companies of all sizes together to help you gain a competitive edge. We want to help our members meet their goals of enabling efficiency and agility in their IT and operations while protecting and promoting competitive differentiation.

We hope you will find the case studies contained in this Handbook inspiring and motivating. Most of all, we hope they help you make changes to ensure on-going success in the digital world.

Nik WillettsChief Strategy Officer, TM [email protected] @nikwilletts


FRAMEWORX

What is TM Forum Frameworx and how can it help you?Adopted by 90 percent of the world’s largest service providers, TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices provides the blueprint for effective, efficient business operations. Frameworx enables you to assess and optimize performance using a proven, service-oriented approach to operations and integration.

Frameworx helps you:n Innovate and reduce time-to-market with streamlined end-to-end service management.n Create, deliver and manage enterprise-grade services across multi-partner value-chains.n Improve customer experience and retention using proven processes, metrics and maturity models.n Optimize business processes to deliver highly efficient operations. n Reduce IT systems integration costs and risk through standardized interfaces and a common information model n Reduce transformation risk by defining a proven blueprint for agile, efficient business operations.n Gain independence and confidence in your procurement choices through conformance certification and procurement guides. n Gain clarity by providing a common, industry-standard language for processes, information and applications.

Frameworx is developed in the Forum’s unique Collaboration Community and continues to evolve through the efforts of the Community to meet changing market needs. It is driven by service providers and available exclusively to members, whose companies represent more than 90 percent of the world’s communications subscribers.

Frameworx is made up of four core frameworks:

Business Process Framework (eTOM)The Business Process Framework defines a comprehensive set of efficient, clear and effective business processes that are critical to running a service provider's business, at the least possible cost. The framework provides a multi-layered view that starts with primary organizational functions and drills down to thousands of process details, and is strongly aligned with ITIL. It is supported by off-the-shelf tools to provide an implementable catalog of the business processes and includes users’ guides and sample process flows to ensure your processes are streamlined across the enterprise and across partners in a value-chain.

Information Framework (SID)The management of services, customer experience, networks and enterprise management functions demands consistency of data across an enterprise. The Information Framework provides a comprehensive, industry-agreed structured set of definitions for the information that flows through an enterprise and between service providers and their business partners. It is a widely adopted model that is supported by off-the-shelf tools for implementation into software solutions, reducing time and effort for creating standardized integration points.

The Application Framework (TAM)Understanding how your business processes are implemented in your software systems environment is essential. This Framework provides a model for grouping processes and their associated information into recognizable applications that span the service provider's operations, business and enterprise management functions. It provides a common language and identification scheme between buyer and supplier for all application areas. It helps in the design of enterprise architecture through a better understanding of your systems.

The Integration FrameworkThis Framework provides direction on how operational processes can be automated by utilizing standardized information definitions from the Information Framework to define standardized Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based management systems. It also provides an automated means to create standardized interfaces and use these interfaces to integrate applications within the enterprise and with partners.

TM Forum Frameworx also includes adoption best practices for implementing key Frameworx-based functions across competencies such as revenue assurance, service level agreements and security; and management best practices for procurement, business metrics and benchmarking.

TM Forum Business Metrics and Benchmarking

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 Forum’s Business Metrics, mapped to the Business Process Framework, provide a way for you to measure success based on a balanced scorecard that covers:


n Revenue and margin: a view of fiscal performance.n Customer experience: measures that impact the end- customer’s reaction to the service offering.n Operational efficiency: a view of cost and expense drivers.

BenchmarkingMore than 170 service providers from over 65 countries use performance data from TM Forum’s Business Benchmarking Program to improve efficiency and effectiveness. TM Forum conducts regular group benchmarking studies. Participation is free to service provider members and participants receive secure, individualized reports showing their performance against each metric plus access to the benchmarking database.

Aggregated results and access to the database are available for a fee to non-participating service providers and suppliers. For more information on TM Forum’s Business Benchmarking and Business Metrics please see www.tmforum.org/BusinessBenchmarking. For details of upcoming studies or to participate, please contact Chryssa Dislis, Senior Manager, Business Benchmarking, [email protected].

Latest release – Frameworx 12.5More than 200 people from 86 companies worked on 45 projects to create more than 60 new features in this release of Frameworx. They help service providers reduce IT and operation costs, risk and time to deliver services, and manage digital services including those delivered through multiple partners. Highlights include:

New multi-cloud management packs for digital servicesPractical guides for business management and developers that tackle the challenges of multi-cloud management from a service level agreement (SLA) perspective – specifically how to gain visibility into and automatically manage service-level adherence when multiple partners are involved.

Enhancements to the core frameworks that help you strengthen your system's foundationThe Business Process Framework's updates include further work demonstrating the linkage to ITIL and supplier/partner processes for value chains. The Information Framework contains a new catalog model plus enhancements to areas of the model addressing supplier/partner, multi-partner services, performance management and security. The Application Framework (TAM) covers additions in customer information, customer loyalty, revenue assurance and sales and marketing.

Maturity model and metrics for Customer Experience ManagementA robust guidebook for Customer Experience Management includes a roadmap, enhanced maturity model, an outline of customer-centric processes and close to 250 customer-centric metrics. The release also has enhancements to all core Frameworks for customer specific processes, information and applications.

Tools to make Cyber Security measurable and contractableThree new deliverables have been developed that outline best practices and metrics for Human Factors, Patch and Mobile Device Management. In addition, Frameworx 12.5 incorporates security vulnerability scoring into the Information Framework.

Practical methodologies and models for effective Revenue ManagementFrameworx 12.5 includes two new technical reports on charging and billing. The first outlines best practices for M2M-based services and the second provides thought leadership and perspective on policy in the context of charging and billing. There is also a new Fraud Classification model with an holistic view of fraud and cost effective mitigation strategies. Another new guidebook includes methodologies and techniques for building the business case for revenue assurance.

Please visit www.tmforum.org/frameworx for more detail and to download the deliverables in Frameworx 12.5. Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions.

Management Best Practices

Adoption Best PracticesBusin

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Application Framework

IntegrationFramework

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How to succeed – and fast – in M2M through conformance with standardsHughes Telematics, Inc. (HTI), an Atlanta-based company in the U.S., offers a portfolio of location-based machine-to-machine (M2M) services for consumers, manufacturers, fleets and dealers. HTI’s innovative business model includes providing telematics services in a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) model for original equipment manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz. The company recognized that this would allow it to provide subscriber services directly to consumers, including marketing to them through the manufacturer’s brand, field agents and other channels. That reading of the evolving market proved prescient.

To achieve its goals, HTI implemented a new billing system that was pre-integrated with existing systems to simplify call center operations and enforce revenue assurance, all without disrupting current operations. The platform provided high availability to support telematics services, while minimizing total cost of ownership by using productized solutions. HTI also stood to gain a substantial increase in revenue if it could have the system live within 100 days. By deploying a solution certified by TM Forum as being conformant with the Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices, it met that deadline and generated an additional $30 million in revenue. It also reaped a host of operational and business advantages for itself and its customers.

Hughes Telematics, Inc. (HTI) provides five categories of services to its OEM customers, and its aim is to repackage them across different product lines. They are:

n safety and security services, including automated crash detection;n convenience services like using an iPhone to unlock the car door;n navigation services such as using an iPhone to look up

locations and sending the details to the vehicle in advance, so it’s waiting for the driver when they get in;

n diagnostics in both directions – the driver can access information online, and the manufacturer can query the vehicle;

n infotainment, including access to Internet-based apps in the vehicle like Facebook and Yelp.

An example of how these products can be repackaged is that the automatic crash detection technology, which is built

DiGiTAlSERVICES

into the hardware in embedded telematics solutions, can also be put into a pendant or a watch as automatic fall detection for active seniors.

A big step up – fastTo leverage these five primary services and roll them out via the B2B2C model, HTI designed a Next Generation Telematics Architecture (NGTA), including a sophisticated billing system. This NGTA needed to be scalable to support the massively expanding subscriber base, as well as flexible and configurable to support complex charging models and the rapid introduction of new offers. In addition, HTI had a significant business opportunity if the deployment could be completed within 100 days – which it was able to do, thereby generating an extra $30 million in revenue.

Examples of being able to introduce new offers quickly include Mercedes-Benz USA wanting to offer three years’ worth of free service to car owners who bought their cars in November and December 2010 using Mercedes-Benz


financing. HTI was able to create new products and a new ordering process in a matter of days, going live with the offer in November 2010 and seeing a great increase in the take-up of its service offering.

The system also enables HTI to make far more complex offers to consumers on behalf of its wholesale customers. For instance, State Farm (one of the largest insurance carriers in the U.S.), is regulated on a state-by-state basis, so the pricing of every product has to be approved by state regulators. Hence, when the company engaged with HTI to introduce new connected service products for consumers, in effect this meant variations of the products to cover differing requirements across the 50 states. HTI was able to assemble the products from reusable and reconfigurable components relatively easily.

To have this level of flexibility and speed, HTI needed a billing system that could be integrated with existing systems to simplify call center operations and enforce revenue assurance, all without disrupting current B2B operations. The platform needed to comply with the strict high-availability requirements of telematics services, while minimizing total cost of ownership by using productized solutions.

The importance of conformanceTo meet the requirements, HTI selected and deployed the Frameworx Conformance Certified Unified CRM BRM (UCB) solution from Oracle, which includes Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM), Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Oracle Contact Center Anywhere, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Application Integration Architecture for Communications, and Oracle Fusion Middleware.

The UCB solution is certified as conformant with TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 55 for more about the Forum’s Conformance Certification programs), which was instrumental in facilitating HTI’s accurate understanding of the Oracle solution. The clear alignment between the processes in the Oracle Solution and the Business Process Framework (eTOM) element of Frameworx helped HTI to identify process requirements and reduce the fit and gap analysis phases by several weeks.

David Cook, HTI’s IT Director, explains, “Using commercial off-the-shelf apps with pre-built integrations made great sense for us. For a quick and efficient implementation we had folks experienced with the Business Process Framework

demonstrate what the applications offered leveraging Frameworx and the Business Process Framework. We then configured and customized from there, greatly minimizing the number of customizations and enabling us to launch more quickly than traditional methods.”

The resulting NGTA is a flexible and open architecture that enables HTI to integrate new services and add new content partners quickly, connect to customer-defined call centers, and be cellular-operator agnostic. This architecture also provides full redundancy, supports 22 languages, is scalable and greatly simplifies integration for OEMs.

More specifically, benefits include:

n greater scalability to handle increased subscription volume, which rapidly grew from a handful of enterprise customers to hundreds of thousands of individual consumers;

n decreased time to market of new offers from 14 days to one day and offers can be configured by the marketing team on-demand;

n expansion into new markets, accounting for millions of dollars in additional revenues;n reduced total cost of ownership and implementation risk

by enabling fast, easy integration with out-of-the-box solution functionality; and

n flexible charging capabilities to support variable billing models and complex bundled offerings.

Cook concludes, “We are able to support that B2B2C model, which helped us respond rapidly to customers’ needs with innovative products and to be very flexible. We were able to adopt industry best practices easily and leverage the Business Process Framework to deploy the solution in under 100 days. This enabled us to generate an additional $30 million in revenue we otherwise may not have had.”

”We were able to adopt industry best practices easily and leverage the Business Process Framework to deploy the solution in under 100 days. This enabled us to generate an additional $30 million in revenue we otherwise may not have had.”


Managing the service lifecycle brings in more than €30 million a yearPortugal Telecom (PT) is the country’s largest communications service provider, with international operations in many countries. SAPO is a division of PT, which contributes income of €30 million ($38.72 million) annually, based on web advertising. SAPO’s Service Delivery Broker is a new line-of-business for the division and the company at large, building on the division’s success in introducing digital services. So far it has helped PT attract 1 million new subscribers to its IPTV offering (under the MEO brand), representing an income of over €50 million a month. In addition, downloads of mobile applications have risen by 322 percent year-on-year, hitting 486,000 a month, while page views have increased 258 percent year-on-year, rising to 46 million a month.

Portugal Telecom (PT) is that country’s largest communications service provider, with international operations in Angola, Brazil (as Oi, the largest communications service provider in South America), China, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, São Tomé, Timor-Leste and Principe. It offers fixed, mobile, multimedia, data and corporate solutions.

SAPO is a division of PT, which contributes income of €30 million ($38.72 million) annually, based on web advertising. SAPO’s Service Delivery Broker is a new line-of-business for the division and the company at large, building on the division’s success in introducing digital services.

The Service Delivery Broker is designed to connect, mediate and manage interactions through standardized application program interfaces (APIs) between any web-enabled device and heterogeneous services. It delivers built-in, real-time management and monitoring capabilities while supporting integration with any application or service that complies with a service-oriented architecture.

The Service Delivery Broker is being used by PT to deliver APIs in support of its own main offers and its product catalog has more than 4,000 web service endpoints to enable the quick creation of new products and lines of business, supporting millions of applications, services and APIs on all kinds of platforms.

The Broker exposes and integrates processes and systems in a secure, non-intrusive way that ensures governance and best practices are followed and validated. This is done by automating the API service management lifecycle phases,

SAPO’s Service Delivery Broker

For more details about what can be found in the production web addresses please see:

n SDB API Marketplace: http://services.sapo.ptn SDB site: http://sdb.sapo.ptn Portugal Telecom IPTV offering (under the brand name

MEO) interactive applications using SDB services (in Portuguese): www.meo.pt/conhecer/tv/experienciatv/interactivo/pages/default.aspx

n Mobile applications using SDB services: http://apps.sapo.ptn SDB reference quotes: http://sdb.sapo.pt/en/quotes.html

from Service Design through Development, Transition, and Operation, in alignment with TM Forum’s Software Enabled Services program (see panel).

So far the Service Delivery Broker has contributed to PT’s sales of IPTV subscriptions, mobile devices and web advertising, by enabling the faster, cheaper and more efficient delivery of multi-channel, multi-platform applications. In its first year of operation in 2006 it was forecast to bring in 30 percent of SAPO’s income, growing to 40 to 45 percent the next year.

Portugal Telecom TV offer (known as MEO) has more than 1 million subscribers. They can access SAPO IPTV apps, which use web services through the Service Delivery Broker. There are over 2.5 million visits per month to MEO’s marketplace.

DiGiTAlSERVICES


PT’s mobile apps portfolio (SAPO, MEO and Telecomunicações Móveis Nacionais TMN) includes 39 apps for three different platforms, which as of August 2012 had, year to date, between them generated 23 million banner views (a year-on-year increase of 85 percent). Over the previous four years, SAPO Notícias had attracted 7 million banner views monthly, while SAPO Desporto had clocked up 4 million banner views monthly.

SAPO’s Service Delivery Broker was also recently positioned as a SmartCloudPT (www.smartcloudpt.pt) service offering in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, generating leads and sales among local government and small and medium-sized businesses looking for efficient service lifecycle management and multi-platform content capabilities (see panel on page 10 for more details about how the Service Delivery Broker is being used and positioned by PT).

This new Portugal Telecom cloud services offering is designed to help communications service providers attract new business-to-business customers such as banks, insurance companies and local governments, effectively positioning PT as an over-the top, SaaS and Platform-as-a-Service provider for those markets.

TM Forum’s Service Management Interface (SMI), which is at the core of the Forum’s Software-Enabled Service Management Solution (see panel on page 12) was initially created and contributed by SAPO. It has recently been recognized by the Open Mobile Group (OMG) and incorporated in one of its Telco 2.0 draft specifications.

The key benefits that the Service Delivery Broker achieved through the SMI are:

n strong control of the service lifecycle management across all service enablers;n minimizing the cost and cycle time to translate service ideas into market offerings;n reducing the cost by repurposing content and applications;n swift adaption to market changes and customer preferences;n ensuring the best practices and industry patterns at design time;

n mitigating the burn of service designers and service developers; n delivering a standards-based, consistent and fully interoperable offer of services enablers to third parties;n leveraging service composition with full control of dependencies and resources.

Put another way, users can deploy cloud services and service management to innovate and deliver competitive products faster and cheaper, over a public or private cloud. The business benefits to other service providers who use the cloud approach enabled by the Service Delivery Broker are that it:

n supports new revenue streams by enabling the communications service provider to leverage their assets across the value chain;

n operates a two-sided business model for retail and wholesale services;n can meet end-customers’ demands faster and therefore encourage a closer relationship with them;n lowers costs associated with the acquisition and maintenance of technology;n enables third parties’ businesses;n feeds key performance indicators into real-time, decision- making applications;n drastically reduces costs associated with customization;n manages software-enabled services in a standardized way;n reduces service management costs and supports delivery

through a multi-tenanted model via Platform-as-a Service and Saas;

n supports a pay-per-use business model within a cloud services platform;n service providers have access to the range of business

models as a service, as required, to meet their business strategies.

Clearly to achieve all these things, a standardized approach is critical. PT/SAPO used the Business Process Framework (eTOM), part of TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-


based tools and best practices, to inspire and guide the process flows for product and infrastructure lifecycle management of the Service Delivery Brokerage’s Marketplace and support services. The Service Delivery Broker is also aligned with several of the Business Process Framework’s with ITIL v3/2011 (please see pages 6, 7 and 51).

SAPO also incorporated Aggregate Business Entities (ABEs) from the Forum’s Information Framework (SID) in all the Service Delivery Broker’s components. Their use is particularly notable in the SDB Marketplace, which went live in November 2011 (http://services.sapo.pt).

Where to next?PT/SAPO will continue to develop the Service Delivery Broker, positioning it as a general-purpose service management platform that will be a lead generator in other industries.

In addition, SAPO is working towards certifying its Service Delivery Broker for conformance with a number of the Information Framework’s entities and the Business Process Framework’s processes.

The goal of the TM Forum Software Enabled Services Management Solution program (SES) is to define a generic management framework for next generation services regardless of the software or network technologies used to implement those services. This management framework is aimed at addressing the full lifecycle of the services, from concept to cash.

SAPO’s Service Delivery Broker team was instrumental in creating the first draft specification for the Simple Management API (SMI also known as TMF617 – the latest version is defined here: www.tmforum.org/SMIinformationagreement, which is at the heart of TM Forum’s Multi-Cloud Management Solution and deployed in SAPO’s Service Delivery Broker services.

Business objectives of SES are: to minimize the cost and

cycle time to translate service ideas into market offerings; reduce cost by repurposing content and applications; and to adapt swiftly to market changes and customer preferences. Its structure addresses the services lifecycle, covering important use cases like concept-to-cash, service marketplace, service composition or aggregation, and service catalogs.

The importance of this work and the commitment demonstrated by PT/SAPO was recognized at TM Forum Action Week in Madrid in January 2012, when António Cruz, Project Manager, Service Delivery Broker, SAPO, was given a TM Forum Outstanding Contributor Award.

For more information, please go to: www.tmforum.org/softwareenabledservicesmgmt

How TM Forum’s Software Enabled Services can help you

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Catalyst proves Bandwidth Exchange commercially viableAt TM Forum Management World 2012 in Dublin, BT Group championed the Bandwidth Exchange Catalyst project in which First Derivatives, Amartus, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) and Intune Networks also participated. The live demonstration showcased the technologies that would underpin bandwidth trading and that could, in turn, drive new revenue for service providers, demonstrating the technical and commercial viability of a bandwidth exchange marketplace. The Catalyst project was developed on the Irish government’s Exemplar test-bed.

BT serves customers in more than 170 countries. A number of factors informed the decision to embark on the Bandwidth Exchange Catalyst project (see panel on page 54). First in the face of unprecedented competition, identifying new sources of revenue is a high priority for many service providers. Second, demand for network capacity is growing exponentially and operators are continuously upgrading their networks to deal with it, typically ‘overbuilding’ networks to meet demand based on historical data resulting in stranded capacity.

Third, the rise of cloud as a major commercial opportunity for communications service providers, IT companies, software houses and web companies. Typically resources are distributed to discrete parts of the network and data centers aggregate lots of demand to the same location, so the ‘unshared’ part of the network becomes small, and non-existent where data centers deploy virtualization.

Many such data centers have introduced on-demand services, which have created a compelling use case for ‘on-demand’ bandwidth. Enterprise cloud services need reliable network connectivity to data centers, and communications service providers are arguably best positioned to offer this through simple, on-demand provisioning of application program interfaces (APIs).

Finally, bandwidth and computational resources have become commoditized.

Regulated buying and sellingAs with established commodity exchanges, bandwidth exchanges can facilitate the regulated buying and selling of goods and services – in this case bandwidth, cloud products and services – based on criteria such as price, quality, availability and geographic location using standardized contracts.

The emergence of dynamic, on-demand computational resource trading will also enable a re-evaluation of complementary bandwidth-on-demand service offerings allowing for the cost-effective movement of data between end-customer and data center for short time periods.

Typically bandwidth is bought in incremental sizes, either as packet-based, point-to-point, point-to-multipoint, multipoint-to-multipoint services or circuit-switched services, under forward contracts, which are traded in over-the-counter (OTC) transactions. In the Catalyst project, First Derivatives, Amartus, Nokia Siemens Networks and Intune Networks pooled their expertise to research the possibilities of creating a commercially viable Bandwidth Exchange marketplace.

This would involve trading options and futures on bandwidth just like other commodities on a typical commodity exchange, and a spot market where the transaction involves a physical settlement – in this case the securing of bandwidth on demand in real-time to transfer data.

The securitization of bandwidth as an exchange tradable commodity would allow the creation of a stream of financial instruments to facilitate the needs of both communications providers and enterprises. It would enable price discovery, ensure excess capacity is utilized through the laws of supply and demand, and allow for the mitigation of risks concerning variable or increasing bandwidth costs. It would also reduce costs by allowing enterprises to utilize bandwidth at less expensive times or via less expensive routes.

Questions and answersThe Catalyst project posed a number of questions. For example, could resources of network, compute and storage be linked? What would be needed to extend network operators’ OSSs to accommodate this model, as they lack the automation needed for third party, on-demand provisioning? In the Bandwidth Exchange Catalyst project, the workflow demonstrated was as follows.

The operator published capacity on the CloudStreet platform. CloudStreet is an open, virtual trading platform which allows operators from around the globe to sell and buy transport capacity on demand. In the Catalyst project, the First Derivatives’ Trading Engine used part of the operator’s inventory to create predefined trading products.


CloudStreet then updated the Service Inventory on the Amartus Service Commander, a vendor-independent service delivery framework. The Trading Engine picked up connections and capacity from Service Inventory and split them into easily tradable securities.

Finally the Service Commander provisioned the network. This process was underpinned by Intune’s Optical Burst switching technology, which can be used to switch packets in real-time across hundreds of kilometers, reducing network complexity and increasing connectivity by making bandwidth instantly available to any point in the network.

Proof of conceptThe Catalyst project proved that bandwidth can be traded as a commodity. It compared OTC trading to futures and spot trading. The demonstration used TM Forum’s Multi-Technology Operations System Interface (MTOSI) Service Catalog and Activation and RESTful Web Services Interfaces.

MTOSI is part of the Integration Framework, which is an element of the Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices. The Integration Framework provides a standard set of interfaces that enable rapid, repeatable, and flexible integration between systems. MTOSI is an XML-based set interfaces designed to enable simple integration of disparate operations systems used for the network and IT resource management.

MTOSI covers both service and resource level interfaces. At the resource level, MTOSI includes interfaces for inventory, provisioning, fault management and performance management. At the service level, MTOSI has interfaces for service activation and for service inventory. For more information, please see: www.tmforum.org/BestPracticesStandards/MTOSI/2319/Home.html

The demonstration leveraged MTOSI-based service models and interfaces for service and resource catalog, inventory and activation, extended by RESTful XML interfaces (see below) to expose capacity inventory APIs on Amartus’ Service Commander. This enabled bandwidth publishing and trading functions on the Cloudstreet and First Derivatives’ Trading platforms. The Catalyst showed how standardized MTOSI-based service models and interfaces provide the required service abstraction to enable fast integration of business services and applications with a technology- and vendor-agnostic programmable network.

Representational State Transfer or REST defines a set of architectural principles for designing Web Services, which focus on a system's resources. They include how resource states are addressed and transferred over HTTP by a wide range of clients, written in different languages. It is the predominant Web Service design model.

A major conclusion was that units of trade should also be standardized and interest in developing this continues.

Use cases follow the money

The Catalyst project illustrated two use cases which showed how the Irish government’s Exemplar Network test-bed could be accessed, controlled and monetized.

Capacity expansion funded through futures/spot contractsBackground: Company ABC operates a large global network and bandwidth system for its own use. It has plans to extend capacity in the APAC region. Analysis shows the company’s capacity needs would double in this geography by 2013 and increase ten-fold by 2015.Problem: Company ABC does not have a cashflow projection that can afford an upfront investment to facilitate the required ten-fold increase all at once.Solution: Company ABC could sell capacity as an OTC transaction to a financial institute, which translates capacity as easily tradable securities. This way company ABC could raise capital which would help pay for work on the ten-fold increase in capacity.Financial institute: Sells futures bandwidth contracts on the Bandwidth Exchange to raise funds, sells spot bandwidth contracts on the Bandwidth Exchange for the period 2013 to 2015.End-user: Purchases futures contracts to reserve bandwidth for use at a cost efficient price to ensure cost base for coming years and have flexibility on capacity side.Result: Project for full expansion proceeds, future excess capacity is monetized into a combination of immediate cashflow and a stream of future cash flows.

Spot bandwidth requirementBackground: Company DEF is a small media company which hosts a current affairs website. The Government has made an unexpected announcement that it will hold an important press conference regarding the upcoming budget.Problem: Company DEF expects an unprecedented increase of traffic to its website and fears that a shortage of bandwidth capacity may cause its site to go down, which will adversely affect the reputation of the company.Solution: Company DEF could purchase spot contracts on the Bandwidth Exchange to increase bandwidth capacity for the duration of the event. This would ensure the site could temporarily handle an increase in web traffic.Supplier: Supplier would allow excess capacity to be sold via spot contracts on the Bandwidth Exchange.End-user: Purchases spot contracts for delivery of bandwidth as required.Result: Supplier capitalizes redundant bandwidth capacity. End-user has mitigated the risks that the website that temporary increased web traffic would inflict on its company.

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Multi-faceted transformation leans on standards to help one of the fastest ever new network buildsTelekom Malaysia faced a tough challenge – to transform from being a fixed-line incumbent to being a lean operator in a market that is rapidly becoming fiercely competitive. It was faced with sticking to a very tight schedule to roll out a national high-speed broadband network and deploy the associated back and front office systems while rethinking its legacy business. To become and stay competitive it also needed to become more customer-centric and to make its workforce more productive, in part by winning their support for the massive transformation. The company applied LEAN principles throughout and chose certified Frameworx-conformant solutions to keep integration to below 20 percent. This contributed greatly to it being ahead of schedule with its deployments, which in turn in part was due to being able to run lots of developments in parallel. By the end of 2011, Telekom Malaysia was able to report substantial business benefits, from reducing fault resolution time by 80 percent and cutting the time needed to install a new line by 70 percent, to being able to configure innovative bundles and tariffs in a week, down from three.

Telekom Malaysia (TM) was tasked with, by some measures, one of the fastest ever rollouts of a brand new, national network when in September 2008 it signed a public-private-partnership with the government of Malaysia to roll a high-speed broadband (HSBB) network across Malaysia and pass 1.3 million households by the end of 2012. Recognizing the high level of investment required and the benefit it would bring to the country’s economy, the government agreed to fund up to 20 percent of the project, so long as one third of the country’s households were ‘passed’ by the fiber infrastructure.

To achieve this, TM rolled out fiber access in the most densely populated parts of the country, deployed an all-new, all-IP backbone and IP Multi-media System (IMS) and, through Project Nova, created new operating and business support systems (OSS/BSS).

While building the OSS/BSS stacks for the new business, TM was working on streamlining the old system that supported the original product portfolio. The company built a new IT system to address problems with the legacy system, which supports some 5 million customers and has been involved in fulfilling about 1 million orders in the year since it went live.

TM also sought to use the copper infrastructure in new ways, by greatly raising the transmission speeds for data on

them, which is very important in a market where data traffic is increasing by 50 percent annually.

The company realized that simply adding more and more resources to meet the rising demand for TM’s services (as seen throughout 2010 and 2011) was not viable, so at the same time as rolling out Project Nova and the HSBB network, it launched a three-year initiative, TOP (for Towards Operational Perfection), based on LEAN principles (see panel overleaf), to increase employees’ productivity, improve customer experience and operational performance in a holistic, end-to-end manner, covering sales channels and customer service as well as network operations.

The plan was to make processes more efficient, focusing on end-to-end performance targets in service delivery and quality. This in turn would give greater customer satisfaction by ensuring consistency in service delivery and aligning process metrics to customer experience. It also wanted to shift the company’s attention from performance at departmental level to an end-to-end, customer-centric view of performance.

ImplementationThe company had noted that, according to research by Vanson Bourne (sponsored by Oracle) a survey of IT executives at


"By spring 2012, TM was a good six months ahead of its initial goal of passing 1.3 million customers’ premises by the end of the year, and has yielded significant, quantifiable business benefits.”

communications service providers believed that an average of 16 percent of IT budgets would be freed up if industry standards were widely adopted. The decision was made to deploy a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solution, based on industry standards and best practices.

It chose a suite of systems from Oracle on which to build the BSS/OSS, which is certified by TM Forum as being conformant (see panel on page 55 for more detail about the advantages of using conformant products, solutions and implementations) with its Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6). A major aim was to ensure that less than 20 percent of the solution would require customization, in which it was successful.

Consequently TM launched the network, systems and triple-play services within 18 months of signing the public-private agreement. It took five months to set up an IPTV platform and nine months to have the full OSS/BSS stack in place. By spring 2012, TM was a good six months ahead of its initial goal of passing 1.3 million customers’ premises by the end of the year, and has yielded significant, quantifiable business benefits.

The systems take care of customer relationship management (CRM), billing and enterprise interfaces, among other operations. They provide a single view of customers and the services they use, a unified customer care and provisioning platform, and consistent user experiences and capabilities across all channels.

They were designed to be as automated as possible, requiring little human intervention. This means, for instance, when the company receives a request for triple-play service activation, the order preconfigures the systems to accept that customer and an employee is dispatched to install the set-top box and fiber termination. Both the box and the termination unit work without any further configuration.

A standards approachFor the HSBB initiative TM chose to deploy a standards-based architecture using TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM), part of TM Forum’s Frameworx to model the architecture. The company started from the ground-up in developing processes under the HSBB program to address limitations of current processes and ensure future growth opportunities.

What is LEAN?

Henry Ford, who brought automobiles to the masses, was the first person to truly integrate an entire production process starting in 1913. His approach was much improved upon, to offer customers variety, economically, through highly streamlined processes, by Kiichiro Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno, and others at Toyota working in the 1930s. This was the start of what we call the LEAN principles today (see www.lean.org for more information).

The five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of LEAN techniques is easy to remember, but not always easy to achieve:

1. Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.2. Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product

family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.

3. Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.4. As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.5. As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted

steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.

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Its aims were to achieve minimal manual intervention between processes, greater use of data, and auditability and traceability in systems and processes. It also wanted tight coupling with the OSS, allowing for flow-through provisioning, integrated systems to minimize the complexity of processing and a single view of customers’ information and services.

Parallel processingThe most difficult part of the undertaking was managing the three components – HSBB, Project Nova and updating legacy systems – of the transformation in parallel, as each had many structural touch points. At one stage in the development phase, the TM had to work on four separate IT releases simultaneously, which normally would have been dealt with sequentially. Hence the design and development work was begun before on the second release before the first was completed. The company constantly had at least three different teams working with the systems-integration group and the software vendor on new releases.

Nevertheless, this parallel way of working, adhering to LEAN principles throughout, meant that within 18 months of the project beginning, the improvements made far exceeded the company’s own expectations. For example, TM was able to reduce fault resolution time by 80 percent and cut the time needed to install a new line by 70 percent, both of which had a highly positive impact on the field force and helped to get them onside.

In addition, TM’s transformation team spent considerable time with the field force, call center agents, dispatchers and other parts of the workforce to understand their issues. Taking what it learned, the company launched a pilot project then brought in staff from the regions to see the progress it was making. This created a lot of enthusiasm and excitement among them, and in particular, a willingness to change, which made the acceptance of new practices surprisingly easy and fast among some 16,000 TM employees and contractors nationwide.

Some 95 percent of results of the transformation’s success came from implementation, with strong task forces who have clear mandates and roles, led by talented, ambitious leaders. TM also recognized the importance of performance management to drive change at scale across its huge

organization. It also recognized that having come up with a winning strategy, it needed to adhere to it for some years to get the greatest benefit from it. It can take a long time for messages to reach and be acted upon by everyone in an organization. As TM’s CTO and Chief Innovation Officer, Giorgio Migilarina, comments, “Be consistent, be persistent, and be straightforward in the way you communicate important things.”

Huge business benefitsFrom late 2011 onwards, Telekom Malaysia was reporting the business benefits which correlate directly to its use of the Business Process Framework, as well as its decision to deploy a single vendor OSS/BSS, which is certified by TM Forum as conforming to the Business Process Framework, coupled with strong emphasis and adaptation of LEAN principles in the operations.

For example, for the HSBB triple-play offering, the average lead time to install (from customer order to installation) had improved by 57 percent between April 2011 to November 2011 (this includes appointment dates requested by the customer). Average monthly new installation increased by 170 percent, from about 10,000 new installations per month in February 2011 to approximately 27,000 new installations in November 2011.

For Metro Ethernet, order fallout dropped 70 percent, from 194 in September 2010 to 58 in November 2010. In addition, it automated network design/assign and activation for complex enterprise products such as Metro Ethernet.

For greenfield operations, TM’s ‘out of the box approach’ meant, as mentioned, less than 20 percent customization of the solution was necessary, while support systems for triple-play fiber-to-the-home /VDSL+ were launched in under eight months. Further, the company achieved end-to-end flow through to network activation of 98 percent for triple-play orders.

The company is able to carry out flexible product bundling and pricing configuration so that the time needed to configure innovative new packages and promotions has reduced from three weeks to one.

The systems also support broad customer segmentation and product group support with a single, consolidated platform supporting consumer, SME, enterprise, government, wholesale and global segments and associated products. The company


has extended the reach of its channel through online portals for customers, resellers and wholesale.

In addition, as part of its reorganization, the company has aligned the IT organization to the Business Process Framework, grouping front end systems (sales force automation/CRM), back end (billing and subsystems), network support systems and enterprise services (software and hardware infrastructure support).

As a result, it achieved four main benefits:

n better load balancing for the teams through more efficient allocation and work distribution among them; n faster decision-making and better prioritization within teams, which improves time to deliver to the business;n technology up-skilling and a greater range of skills between

the teams supporting the legacy systems and the new Oracle stack; and

n an improvement to IT employees’ satisfaction index. Future plansTM plans to increase efficiency further, enabling zero-touch configuration of digital home devices. It intends to address various aspects of OSS service assurance, including service performance, network traffic analysis, service quality, dynamic line management and network capacity planning – again, all in the interests of greater efficiency and better customer service.

It also has ongoing projects building additional business capabilities and product support across BSS/OSS and the service delivery platform (SDP), while continuing to expand the SDP/IMS. Finally, the company is also working on its content and SDP.

Aligning LEAN with TM Forum’s Business Assurance program

TM Forum’s Business Assurance Program recognizes it needs to bring the operational implementation of Frameworx together with the enterprise-level balanced scorecard of Business Metrics (see pages 7 and 29) through the application of best practices in Business Management Systems. Frameworx is the Forum’s suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6). In the era of digital services, these best practices center on these critical areas:

n customer experience management;n big data management and analytics;n revenue management;n Lean Extended Value Stream Management.

While members have collaborated and produced a lot of work in the first three of these areas, the fourth is the key to enabling the digital services enterprise to bring the necessary agility and sustainable financial results to this challenging marketplace.

The TM Forum Business Management Systems Group has contributed a White Paper, From Frameworx Implementation to Lean Transformation, which includes a summary of Telekom Malaysia’s approach and implementation by Dr. Ahmad Nasri Mohamed. The White Paper is available to members from our website via www.tmforum.org/FrameworxImplementationWP. It sets the terms of reference and suggests the way forward to tailoring the best practices of LEAN from industrial application to the digital services environment.

It is expected that this will provide a foundation for the Business Management Systems Group to produce guidebooks and other specific best practices and standards publications to enable the Business Management element of the Business Assurance Program portfolio to come to full maturity.

For more information about or to get involved in TM Forum’s Business Assurance programs, please see www.tmforum.org/businessassuranceprogram or contact Steve Cotton, Director, Business Assurance programs via [email protected]

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The unstoppable growth of Media Networks in Latin AmericaMedia Networks, a B2B unit of Telefónica Digital, is an exemplar of how a service provider can make money from new digital services by exploiting existing assets and local markets’ conditions. One of its aims is to foster competition in the region for pay TV services, which it has succeeded in doing by moving its assets to the cloud to provide wholesale services to other companies within the Telefónica Group, as well as to their competitors. It is also moving into providing Internet access via the same platform.

Telefónica has about 170 million mobile customers in Latin America and around 8.5 million fixed broadband customers in the region. Six years ago, the company turned its attention to becoming a TV distributor, based on a consolidated offering across the region, with one of its goals being to bring pay TV to new audiences and to foster competition. It established Media Networks (MN) in 2006, which is now a division of Telefónica Digital.

MN is a wholesale distributor of pay TV and Internet services for 25 companies across the region (including some main operators, some of which are Telefónica’s competitors), as well as a generator of content, audiovisual and broadcast services, and those who sell advertising for leading TV channels.

MN uses a single platform from which it runs its operations in Spain, the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Central America and Peru, where its headquarters are located.

MN is now growing its business with a new concept of wholesale Internet over satellite platform. Using a similar concept that made the wholesale pay TV business a success, MN is starting to promote and provide services to the communications operators to boost the growth of the home broadband market. MN describes its satellite platform as “the engine for developing new Internet markets” and is determined to derive greater value from it by improving the time-to-market for new services and leveraging various governments’ digital inclusion initiatives in the region with plans to provide satellite-based broadband access.

The key to achieving this was through working with technology partner Intraway to manage the Lima-based OSS, which its partner converted into a multi-tenanted, cloud-platform solution. Intraway streamlined and standardized the OSS, exposing its assets through open application program interfaces (APIs) to MN’s operator customers’ many disparate BSSs, scattered across the region.

It quickly became clear that companies other than some Telefónica operations wanted to enter the pay TV market, rapidly and easily – and they saw MN as the best way to do

"It quickly became clear that companies other than some Telefónica operations wanted to enter the pay TV market, rapidly and easily – and they saw Media Networks as the best way to do that."

MN’s business goals and team at a glance

n better time-to-market for new TV and Internet services;n addressing geographical service restrictions;n reducing the costs associated with proprietary solutions;n increasing competition in the region;n improving penetration in the region to include the less affluent;n developing and exploiting technology know-how;n using state-of-the-art technology and introducing a cycle of constant updates.

MN has a team of more than 1,000 employees, serving more than 20 operators with more than 3.5 million subscribers across the region. Its platform for TV offers more than 500 HD and SD channels and is able to handle more than 100,000 activations per month. It receives signals from 19 satellites.


that. The companies included Oi in Brazil, which has millions of mobile subscribers and competes with other Telefónica business units. Clearly, ensuring fair and equal access to all its customers is paramount.

Pedro Planas, MN’s CTO, comments, “We have to avoid overloading the cloud and the way we do this is through putting business rules in place. Based on the type of query, it is essential to balance priorities between general calls coming through the call center from those that are needed to renew the subscriptions of existing customers.”

Openness and flexibilityThe company says MN’s solutions are “designed from a flexible business model and infrastructure that allow us to provide satellite services across the region, adapt to the needs of each customer in the shortest time-to-market and provide the best support to pay TV and Internet operators.” MN is responsible for technical management and innovation, overseeing more than 500 standard- and high-definition (SD and HD) TV channels.

Planas also comments, “We provide the best solution because we are efficient at reusing assets – we manage the space segment and give our customers all the right tools needed so our clients can deploy the services in their markets.”

He adds, “We process all the signals we get from the content providers, digitalize them, encrypt, uplink them to the satellite and in connection with the BSS platforms of our clients in the different countries we are able to do all the provisioning of current and new final users.

Through our business model, the operators manage all the commercial variables, focusing on defining the product, brand, pricing, set-top box arrangements, commercial strategy, channel map and service strategy, which includes looking after customer relationships and customer experience, leaving all the rest to MN.”

Planas says, “The advantage of working with MN is that we provide the best time-to-market, therefore our clients don’t need to manage the technical issues.”

Starting with ChileThe MN wholesale service started when Telefónica Chile asked MN to help them launch its pay TV service in 2006. The Chilean proposal fueled the MN efforts to provide a solution for Telefónica del Perú to expand the pay TV service further than the eight Peruvian cities where they offered cable TV. The direct-to-the-home (DTH) solution provided for Chile and Peru was so successful that in the following months the Telefónica operations in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela joined them as their first wholesale service clients. “That’s how it all began,” recalls Planas.

Standards, tools and best practicesWorking with its partner, Intraway, and drawing on expertise from other parts of parent company, Telefónica, MN exploited a number of TM Forum Initiatives to implement its strategy.

Planas says, “Regarding standardization, we are carefully following initiatives from TM Forum – in particular, the Cable Initiative is very important to us.” Intraway has participated in the Cable Community and has reused the assets that our Cable Program has produced for both their cable customers as well as their communications and media customers including MN. Indeed the digital head-end in the sky built by MN is very similar to how the cable industry manages its digital video programming content distribution.

The Forum’s Collaborative Cable Community represents more than 600 companies and over 7,000 individuals working together, primarily online, to collaborate and develop best practices and standards. In 2011, TM Forum’s Cable Community launched Frameworx (see page 6) for Cable. Frameworx is the Forum’s suite of standards-based tools and best practices, and the ongoing refinements include development of use cases, standards and best practices developed specifically for the global cable industry. In particular, a great deal of work has been done and continues on the Business Process Framework (eTOM) part of Frameworx.

TM Forum works closely with CableLabs to continually improve the effectiveness of TM Forum standards and best

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"We provide the best solution because we are efficient at reusing assets – we manage the space segment and give our customers all the right tools needed so our clients can deploy the services in their market."

practices for the cable industry. For information about the Cable Community’s activities, see: www.tmforum.org/cableinitiative

The Cable Business Intelligence workgroup within the Community has already identified almost 50 key performance indicators (KPIs) so far, more than 75 percent of the way to the Forum’s stated goal for this project.

The work continues to drill deeper into the details of each of these KPIs to provide more insight into how to use the indicators to actually drive transformation. For more information, or to get involved, see www.tmforum.org/cablebusinessintelligence and/or contact Craig Bachman, Director, Cable, Utility and eHealth Care Programs, via [email protected].

Planas comments, “We use the key performance indicators (KPIs) from the Cable Business Intelligence work, inputting them into our key processes to monitor performance. With so many suppliers and customers, there are very tough service level agreements in place and you have to monitor them very carefully.”

MN also implemented the Forum’s Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR) to help manage its customers’ experience. Planas says, “IPDR will be very important for launching the satellite Internet service, although at the moment satellite service is only one way, the return path will be used for Internet and SMS, and we are also looking at the Forum’s Cloud and New Services initiative [which is now a core part of TM Forum's Digital Services Initiative – see page 51].”

IPDR is a standardized interface for collection and re-distribution of data found in the IP ecosystem. It enables a true understanding of customer experience because it captures information that directly reflects end users’ consumption of services.

IPDR helps cable operators and all types of other service providers to take advantage of big data – the unprecedented amounts of data that service providers now have about their customers and operations. In today’s management

environment where everything is measured and decision-making is based on analytics, IPDR provides critical data from every end-user’s device in a network rapidly and accurately. It can scale to manage the largest deployments. See www.tmforum.org/IPDR for more information.

The power of open APIsClearly, open APIs are a critical part of the ecosystem and business model. Planas explains that initially MN opted for Web Services interfaces, but sees them as a de facto, rather than ‘true’ industry standard. He says, “We are looking at moving from using it to TM Forum’s OSS/J so we can deploy other BSSs that have OSS/J and to take advantage of professionals who have expertise with it.”

The OSS/J is part of the Integration Framework, itself an element of TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6). It provides standards-based interface implementations (OSS/J APIs) 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 support multiple technologies including Java, XML and Web Services integration profiles. Each integration profile consists of specifications, a reference implementation, and a conformance test suite. All OSS/J APIs are publicly available to the Forum’s members at no charge.

The futureIn 2013, MN will continue developing its pay TV wholesale service as well as introducing satellite-based Internet access across the region in line with many of the region’s countries digital inclusion plans. There is no doubt that openness and standards will play an essential role and that MN faces a promising future.

www.tmforum.org/cablebusinessintelligence


Picture perfect: Monetizing mobile video streamsReliance Communications is India’s largest private sector, integrated communications service provider, with over 162 million individual, enterprise, and carrier customers. The group operates pan-India across the full spectrum of wireless, wireline, and long distance, voice, data, video and Internet communication services. It also has an extensive international presence through the provision of long-distance voice, data and Internet services and submarine cable network infrastructure globally.

With voice services fast becoming commoditized, Reliance 3G, one of the group’s two strategic customer-facing business units, has diversified into mobile data services in general, and into mobile video in particular. Reliance’s focus on video reflects projections by a number of analysts that by 2014 around 64 percent of mobile data will be video. This approach put a premium on an inclusive, open standards approach. Using TM Forum’s specifications and guidelines helped ensure a successful launch of the delivery system and laid the foundations for a business that is expected to account for significant part of Reliance 3G’s value added service revenue.

Mobile video services may represent a major new market segment for a communications service provider, but there are major challenges to be overcome if the provider is to maximize the opportunity and drive up video-related revenue. They include ensuring that video streams can be run, without loss of quality, by the maximum number of different connected devices, with many different operating systems and using various types of codec. Another challenge is signal strength, which varies between locations; given the geography of the country, this is a particular concern for a service provider operating in India.

Seeing is believingAccordingly, Reliance 3G designed and implemented its entire video delivery platform to accommodate the issues of multiple operating systems, the many different types of devices, variable signal strength and changing data pipe ‘thicknesses’.

The Reliance 3G Video Delivery Service is the first streaming service of its kind to be offered by any operator in India. Its commercial launch took place in December 2011, allowing 3G customers to view adaptively streamed video content across devices including PCs, smartphones, tablets and other mobile

Internet devices. The Service accommodates multiple operating systems such as Apple’s iOS, Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Bada, Blackberry OS and so on. It also allows users to watch live video channels.

Key features and capabilities of the Reliance Video Delivery System include:

n additional memory is not needed for devices and it supports all devices’ streaming protocols;n it works with all codecs, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2,

MPEG-4, 3GP, H.264, WMV, AAC, MP3, AAC+, H.263, WMA, MOV and RMV and so on;

n users can move between low network coverage and high network coverage areas without experiencing any interruption in video streaming. A daemon running in the background of the stream ‘sniffs’ the data pipe’s thickness periodically and adjusts the bit-rate accordingly;

n it provides seamless video viewing to low-tier as well as high-tier devices, with various screen sizes, resolutions and color depths across network bandwidths ranging from 40 kbps to 7.2 Mbps;

n the system supports various network technologies, including

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GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, CDMA One, CDMA 2000 and WCDMA;n it offers an encapsulated ‘customer delight’ function,

which allows viewers to resume watching videos at the point where they previously left off, whatever the reason, and auto reconnection if the user loses the signal;

n the system enables highly secured video viewing, thereby protecting digital content (video or audio) from unauthorized use.

Present positives, future prospectsA number of TM Forum standards-based tools and best practices were used to enable this innovative video delivery system. Three elements of the Frameworx central suite were involved.

The Business Process Framework (eTOM) was instrumental in the creation of the 3G platform from the start. The reference template kept the product firmly focused on its founding principles, ranging from operations and infrastructure management to prompt billing and revenue generation. At the same time, it helped create a diversified approach that has subtly influenced processes related to customer and enterprise management.

The Information Framework (SID) takes the product intricacies to a new level by integrating a very large vocabulary of information/data definitions and relationships used in defining the Frameworx-based architecture. The market/sales, product, customer and enterprise domains of the Information Framework provided an exhaustive reference model during solution analysis and design for the system.

The Application Framework (TAM) model was leveraged to improve product management practices employed during product lifecycle management of the 3G video delivery service. Best practices from the Application Framework regarding service management and resource management are incorporated.

Use of TM Forum models and best practices has been an important factor in Reliance’s being able to monetize its Mobile Video Service products. The company says, “The 3G Video Delivery Service is now expected to provide major thrust in

significantly growing Reliance’s user base by the end of 2012.”For the future it is anticipated that TM Forum standards

and guidelines will be used for both the development of new products and in the support of new operational and business capabilities. Reliance’s 3G’s planned product introductions include social networking services, a unified multimedia player, a geo portal and location-based services.

Finally, a next generation, analytics-based solution is in the pipeline for the back office, which is intended to: enable a better understanding of customer behavior towards service or product buying; carry out customer segmentation modeling and analysis; support operational decisions; use analytics to optimize performance; enhance customers’ experience; and improve the targeting of products and services.


Defining products within hours, cutting launch costs by 75 percentEstablished in 2006 as a subsidiary of Türk Telekom, TTNET is Turkey’s largest Internet service provider, its largest broadband access supplier, and its largest multi-play service operator. Faced with intensifying competition, a rapidly growing customer base, and the need to constantly innovate in terms of new services and managing operations and its customers, the company embarked on a wholesale re-engineering of its OSS/BSS systems and capabilities at the beginning of 2010. In this project, dubbed the Service Excellence Program (SEP), two main components were a next-generation customer relationship management, order and product catalog management system, and a state-of-the-art billing system. The SEP was completed in August 2011 and it has shortened the launch time for a new product to two hours; reduced training time and other costs associated with launching new products by 75 percent; and has cut churn by 18 percent.

TTNET is Turkey’s largest provider of broadband access and a multi-play service operator. In addition to Internet services, broadband access, and voice and data services, its product range encompasses Wi-Fi, Metro Ethernet, ATM and Frame Relay, IPTV, mobile TV and, as a virtual mobile network operator, GSM and 3G. TTNET serves more than 6 million customers in 81 provinces of Turkey.

The Turkish market is expanding rapidly and characterized by intense and growing competition. The company’s legacy OSS/BSS systems were increasingly unable to meet the new competitive demands of the marketplace. Nor could they efficiently handle the intersection of technologies, payment methods, standards and services that underpinned the ever more complex product offerings that TTNET needed in its portfolio.

Starting in January 2010, with technology partners Etiya and i2i, TTNET began the Service Excellence Program (SEP).This plan was to replace its customer relationship management (CRM) and billing systems with a configurable, convergent, service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based solution which was standards-based and exploited the latest technologies.

Keeping the customer satisfiedEtiya’s Telaura CRM Suite was designed to provide a broad, but detailed, view of the service provider’s customers and their behaviors, to increase TTNET’s profitability and to decrease the company’s time-to-market and operating expenses (OpEx). More specifically, the solution enabled better management of customers’ experience, with so-called party-role relations and

a single application program interface (API) for all customers’ touch points across the different value chains.

A characteristic-based product catalog has speeded time-to-mark, making it simpler to launch new products through greater flexibility. OpEx has fallen thanks to standardized, simplified SOA-based processes and TTNet manages churn better because it has a comprehensive view of the customer.

In addition, script-based rules support validations for order management, while an external engine serves as a rule repository for all internal and external systems.

Billing and cooingThe CRM system was integrated with a new billing system known as the Frontiers Charging and Billing System (FCBS). From the customer-facing perspective, FCBS can handle, for example, a customer‘s account with their order items, which might include a ‘personalized’ bundle such as:

n two telephony and/or three ADSL products, each with a different tariff;n 1,000 free minutes per month for phone calls across all telephony services;n a simple 10 percent discount for the first 1,000 Mbs used on

the first ADSL product, applied for the first three billing cycles after purchase; and

n a duration-based agreement (implemented as a product) of six months for a particular product and where this is breached, a penalty could be calculated dynamically based on all previous discounts.

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From the more technical charging, billing engine modeling and design back-end perspectives, the FCBS can support:

n fixed line or mobile communications services such as GSM telephony, VoIP, SMS, MMS and so on;n ADSL and GSM/3G mobile data services;n content-based services;n other online event-based services such as pay-per-view, IPTV, video-on-demand;n once-only and/or periodic charges such as data line rental, ADSL modem fee, cable TV subscriptions; andn other fixed line/leased data services like ATM and frame relay.

The FCBS also has rule-driven, cross-discounting capabilities and rule-driven tariffs. It supports convergent prepaid and postpaid charging as well as multi-market convergent billing and on-demand billing.

TM Forum in at the outsetTM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6) were extensively used in the realization of the SEP and in particular, the Business Process (eTOM), the Information (SID) and Application (TAM) Frameworks.

The Business Process Framework was used from the start to define the functional scope of the Telaura CRM and FCBS billing suites to analyze business processes and model individual modules. All the CRM and billing-related entities in the Information Framework were examined in detail, and all applicable Aggregated Business Entities were used to create the project’s taxonomy and as a guideline for conceptual data modeling workshops. The Information Framework proved especially useful in the design of the product catalog, which delivered the following benefits:

n the re-factoring phase is very short compared to other TTNET software projects;n new products are easily accommodated and supported;n the combination of a characteristic-based product catalog

supported by a rule engine provides a powerful tool for launching new offers with complicated marketing rules, as shown in the example above.

The Information Framework was also used for defining a common data model of integration and related entities.

Adopting the Information Framework from the start enabled a smooth integration and shortened the project lifecycle enormously: TTNET introduced the next generation CRM and billing suites, migrated its legacy system, and realized an ultra-

modern, integrated, synchronized enterprise environment in the space of around a year.

This was complemented by the Applications Framework providing an outline for the SEP’s applications and their functional domains. It was also used to design the high-level architecture of the overall systems, and is being used in the planning of TTNET’s roadmap for the future.

Doing the business As a result of the standards-based SEP, system integration costs and the duration of the project were cut by 10 percent due to standardized data modeling and Information Framework-based APIs. In the integration phase of the implementation, the Telaura CRM suite was integrated with 30 external systems (including the billing system), using over 300 Web Services within a two-month period (excluding end-to-end tests).

The length of the integration testing and associated costs were reduced by 20 percent. This is a natural outcome of the success with implementation of the middleware and integration aspects of the project, and due to the common flows and the Information Framework.

Time-to-market for new products, services or offers can be within two hours, which has decreased the number of man-hours needed in IT operations. The Telaura CRM and the FCBS suites cut time-to market implementations in terms of duration and cost by 75 percent.

Before the SEP, TTNET spent days training personnel for the deployment of new products, services and offers. Thanks to the construction of unified interfaces for different business interactions, training costs and times decreased by 70 percent.

SEP’s more efficient churn management system functionalities have helped improve churn rates by 18 percent.

Basis for future growthThe SEP systems are handling more than 6 million individual and corporate customers, billing for over 600 million usage transactions, of which around 70 million need to be rated every day, with complex discounts being applied at the point of charging. The systems have 4,000 concurrent and 10,000 defined users, and process 60,000 to 150,000 business interactions per day. The success of the project has increased the level of trust in and support for the company’s IT and operations departments from TTNET’s business divisions.

Aligning the SEP with elements of TM Forum’s Frameworx has provided agility and know-how for the on-going transformation of TTNET’s business. Being able to manage and track complete end-to-end processes and higher data visibility, has enabled TTNET to build far more effective business strategies.


Telaura CrM Suite’s Expansion into Social Media: Somemto

Telaura CRM Suite is a next generation CRM solution which provides essential business functionalities for Communication Service Providers (CSPs), allowing them to manage their customers, product portfolio and orders effectively. Telaura has 15 modules which have been integrated to work together, but each can also serve in its domain individually. Telaura CRM Suite’s design objectives were:

n Enabling customer-centric business strategies for CSPs n Allowing CSPs to know their customers better at micro and macro levelsn Decreasing time-to-market to increase competitiveness n Allowing bundling of convergent products and servicesn Providing dynamic order managementn Supporting the configuration of complex business rulesn Increasing data visibility and security.

The core modules of Telaura CRM Suite are Telaura Customer and Account Management, Telaura Product Catalog and Telaura Sales and Order Management. Telaura Customer and Account Management System provides a real 360° view and very high data visibility.

It keeps relational information about the customers and tracks their interactions across all touch points. The Telaura Customer and Account Management approach has Customer Experience Management (CEM) at its heart, focusing on customers’ needs and the company’s methodology to interact on any platform or channel while meeting the expectations of both customers and CSPs.

Telaura Product and Catalog Management System supports multi-play product portfolio and convergent product definitions. Its catalog is constructed from the bottom up to drive top-down order decomposition. Telaura Product Catalog can serve as both a commercial and technical product catalog.

Telaura Sales and Order Management allows unified order entry for all customer interactions. Telaura CRM Suite’s product catalog-driven order management captures, validates, decomposes and orchestrates orders by accessing product definitions to provide dynamic order fulfillment. Telaura CRM Suite’s external rule engine enables the definition of complex business rules via scripts which take effect immediately. Every step in the order flow is a rule execution node.

The flexible rule engine allows the waiving of any business rules regarding customers, accounts and products across the order flow using rule execution nodes. Telaura Order Management recognizes the entities involved in the rule scripts and ensures that the rules are satisfied during the order flow.

The system enables service providers to roll out convergent service bundles and complex services with the assurance of minimal order fallout. In addition to its core modules, Telaura CRM Suite includes other supplementary modules which enable additional functionalities like customer retention, churn and campaign management.

Telaura CRM Suite is designed using TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM), Information Framework (SID) and Application Framework (TAM) standards. The Application Framework was used as a guideline to shape the applications and

contour their functional domains, and to design the high-level architecture of the overall systems. The Information Framework was used to define a common data model for integration and related entities.

In the integration phase of the TTNET implementation (see page 24), 250 web services and 800 end-to-end task flows were developed, reducing system integration costs and shortening the time taken by using the standardized data model and Information Framework-based application program interfaces (APIs). In 2012, Telaura CRM Suite was certified by TM Forum as conforming to the Business Process Framework Release 9.0 and Information Framework Release 9.5.

Telaura CRM Suite covers major business functionalities in the CRM domain and offers CSPs complete control over their customers’ data. The modular structure of the systems, standardized business entities and APIs allow the systems to fit into any ecosystem easily. Telaura CRM Suite offers reliable, simple and process-centric agile applications. They can be readily integrated with each other to work as interoperable services, allowing dynamic business processes which span organizations and platforms.

A good example of this is Telaura’s new social media extension, Somemto, an intelligent application which allows companies to manage their customers’ interactions in social media. Somemto’s advanced natural language processor scans the social media for the brands, understands the related contents, classifies and reports them.

The application enables responses to customers’ feedback quickly by forwarding the results to the related staff automatically. Somemto enhances


the 360° customer view by adding the customer’s social media profile to the customer’s other information.

Somemto operates in two layers: the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Layer and Analytical Engine Layer. The NLP Layer provides meaningful input for Analytical Engine Layer by processing and sorting information flows from social media platforms. The Analytical Engine Layer deciphers that information and triggers the required actions.

The core of customer experience management is to understand customers and drive the business according to their

needs. It is well known that customer-driven businesses launch more realistic and successful products and services.

Every day, millions of social media users share their good or bad comments about the products and services they receive from companies as well as the attitudes of the companies towards them. By analyzing this digital sea of text, it is possible to build marketing strategies that meet the expectations of customers better.

Companies who understand and adapt social media strategies are increasing their revenues and reputations

significantly. Many big companies that realized the importance of social media have already established social media departments. Somemto offers following benefits to CSPs in CRM terms:

n Introduces a new type of actionable data about customers, prospects and also for competitors n Customers can be reached in their trusted environmentsn Enables community managementn Customers at risk can be identified and precautions can be taken to increase their loyaltyn Provides data to understand market trends and customer needs, resulting in more effective marketing messaging.

Telaura Customer Management is now offering more powerful strategies by the addition of social media dimension to its customer management functionalities.

TTNET is the biggest Internet service provider in Turkey with 6 million subscribers. In 2010, it decided to go through a full transformation which meant replacing every single IT system including customer care, product development, order management, lead management and campaign management systems.

By the end of August 2011, Telaura CRM Suite had been implemented at the heart of the enterprise and has been managing all end-to-end business flows regarding products, customers and orders since.

Details and results of the implementation of Telaura CRM Suite at TTNET as a part of Service Excellence Project can be found on page 24 of this issue.

NLP Module pre-processes the data flows through somemto from social media platforms.Classification Module categorizes and tags the unstructured data.Search Engine manages search and filtering of the data on the server for CRUD operations.Schedular allows users to plan periodic or future-date searches for improved performance.Analytical Engine converts the data into a meaningful, comprehensible form to allow business analysis over the data.


Achieving business effectiveness with a solid BSS foundation Malaysia’s Celcom Axiata is part of the Axiata Group Berhad, the communications giant serving some 200 million customers in 10 Asia Pacific countries and having 2011 revenues of MYR16.4 billion ($5.35 billion). Celcom itself is one of the region’s largest and fastest-growing mobile operators, servicing more than 12 million of its own subscribers and reporting a staggering 25 consecutive quarters of growth as of June 2012. Operating in what is a highly competitive and rapidly maturing market, Celcom is Malaysia’s mobile broadband market leader with over 47 percent user share in mid-2011, and with data services overall contributing almost 23 percent of revenue in the second quarter of 2012. The company attributes a large part of its success to a highly focused emphasis on marketing innovation and Customer Experience Management (CEM) together with on-going initiatives to control costs, and the generation of additional revenues through continuing campaigns of new product launches. In this context, the successful migration of Celcom’s prepaid services to a Frameworx-conformant Next Generation Intelligent Network (NGIN), coupled with the use of advanced business intelligence platforms has paid real dividends. Among these are an increase in prepaid daily revenues of 20 percent in a six-month period, and an operating expense improvement of between 60 and 70 percent.

Part of the Axiata Group Berhad, Celcom is one of the most successful mobile operators in the Asia-Pacific region with more than 12 million customers and an astonishing record of 25 consecutive quarters of growth. In Q2 2012 the operator reported a year-to-date revenue increase of 9 percent to MYR3.8 billion (US1.24 billion) driven by increased mobile broadband and advanced data business, with some 994,000 broadband subscribers reported.

Similarly, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were up 6 percent and, despite Celcom’s aggressive investment program in support of mobile data and its competitors slashing their prices, margins held steady due to the implementation of ‘smart spend’ measures and the improved management of network costs.

The strong growth in data services (excluding SMS and value-added services), which contributed 23 percent of revenue in Q2 2012, was the result of a positive customer response to new products and services. Also, despite declining worldwide trends, voice usage continued to increase on the back of promotions and bundled offerings.

Celcom’s business strategy has five main components:n sustaining the current voice and SMS revenue base;n focus on growing non-voice revenue and maintaining mobile broadband market leadership;n the offering of a full suite of high-speed broadband services – fixed as well as mobile;n a drive to deliver greater cost efficiencies with a strong emphasis on technology innovation;n as a priority, the enhancement of the customer experience through business support systems (BSS) transformation.

Enhancing the customer experience has a number of aspects, including the improvement of existing offers, the launch of multiple new services, and the introduction of improved tariff plans and reward schemes. Given that prepaid constitutes a significant and buoyant segment of the operator’s total customer base, this was the initial market constituency addressed by the new Celcom Next Generation Intelligent Network (Celcom NGIN) developed by Huawei Technologies. The Celcom NGIN revenue management platform is an integral component of the Huawei BSS, a TM Forum award-winning solution.

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First step in BSS transformationCelcom NGIN is the new IT-centric convergent charging and rating system, replacing Celcom legacy network-centric Intelligent Network (IN). The Celcom NGIN system comprises a services platform and an IT core, and is based on a rule-driven engine for online and offline charging. Being rule-driven means that during system implementation and operations, Celcom can compose new rating or rules whereby new products and services can be rolled out much faster.

The Celcom NGIN was deployed from late 2010 as one of the first stages of Celcom’s ambitious program of overall BSS transformation. The intention was to put into operation what was believed to be the first ever example in the communications industry of a system that unified the ‘service-divide’ between postpaid and prepaid customers.

With the implementation of this new platform in the first

half of 2011, Celcom was able to enhance its internal service performance and deliver a catalog of new products that more closely matched individual customers’ needs. These needs were identified through a rigorous segmentation product plan based on the age group of the customer, with different customer preferences and aspirations being targeted at the pre-school stage, then at school, followed by the years in employment, and on through to retirement. On-going changes in customer behavior could also be factored into the equation.

Using the next-generation charging system, response time to customers’ requirements was significantly reduced, and changes and updates to their service profiles and entitlements accomplished in a much more timely fashion. The NGIN system also supported the launch of an extended range of new services and offers. These included Celcom’s first-ever prepaid services for the enterprise market segment; several

TM Forum’s Business Benchmarking Performance Studies

To gauge how well they are performing in various aspects of their business, TM Forum’s service provider members contribute data anonymously into our secure database, and receive personalized reports and assessments of their performance against other participants.

TM Forum’s Business Benchmarking Performance Studies use the quantitative metrics defined in our standardized business metrics, ranging from tactical operations data (for example, percentage of unbilled revenue) to executive-level business performance information (such as operating expense as a fraction of revenue).

They compare operational performance for broadband, mobile and high-speed business services, as well as revenue management topics including billing and revenue assurance, in the areas of customer experience, availability, operational efficiency, and revenue and margin.

The reports provide full statistics and data distributions as well as correlations. A report with aggregated results is available for a fee to non-participating service providers.

Service providers can also use the secure Business Performance Metrics Database – containing more than 26,000 data points – to analyze results in more detail and produce reports and correlations.

In addition to quantitative Performance Studies, the TM Forum Business Benchmarking Program provides Service Provider Surveys that gather qualitative information, such as how service providers address specific issues. Recent surveys include Revenue Assurance Maturity and Web Self-Service.

For more information please go to www.tmforum.org/ActiveStudies/11589/home.html or contact Chryssa Dislis, at [email protected]


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”The improvements in operating metrics provided by the TM Forum-conformant Next Generation Intelligent Network are nothing if not impressive.”

hybrid postpaid and prepaid plans; a number of real-time bonus and loyalty reward programs: real-time postpaid credit limit management; and many other new and innovative features.

The Celcom NGIN embodies TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM), and the Information Framework (SID). Use of these Frameworks was instrumental in aligning the three parts of TM Forum’s Business Effective Triangle – customer experience, new revenue creation and cost control. TM Forum’s Business Performance Measurement System examines the Business Effective triangle plus operational efficiency, which is itself the foundation of TM Forum’s Business Performance Benchmark Studies (see panel on previous page).

Impressive results The improvements in operating metrics provided by the TM Forum-conformant NGIN are nothing if not impressive.

An increase in prepaid daily revenue of 20 percent was recorded in the six months after the system came online, along with a growth in prepaid data usage of between 3 and 5

percent. These gains can be attributed in part to the use of real-time notifications and promotions and the new ability to rapidly build and launch a large number of attractive new services – a total of 20 new products were released during the period from January to May 2012.

At the same time, thanks to the construction of a system characterized by an optimized architecture, improved operational efficiencies and simplified components and processes, the NGIN delivers an improvement in operating expenditure of between 60 and 70 percent.

“The future is about looking at and knowing consumer behavior – understanding their needs, wants, purchasing patterns and trends is the first step in building an ecosystem that will be able to meet and offer customized products and services to better serve each and every one of our customers and their lifestyles,” sums up Dato’ Sri Shazalli Ramly, Chief Executive Officer of Celcom Axiata Berhad. “Through platforms such as the NGIN, Celcom is stepping up with industry-leading transformations that place our customers’ needs and concerns first.”


Leveraging Frameworx to develop new business models and revenue-generating servicesSaudi Mobily (Etihad Etisalat) is an innovative, forward-looking mobile operator in Saudi Arabia, and one of the leading mobile operators in the Middle East region. In September 2011, the company became the first operator in the Middle East and North Africa to introduce 4G services. Mobily was also the first mobile operator in the region to launch an app store. The company is now the undisputed leader in mobile broadband service provision in Saudi Arabia, claiming a 75 percent share of the national mobile data market. This is one of the highest utilizations of mobile broadband traffic per subscriber in the world.

Mobily recognized at an early stage that the value-added business and data services would be increasingly important revenue generators and brand enhancers. To exploit these new opportunities, the company embarked on a far-reaching business transformation strategy, initially centering on the construction of a Frameworx-aligned Next Generation Service Delivery Platform (NGSDP). To date, among the results of this transformation have been an increase in data services revenue to 20 percent of average revenue per user, and a growth in the numbers of users of NGSDP-enabled services from zero to nearly 700,000.

Mobily is the pre-eminent mobile operator in Saudi Arabia, with over five million data customers, including 2.3 million subscribing to high-volume data bundles. In early 2011, faced with fierce and growing competition in the Saudi communications marketplace1, the company decided it needed an immediate way to differentiate itself. After analyzing changes in the market, looking at which demands from customers were not being met, and its internal resources, Mobily’s CIO, Medhat Amer, took the view that the company could provide “the fastest and most innovative content services to market, ever”.

Mobily’s strategy to differentiate itself had three primary building blocks providing: excellent customer experience; a wider range of services and ideas arising from better partnership relationship management; and a higher return on capital expenditure.

To execute this strategy, Mobily’s CIO Medhat Amer sponsored the Next Generation Service Delivery Platform (NGSDP) as part of the company’s IT transformation.

The plan was to move away from the traditional silo-based way of deploying value added services (VAS) to a platform-based ecosystem. This was not only to provide services but also to act as a platform for innovation. He laid out clear objectives which were aligned with those of Mobily’s CEO:

n to automate processes for bringing partners and developers onboard;n to automate and speed up the settlement process;n to enable the easy creation of services;n to expose Mobily’s network assets;n to develop service level agreements concerning standard application program interface usage; andn to ensure revenue assurance was built into the platform.

The plan was to implement the platform over five months and migrate functions over three months. The business governance of this project was put under the direction of Mobily’s IT Director for Customer Experience, Hashem

1WEF’s Global Information Technology Report 2012, Living in a Hyper connected World, ranks Saudi Arabia as #34 in the world for Network Readiness, #17 for Economic environment, #8 Business and Innovation environment and #2 in number of mobile phone pre & post paid subscription per 100 people (186 percent). The report, created in collaboration with INSEAD, recommends that all economic agents in Saudi Arabia engage in reducing cost of communications, increasing adult literacy and improving access to information, a situation common to other developed countries in the region (UAE, Qatar, Oman).


Sharrab, because the company recognized that customer experience is where the project could have the biggest impact. It also became clear that some aspects of the three business operations areas – customers, partners, and revenue and resources – had to be managed so that new and more agile relationships could be explored without impacting the smooth operation of the core business.

The NGSDP was implemented in partnership with Huawei Technologies. It was integrated with Mobily’s existing VAS platforms (for ring back tones, SMS/MMS, WAP, mobile TV, and so on), core network and business operations support systems (including enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and billing). It gave Mobily a competitive advantage in terms of speed and agility in the creation of new services.

A flexible, integrated platform The flexible, integrated platform, with its communications and IT capabilities, also lowers the risk of disrupting the 24x7, carrier grade, core business operations. Developers and content or service providers can easily create innovative, customized services using simple templates or open and secure APIs.

However, creating a viable business ecosystem on this platform required a continuous, high-level engagement of customers and partners around Mobily’s VAS in ways which really made a difference for each and to the whole. Such ‘network effects’ cannot simply be bundled into platform technology because they affect so many aspects: political, economic, social, technical, legal and regulatory. What more was needed to create it?

This question (or, rather there was no good answer available from the industry) mobilized Mobily and Huawei in a joint effort to define more specific business objectives for the ‘three blocks’ strategy.

First they considered what would give more satisfaction to customers. They decided that two key areas were a more interactive customer experience in the areas of content and self-care services.

Also, that recommendations should match subscriber’s specific inquiries with their known preferences for local or global culture and Saudi consumer market trends as well as their device capabilities, location and usage habits.

They also felt that flexible charging, which creates affordable means of consumption, was important to generate subscribers’

interest in the new VAS.Second, they concentrated on what would attract valuable

partners. Answers they came up with included enhancing and exposing their unique capabilities to interest content and service providers in engaging with Mobily’s subscribers through interactive channels such as SMS, MMS and web/WAP. This would allow the expansion and diversification of offerings almost on demand. They also wanted to provide low-cost access to marketing mechanisms like app stores and white label or jointly branded retailing.

Low friction relationships It was also clear that low-friction business-to-business relationships with content and other service providers needed business processes that contain all the necessary steps to understand, test, engage with and disengage from Mobily’s VAS ecosystem.

Third, they explored what would push revenues to the levels to make the ecosystem viable and would give Mobily’s executives confidence in the project. They concluded that they needed revenue streams from new business models between the network operator, subscribers and third parties. Also, to provide more opportunities to cross-sell and upsell Mobily’s core retail products, particularly new data packages and mobile broadband access.

Finally, they needed ways of ensuring that they monetized data and created value from existing capabilities in the ICT infrastructure by exposing them and allowing partners to use them in a secure, accountable and manageable way.

These clear business objectives for the platform scoped the ‘exploration’, using the NGSDP’s functional capabilities to reach their objectives:

n by providing functional components that support activities such as approval of third parties’ contracts;n through registration and validation as a legitimate supplier

in Mobily’s enterprise resource planning systems with all contract-related policies enacted in Mobily’s IT systems;

n enforcing third-party access to Mobily’s exposed assets as specified by contractual service level agreements (SLAs);n through protecting end-users when they are using

services which involve third parties (such as enforcement of preferences, privacy and charging rules when the service is delivered); and

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n by settlement with third parties using external bank accounts and following the contractual conditions related to revenue sharing from VAS consumed by end-users.

Oiling the wheelsDesigning business processes and data entities to build a viable business ecosystem on the NGSDP required a starting point, an industry blueprint.

Mobily and Huawei acknowledge TM Forum’s standards-based tools and best practices was a good start. It has been developed and honed over many years by its unique collaboration communities with many and varied contributions from its members, for use in the planning, execution and future development phases of the NGSDP.

TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM) and Information Framework (SID) provided practical guides for the in-depth analysis of product lifecycle management (see page 37), customer relationship management and the management of relationships with partner and suppliers.

Both are elements of TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standardized tools and best practices – see page 6 for more details. Frameworx gave Mobily’s IT organization a rational approach to identify which functional requirements were already implemented in its IT department and which were still needed to reach the business objective for the NGSDP project.

Mobily made considerable progress with the help of Huawei in defining best practices to support business operations for content-based VAS products and self-care services when combining existing network and core business operations with partners’ capabilities.

Again, the implementation of the NGSDP-based solution is a validation of Frameworx principles of integration, which expose processes and data aspects down to a granular level. These enable new business models, which monetize an ecosystem of third party services. These in turn add value to Mobily’s assets, which the operator then retails or offers for free to its end-users (monetization can happen entirely on the partners’ side).

Another major area of Frameworx that substantially contributed to Mobility’s NGSDP project success and accelerated the delivery of the implementation was product lifecycle management (PLM). Mobily and Huawei mapped PLM activities in Levels 2 and 3 of the Business Process Framework to the functionalities of components of the NGSDP to the lowest possible level with a large degree of alignment with

supported processes and data structures.Huawei’s business consultants are working with Mobily’s IT

department to create ALOMS, a ‘mini’ implementation of the Business Process Framework dedicated to digital ecosystems for VAS business. It reuses and expands the Framework’s processes for operations and to support the VAS business strategy. The major business operations areas in ALOMS are: aggregation, launch, operations, maintenance and sustainability of the ecosystem, based on continuous value creation for its constituents.

More revenues and customersThe NGSDP helped Mobily to increase the revenue from its data services to 20 percent of average revenue per user. Within the first six months after the commercial launch in August 2011, the NGSDP generated SAR4.7 million ($1.3 million), with revenue doubling on a month-on-month basis.

VAS revenue generated during the month of January 2012 reached SAR1.9 million ($0.5 million). The number of users of the services enabled by the NGSDP has grown from zero to nearly 700,000. Some 40 percent of revenue is generated by the top 10 services, apps and games.

Today Mobily covers more than 92 percent of all populated Saudi areas with mobile broadband reaching 587 cities, towns, areas and highways. Total revenues have climbed to SAR16.013 million, recording a 23 percent year-on-year growth. With unified hardware, unified provisioning, unified portal, unified data storage and management, the NGSDP solution will further contribute to revenue growth, brand improvement and reduce Mobily’s operation and maintenance costs through best practices across business domains.

Future in the cloudThe NGSDP project is part of a broader change program across Mobily’s business that is designed to unlock additional new revenue streams. This program encompasses many operational aspects. They include better customer experience with many types of VAS built around digital content, voice or video and provisioning of third-party access to network service enablers exposed for external consumption under various SLAs. It also supports finer granularity for charging events starting with distinguishing between person-to–person and application-to-person data revenue and expanding into e-commerce charging capabilities.


In future, Mobily will utilize the advantages provided by the NGSDP to create more innovative services focusing on consumers’ needs, ranging from rich communications and entertainment to utility and vertical market segments such as automotive, healthcare, education and security.

Mobily has plans to grow this open ecosystem based on transparent payment systems and settlement systems. It will explore new business models that will encourage partners, content providers, services providers and developers to work

For Mobily, the Service Development & Retirement processes from the Business Process Framework-based product lifecycle management (PLM) constituted the most important set of activities for the creation of new VAS and their launches.

The following seven mappings between the Business Process Framework and the NGSDP solution were particularly important:

Gather and analyze new service ideas: In the NGSDP there is a provisioning function for developers and third parties (including internal innovation departments) exposed through a portal where innovation partners can create an entry proposal for their new idea as a VAS.

Assess performance of existing services: There is a customizable workflow in the NGSDP, which re-directs these proposals to the right department in the operator organization, which can then assess the business value of the idea. This includes the fit for existing service enablers and the cost of developing new application program interfaces (APIs) specific to the new application. It can accept or reject the proposal.

Develop new service business proposal: Once an idea is accepted, the proposer can develop a complete business proposal for the service (which includes the revenue model for the new VAS).

Develop detailed service specifications: The proposer is able to develop a detailed service specification, using the exposed network and IT capabilities of the operator.

Manage service development: All the tools and information required for the development are provided as part of the Service Creation Environment in the developer portal, which allows the whole service development to be managed (this includes the new APIs to be exposed, access to the test environment, subscription to a certain revenue model, submission to launch and production).

Manage service deployment: After the development is completed, services are deployed on the integrated Service Execution Environment for commercial use.

Manage service exit: A simple workflow-based design has been implemented to manage the service lifecycle. By changing the status of the service from an online to an offline service, it will be removed from the commercial environment. There may be exceptions for subscription-based services, which are handled separately. This is because they cannot be made offline when there are users registered and using the service. The same applies to seasonal services that can be re-used for certain events but should not sit idling in-between.

with operators in one marketplace to drive new revenue for all the players in the value chain.

Mobily will upgrade the existing service network to a cloud-based infrastructure, enabling the introduction of new cloud computing business models. These will include cloud solutions for the visual media (Media Cloud), healthcare (Health Cloud) and so on. The expectation is that migrating service platforms and other service layer systems to the cloud will additionally increase flexibility and rationalize costs.

Product lifecycle management shapes the services platform

DiGiTAlSERVICES


China Telecom shows the importance of product lifecycle management in the digital world China Telecom’s move from being a ‘telco’ to an integrated information service provider meant that the way it offers products and services, and bundles them, was changing rapidly. Not only was the number of new products growing explosively, but their source, content, form and business models were changing greatly too. The service provider recognized that efficient, effective management of the products and their packaging, right through their lifecycle, was crucial. It built a Product/Packaging Management (PPM) System to do just that, initially referencing, then contributing to, TM Forum’s work on Product Lifecycle Management. The Forum’s Information Framework was also fundamental to the PPM, which has delivered many benefits to China Telecom that include standardized interfaces (which were partly responsible for reducing integration costs by 48 percent) to halving the time to market in some areas and providing much more consistent data across systems.

With the development of new technology, network convergence, and the transformation of the traditional telecom operator to integrated information service provider, the number and variety of products, and how they are packaged, is changing rapidly. This process has been accelerated for China Telecom by the arrival of 3G and converged networks.

In China’s fiercely competitive market, there is less time to research and develop products and packaging, faster times to market are needed, and so is their effective management. Developing this management expertise was an urgent business issue – China Telecom saw it as an essential weapon if it was to compete.

China Telecom had several issues around managing products and bundling:

n A lack of an end-to-end product/package management process: it needed a system to manage the whole lifecycle of product and how they are packaged. At the start of the project to develop effective management, there was only a low level of offline communication during the research and development process, no assessment of their success or otherwise after launch and no means of ‘delisting’ products.

n Configuration was slow and involved a heavy workload: before the launch of new products and bundles there was no consistent information about them and often some information was missing, resulting in lengthy IT configuration.

n No single system to manage all the product and packaging data: there was no centralized, unified source of information which could be used by other systems.

Business goalsChina Telecom wanted the effective management of products and their packaging to enable it to compete better in the marketplace; support the entire enterprise business operations and meet the needs of business management. It also needed to integrate existing products and their packaging effectively and build a unified brand. It was keen to be more flexible so it could respond to the changing market and shorten the time needed to launch new products and bundles.

The company saw that the way to achieve all these business goals was through a Product/Package Management (PPM) system. China Telecom took into consideration how to build a system that would allow it to become more customer-centric, as well as the system being product-centric. The company says, “We needed the PPM to be an important base platform for China Telecom’s supporting IT system”.

Key points of the solutionChina Telecom’s PPM system is built around a two-level deployment and three-level application handling model. It is implemented in a central group with provincial branches, and utilized in the central group, as well as provincial and municipal branches.


DiGiTAlSERVICES

The business and IT departments cooperated to clarify the whole lifecycle process of products and their packaging, and together developed a template for their business configuration requirements, including the IT systems necessary to support the entire lifecycle of products’ and sales’ processes.

Most elements in the template can be used by business departments; the structure of the template avoids inconsistent interpretations by the business and IT departments, and helps business departments input information to the PPM system directly.

The PPM system needs to interact with 11 surrounding systems, including customer relationship management (CRM), billing, service fulfillment, very small outline package (VSOP) and so on. Originally this involved 37 interfaces, which made development and debugging time-consuming and difficult, and required close cooperation between different systems and departments.

Building on the templateHaving developed the developing product/package configuration requirements template, the next steps were to build a consistent data model, a standard data interface and unified system specification.

The consistent data model would simplify the data interactions between systems, while a standardized interface would simplify the system’s development. China Telecom opted for Web Services interfaces to connect the PPM and surrounding systems.

The PPM system was successfully developed and deployed in a central group and 31 provincial branches in just 12 months, adopting the China Telecom Group-Management & Business Operation Supporting System (CTG-MBOSS) specification series to standardize the system.

Standardized lifecycle managementChina Telecom’s PPM referenced TM Forum’s holistic product lifecycle management (PLM) framework, which includes three dimensions: Product Definition Data, Product Definition Processes and Meta Capabilities (see panel).

The Product Definition Data uses the Unified Modeling Language (UML) model to define products.

The Product Definition Processes capture customers’ needs, analyzing them into a set of solution components, and supports the design of how the components are assembled into an offering or product. It also covers how the assembled components are delivered to systems and supports the after-sale lifecycle events and processes.

China Telecom’s Product/Package Management System

China Telecom built the PPM system, which is deployed in central group and provincial branches. This solution makes product/package management and configuration in the PPM system, achieves the goal of unified management and control, uses a unified template, unified configuration, unified dispatching and unified demonstration.

Lifecycle management mainly implements the entire product/package lifecycle management from ideas, to publishing and retirement. It provides a unified, standard collaborative platform for business and technical staff.

Product/package information management is responsible for defining and maintaining the entire product/packaging specifications and catalog data. It examines and approves the product/package configuration appliance, and provides relative statistics and evaluation management.

Template management implements the management of new additions and changes template for the product/package configuration application. It prescribes and unifies the structural expression of the product/package application. It also manages the customized control process template and customized work order template in each link of the process.

Module for managing end-to-end product/package provides integrated, complete product/package business entire view and system entire view querying and demonstrating. The system's entire view includes product/package configuration application and specification data, related catalog, in transit and historical lifecycle management and control process, as well as linking and handling information, and so on.

Rule management module governs business rule management and mainly includes the management of catalogs and rule configuration. In the PPM system, business rules mainly face business staff, focusing on functional descriptions of business rules, not their specific implementation details. Business rules need to be synchronized with other related systems, which will complete the configuration implementation of business rules, and build relationships with PPM.

System management module mainly carries out daily management functions including login ID and permission management, as well as the maintenance of basic data to ensure the platform is flexible and stable.


The Meta Capabilities enable a single view of the product, its data configuration and provide search capabilities.

In particular, China Telecom’s PPM primarily adopts the these aspects of the Forum’s PLM standards: information management for products and their packaging; lifecycle management; and rule management.

Based on the experience it gained, China Telecom added some refinements to the Forum’s PLM standards. First were some further refinements to the configuration and launch processes in lifecycle management, as well as to the monitoring of the entire lifecycle process and collaborative management.

Second, it came up with additional aspects on to how to manage the entire view of products and their packaging. Third, it provided extra data modeling for products and their packaging.

TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) model was also fundamental to the PPM’s success. It is an element of the Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6). In particular, China Telecom used the Information Framework to identify the concept relationships between resource, service and product systems. The company also used it for defining the product data model and offer data models.

It also used another element of Frameworx, the Application Framework (TAM), which is based on the principles of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). It was implemented to encapsulate the PPM’s and the surrounding systems’ functions into distinct services and deploy them on the service bus. This means that the services can be invoked by other systems, reducing integration difficulties and saving 48 percent on integration costs.

A shared success storyChina Telecom’s PPM system deployment has been a great success. The company hopes that the PPM can also act as a reference for other service providers in the management of products and their packaging.

In just over a year, China Telecom successfully realized a two-level deployment – implementing PPM in a central group and 31 provincial branches and unifying product/package management and configuration in one PPM system. It has brought many benefits.

They include enabling the whole process management and control for products and their packaging. This has improved configuration efficiency, reduced configuration time: for example, now China Telecom’s Anhui branch takes 3.5 working days to complete package configuration , instead of six to seven days.

TM Forum’s progress in product lifecycle management

In conjunction with Tribold, TM Forum has produced Product Lifecycle Management – an Introductory Guide which focuses on the importance and applicability of product lifecycle management (PLM) for the digital age.

Service providers are increasingly focused on deploying a PLM as a discipline for turning under-managed capabilities and fractured processes into a coordinated effort to design, develop, deploy and maintain the products around which their business is centered.

In this context, PLM is seen as the key to effectively and efficiently innovating and managing a company’s products and related services and resources, to assure ongoing sustainability and profitability. The Guide will be available to all members who are registered on our website from December 2012 and will be embedded in the next version of Frameworx (release 12.5 published at TM Forum Management World Americas 2012) TM Forum’s suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6).

This Guide is based on extensive experience in the area PLM , namely the Holistic Product Lifecycle Management report* which includes a survey of the lessons learned about the application of PLM in other industries. It presents best practices and potential benefits to be gain from taking a similar approach in communications and leads to the introduction of a Holistic Product Lifecycle Management Framework for communication. The Framework is characterized by three distinct dimensions; Product Definition Process, Product Definition Data and PLM meta-capabilities. Each is described in detail.

*Please see www.tmforum.org/DocumentLibrary/TR137HolisticProduct/33734/article.html

Data consistency across different systems is also much improved, for instance, inconsistent data in CRM and billing systems has been reduced significantly in the Hunan branch.

The PPM approach has been adopted across the company, meaning that unified, specific codes are generated for products and their packaging. All configuration requirements are initiated by the PPM, ensuring unified management and control, and the end-to-end view query function simplifies the design of new bundles for package planning staff.

Finally, the explicit management functions for rules make it simple for the business department to manage business rules and ensure they are aligned with business goals.

www.tmforum.org/documentlibrary/TR137HolisticProduct/33734/article.html


Saving up to 2 percent of total revenues through revenue assuranceTelefónica Latin America has a long-standing commitment to revenue assurance. In Q4 of 2006, the organization decided to create a new unit to identify and develop the right corporate strategy to enhance the revenue assurance (RA) practices in its 18 operating companies across Latin America. An initial assessment revealed that companies collectively stood to lose between 2 and 4 percent of its services revenues annually without a coherent RA strategy and practice in place. It turned to TM Forum’s Guidebooks and RA Maturity Model to guide it through putting these in place and then going through a continuous process of refinement and improvements. It also used the Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM) as a reference for the business case and to define some of the necessary processes. The benefits vary between recovering 1.5 and 2 percent of total service revenues over the last four years, applying consistent quantifiable criteria, in addition to rising cost savings as the RA teams and practices mature.

Telefónica Latin America’s 18 operating companies in the region offer fixed telephony services, mobile, broadband and TV as well as specific services for the corporate segment, small and medium-sized enterprises, and professionals.

In 2006, Telefónica Latin America came to the conclusion that a strong RA practice, with the right approach, scope, tools and responsibilities, would be a great asset to the business and help improve margins and customers’ satisfaction.

At that time each of the operating companies had different set-ups, including various sized teams (or no resources at all), no single, comprehensive understanding of the role and scope of RA, a lack of tools and no homogeneous set of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure results delivered by the RA team. Also, there were no clear targets for RA teams.

The first thing the new team did was assess two important aspects. First to figure out what the existing RA practices were and second, to identify and gain control of revenue leakage points so they could recover lost revenue. As an extension of this, it wanted to find and fix the root causes of revenue leakages to prevent future losses.

At this point, the corporate RA team has been presented with TM Forum’s methodologies, best practices and standards for RA (see panel), which have been developed and honed over many years by its Collaboration Community.

Telefónica Latin America selected a set of 54 control scenarios (out of over 100 presented) that it considered had the greatest potential and could be carried out by the RA team, the in-country RA teams or another business unit in the operating companies.

The central RA team carried out some calculations based on those selected 54 control scenarios, which took into consideration:

n If no controls were performed by anyone in the company or only sporadically, how much could the company be losing? n If the control was being carried out in another area, how

much was being detected and recovered? It quickly became clear that most areas were not quantifying the leakage risk or revenue recoveries.

At this stage, the objective was to identify risk existing up to Level 2 shown in the table below:

Using the TM Forum KPI Metrics Workbook Instructions (GB941 Addendum A – see panel on page 39) to perform the financial assessment, Telefónica Latin America chose the following KPIs:

n detected leakage risk to determine the potential leakage across the 18 operating companies; n revenues recovered (cost reduction) to assess the potential benefit of RA activities and its contribution to the business; n revenue losses (overpayments not recovered) to assess the

potential losses if no action were taken regarding leakage risk; and avoided losses to recognize the future benefits (revenues and costs) achieved once the company fixed the root causes and the leakage stops.

Level 1Known-knowns – problems that were visible and understood

Level 2Known-unknowns – problems that were apparent, but not understood

Level 3 Unknown-unknowns – undiscovered issues

bUSinESS & IT AGILITY


TM Forum’s guides to revenue assurance

The collateral references used by Telefónica Latin America to get the team started on the development of its corporate revenue assurance (RA) practice included the following from TM Forum’s RA Guidebooks:

GB941 Addendum A – KPI Metrics Workbook see www.tmforum.org/GB941A

GB941 Addendum B – Maturity Model see www.tmforum.org/GB941B

GB941 Addendum D – Revenue Leakage Framework and Examples see www.tmforum.org/GB941D

implementation conformance).In 2011 the team worked closely with Dr. Gadi Solotorevsky,

Head of Revenue Assurance at TM Forum, on the Forum’s Revenue Assurance Risk Coverage Model (GB941 Addendum E). For more information please see www.tmforum.org/GB941E.

Big achievementsSix years into the RA program, some of the operating companies have achieved a maturity level above 4. RA has a much higher profile and its importance is widely acknowledged, and the RA teams have a much better understanding and visibility of the main risks and the right approach on controls and tools.

The RA lifecycle – from detection to the correction of root causes – is down from eight months to between three and four months, although complex issues can take a little longer, depending on IT and capital expenditure requirements.

In terms of control coverage, Telefónica Latin America’s overall metric has risen to 52 percent, whereas at the start it was below 30 percent. Although the company has been continuously improving its automated use of RA controls since 2008, even now about 20 percent of those that are carried out repeatedly are manual and the rest are semi-automated. Nevertheless they have given the operating companies and RA teams great insight into the financial benefits of RA and helped them assess and prioritize further developments and deployments, and to optimize new controls.

Over the time, the RA teams have expanded their controls from only covering revenues to include RA cost controls, increasing the ratio from 5 percent in 2008 up to 20 percent now. This indicates that there is still great potential to cut costs in most of the operating companies.

During the last year, Telefónica Latin America has launched an extensive RA Development and Training Program to

At the same time, it was important to assess RA maturity where the function had been in place for a while. To assess RA maturity overall, the centralized team decided to measure it using the five pillars in the Forum’s RA Maturity Model (organization, people, processes, measurement and influence – see page 40). The overall measurement of the RA across the operating companies was found to be, on average, 2 (on a scale from 1 to 5, according to TM Forum’s RA standards, which demonstrated there was huge potential for improvement and savings.

Regarding financial risk, the results of the first assessment found that without adequate RA controls, the 18 operating companies were collectively at risk of losing over 2 percent of their services revenues annually. Looked at another way, at that time, this represented a huge potential to increase the bottom line results in the region if the group could only recover 20 percent of those potential revenues at risk.

Since Q2 2007 Telefónica Latin America has developed and implemented an extensive RA program following TM Forum’s best practices and guidelines. It merged TM Forum’s GB941 Addendum A and GB941 Addendum D to form its own KPI Metrics Workbook and Blueprint which contains definitions of all the relevant control scenarios. At the moment it covers about 60 control scenarios, from product and offer management to accounts (end-to-end).

In addition, the RA team, as part of its proactive RA activities, is now involved in the launch of a new service or promotion, and any systems or network platforms that are being deployed, replaced or updated to identify, assess and avoid potential risks. With this is mind, Telefónica Latin America defined a specific process up to Level 2 of the table above for the team and created a checklist that covers the key aspects of preventing risks and/or identifying where a specific control is needed.

Evolving the Revenue Assurance Maturity ModelTM Forum’s RA Maturity Model has become the guiding light of Telefónica Latin America’s corporate RA strategy and has also been used as a reference to develop more tools and methodologies to enhance the RA function. The company has added to and refined the Model, based on what it has learned from its own operations, including defining and categorizing all the aspects that are important to target at least periodically.

To assure the implementation of its strategy, Telefónica Latin America put in place an extensive RA Transformation Program based on the five pillars of the Maturity Model. This is an ongoing process and more tools and methodologies will be developed to support the evolving maturity of the RA teams in the 18 operating companies. In addition, since 2008 Telefónica Latin America has deployed a world-class solution for RA, which is certified by TM Forum as conforming with Frameworx (see page 55 for the business benefits of product, solution and



The five pillars of the Revenue Assurance Maturity Model are:

OrganizationHow a business organizes its revenue assurance (RA) responsibilities highlights the alignment between the goals of the business as a whole and the goals of the RA organization. Organizational fit is also a reflection of the business culture and the extent to which the business culture is suited to genuinely adopting RA objectives.

PeopleThe maturity of RA can in part be gauged from the number and skill of human resources dedicated to RA or providing secondary support.

InfluenceThe ability to proactively instigate, manage and deliver change is a sign of mature RA. Influential RA delivers financial rewards to the business

and a mechanism to continuously improve the efficacy of RA against its full potential.

ToolsThe use of tools is one of the most tangible guides to RA maturity. However, maturity relates to the cleverness of design and implementation, the synergistic use of tools to meet multiple business objectives, and the blend of activities supported by automation as well as the raw processing power, number and cost of tools.

ProcessRA involves the improvement of processes, but is itself a high-level process containing many detailed processes that should be improved over time.

1. Ad-hoc, chaotic. Dependent on individual heroics.2. Basic project/process management. Repeatable tasks3. Standardized approach developed. Designing-in control commences.4. Leakage quantitatively understood and controlled.5. Continuous improvement via feedback. Decentralized ownership, holistic control.

figure 1-1: The phases of revenue assurance maturityTM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model is part of TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Solution Suite (GB941). Well established and widely used throughout the industry, it has been refined and honed by our members over a long period and has brought great business benefits to many of our members.

We are applying this proven approach to customer experience management: Frameworx 12.5 includes a guidebook with a roadmap, maturity model and an outline of customer-centric processes and about 250 metrics. Details on our website from December 2012.

TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model

1. Initial

2. Repeatable

3. Defined

4. Managed

5. Optimizing

promote and increase RA knowledge across the group. Its content ranges from RA techniques to RA corporate methodologies. It consists of internally developed training courses and also external courses. This Training Program helps retain the knowledge base and reduces the learning curve among the teams.

The operating companies have achieved a higher RA maturity level and a high degree of control coverage. They consistently reapply RA controls and contribute less recovered revenue as less is lost.

The futureTelefónica Latin America is planning to reassess the maturity of RA in the group and expects to see big improvements since it was last evaluated in 2009. The RA team wants to develop a

quantification criterion to assess the RA risk at Level 3 of the table on page 38, the Unknown-Unknowns.

It will also work on achieving a higher level of synergies regarding work carried out in other areas, such as by the fraud management (see page 44) teams. However, its top priority is to ramp up the implementation of RA tools as it recognizes that there is still room for improvement in terms of speeding up the delivery and improving the quality of tool implementation projects. This is based on knowledge from its current deployments, considerable experience and lessons learned from previous projects.

Finally, the company will continue to work on deploying as many automated controls as possible to make the most efficient use of resources.


Business assurance automation takes business decision-making to new levelThe Business Assurance Automation Catalyst demonstration at TM Forum Management World 2012 addressed a critical communications industry challenge. It showed how what might otherwise be operational data overload can be transformed into intelligence on which to base timely and actionable business decisions. This Catalyst project’s team was championed by Optimus Portugal, Swisscom, and Telefónica’s O2 Slovakia. TM Forum Business Metrics Automation Certified companies cVidya Networks and WeDo Technologies presented their approaches to isolating continuous improvement opportunities and relating them to Frameworx-conformant implementations. Demonstration scenarios included running benchmark queries for various business situations against the TM Forum’s centralized Business Metrics Automation server, and presenting the results in Executive Dashboards.

The project built on the success of Catalyst project (see panel on page 54) demonstrations at Management World Americas 2011 in Orlando. Since all participants were TM Forum Business Metrics Automation (BMA) Certified, this enabled the second phase of the project to include connectivity to the BMA Server, as well as to generalize the Executive Dashboard approach to represent a TM Forum Dashboard for the entire Business Performance Metrics System.

The Dashboard was designed to suggest industry best practices and technology approaches that would be fed back into the TM Forum’s Collaboration Program for members to consider adding to the Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6).

The other key aspect of the project was to demonstrate the relationship of the Business Performance Metrics System to operational data, based on the Frameworx Information Framework (SID – see page 6), as implemented in the applications feeding data to the Executive Dashboard. Both Optimus Portugal and Swisscom are implementing this approach, which is part of an overall Business Assurance application of Business Management Systems, the third aspect emphasized in this project.

The connected view of the competitionAs communications service providers continue to fight for pole position in the race to deliver new and innovative services, being able to evaluate business performance and benchmark against competitors quickly and easily is a vital factor in achieving success. "I don't know if the critical business performance indicators I use to manage our operations are connected to the real-world operational view," is a concern voiced repeatedly by senior executives with service providers.

This Catalyst project demonstrated, using two revenue

Champions’ enthusiastic responsesSupport for the Business Assurance Automation Catalyst project

and TM Forum’s Business Assurance Program from participating

individuals in the Champion CSP organizations.

“This strategic Catalyst addresses a burning industry challenge

by transforming an overload of operational data together with

valuable industry benchmark information into timely, actionable and

effective business decisions. This can provide a significant value to

any telecom service provider.”

Ivan Kabát, Revenue Assurance Manager, Telefónica Slovakia

“Optimus finds the TM Forum Business Benchmarking Studies to

be a valuable source of information to measure our performance

against industry norms and uses them to focus on the most

important areas for improvement. Executive Dashboards that

brings together industry standard metrics, automated business

benchmarking via Business Metrics Automation can hugely

improve our ability to understand the data that underlies our own

metrics, more efficiently compare them against industry averages,

and ultimately provide us with a timely, holistic view of our

performance which enables us to take business critical decisions.”

José Gomes, Revenue Assurance and Fraud Manager, Optimus

Portugal

“We are excited to pioneer this new program with cVidya [Networks]

and TM Forum. Swisscom has been and continues to be an industry

leader and innovator in the telecom space. With TM Forum’s

Business Metrics Automation interface and standard business metrics

implemented in MoneyMap, our Revenue Assurance operations could

improve greatly and we would save on our bottom line.”

Theodora Simeonidis-Orenstein, Revenue Assurance, Swisscom


assurance scenarios, how that connection could be ensured, employing TM Forum-Certified applications, the Business Performance Measurement System and the Business Metrics Automation service to provide an enterprise-wide view and an Executive Dashboard approach to Business Assurance and operational ‘drill down’.

In more general terms, the Business Assurance Automation Catalyst project was aimed at simplifying and speeding up the process of benchmarking, based on industry-agreed metrics, by providing automated access to TM Forum’s Business Benchmark Database.

The proposed solution involved the following:

n defining a group of business-critical metrics and standardizing their calculation to achieve comparable results among different service providers all over the world, within their lines of business;

n providing the automation process within the tools to upload secure information that would enrich the Forum’s Business Benchmark Database, and downloading the information that would allow the monitoring of the service providers’ performance against these metrics;

n proving how the model could be applied in realistic business scenarios, regardless of the service provider’s size, line of business or location; and

n using data analytics for deeper insight into deviations in key performance indicators (KPIs).

The benefits of the solution included:

n improving accuracy and reducing the overheads associated with manually collecting and entering data during business benchmarking;

n ensuring consistent, accurate and ‘apples-to-apples’ comparisons for both benchmarking studies and internal dashboards, delivered in products with TM Forum Business Metrics built-in;

n providing the right information, in the right place, at the right time to service providers who want to keep pace with their competitors by gaining deeper insight into where they can most profitably improve through analyzing the performance of KPIs; and

n delivering market trends information to C-level executives within service providers so they can plan their strategy to succeed in the highly competitive services market.

Overall the project brought together three dimensions of TM Forum's Business Assurance Program, namely:

n Frameworx-conformant operating practices with service providers’ enterprises, automating processes and information management with Frameworx-conformant applications;

n TM Forum's Business Performance Management System to define and manage metrics around enterprise performance, combined with TM Forum's Business Benchmarking Services and Business Metrics Automation; and

n application of Business Management Systems in a Business Assurance practice using tools like an Executive Dashboard to help decision support activities.


Typical use case scenarioUsing the Business Assurance Automation solution it’s possible to envisage the following use case scenario.

The CEO of the largest communications service provider in its market takes a call from the chairman asking them to assess the areas of risk presented to their company by the just-announced acquisition of a smaller competitor by the current second-place holder. They are also asked what actions the CEO would recommend to the board to mitigate that risk.

The CEO uses the enterprise dashboard to look at the running performance, in terms of internal results for the enterprise, comparing them to the industry benchmarks presented by TM Forum.

The CEO sees that there are five key metrics in which his company is considerably below the industry average as compared to the benchmarks, for which the acquired company is known to hold key competitive advantages, which the acquiring company aims to leverage.

The CEO asks the C-level executives of his management team to drill down through internal data, using the relationship guidelines from TM Forum’s Data Analytics Guidebook, and determine what areas of the enterprise process flows are the root cause of the below-average position of the company. He asks them to return with a plan of action to attack the root causes of the shortfall to mitigate the risk of competitive disadvantage after the merger.

The CEO prepares a report for the board with a commitment to surmount the competitive threat and remain the industry leader overall.


Adding $146 million recovered revenue to the bottom line Qtel Group is headquartered in Qatar and has operations in markets in the Middle East, North Africa region and Southeast Asia. They collectively serve more than 83 million customers. In 2009, the Group embarked on a three-year program based on TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model and business benchmarking studies. In 2010, the first full year of the program, the project contributed some $50 million to the bottom line. In 2011, the company recovered $146 million, more than double the target, and prevented the loss of much more through fraud management, using the same principles wherever possible. At the time of writing, in fall 2012, the company was already ahead of its goal for the year.

Qtel Group has grown from being Qatar’s incumbent operator to a large communications group with operations in markets in the Middle East, North Africa region and Southeast Asia. They collectively serve more than 83 million customers.

The company’s key markets include Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia and Indonesia, through companies operating GSM networks and WiMAX infrastructures. Its key brands include Qtel, Indosat, Asiacell, Wataniya, Nawras, Nedjma and Tunisiana.

Qtel Group is approaching the completion of a three-year plan to deliver revenue assurance and fraud management capability to 17 operators across the company (please see TM Forum Case Study Handbook 2011* for more about the plan’s origins and implementation). It set targets based on the TM Forum’s maturity benchmarking self-assessment program, which enables operators to evaluate the maturity of their revenue assurance practices in terms of five key elements: organization, people, process, tools and influence (see page 40).

The project has been a huge success. In 2010, the first full year of the project, more than $50 million was contributed to the bottom line*. In 2011, revenue recovered was double the target at $146 million. This year, with four months to go, the target for the entire year has already been passed. “We’ve delivered over and above the targets we set ourselves,” says Lee Scargall, Group Director of Enterprise Risk Management.

Beyond recoveryHowever, Qtel wasn’t simply looking to stop leakage and recover missing millions in revenue, it wanted to position itself for the future in terms of managing risk in the wider sense. Being able to attach hundreds of millions of dollars in recovered revenue is a straightforward business case for investing in revenue assurance, but the group also wanted to address less tangible issues related to fraud management and revenue assurance.

Moving through the steps of the TM Forum maturity program was therefore critical. “Every year we have done a maturity assessment to see if the progression has been as expected across the five key pillars and, as we have rolled out, each pillar has had a gradual progression in maturity,” adds Scargall. “That increased maturity increases our ability to determine leakage and leads to greater recovery.”

He emphasizes that putting vendor framework agreements in place and rolling them out across the Group’s properties was a key step, along with training. “We set up training academies in Doha, Qatar, where the analysts could come in and learn how to work more effectively,” says Scargall. “It is a totally different landscape now and obviously the business has seen this through the improved revenue recovery.”

However, justifying investment in fraud management is less clear cut, as David Stuart, Associate Director of Revenue Assurance, Qtel Group, explains: “The difficulty with fraud

*TM Forum Case Study Handbook 2011 is free for all employees of the Forum’s member companies who register on the website from www.tmforum.org/CaseStudyHandbook11

"The project has been a huge success. In 2010, the first full year of the project, more than $50 million was contributed to the bottom line."


management is that, unlike revenue assurance where you can walk in and evaluate how much of the gross revenue is being lost, it isn’t really about the operator, it’s about the environment in which the operator sits. For example, you can’t predict the extent to which fraud exists in the company when assessing it – we can only look at what we can detect.

“In the last three years we have seen an increase in the amount of fraud we detect,” he adds. “At the beginning we found very low levels but the program has helped us to mature and understand what is fraud and how you find it. Even so, when it comes to a maturity grading, there really isn’t a benchmark for fraud out there.” (see panel opposite).

A question of cultureQtel Group has used the benchmarking activity related to revenue assurance to help develop its fraud management. Having a large group of operators to draw upon and share data and techniques between has enabled it to achieve good results. However, having such a diverse range of operations means taking into account lots of different cultures too when managing fraud.

“In some of the places we operate, the corruption index is high and it can be a cultural norm to take from your employer,” explains Scargall. “In the U.K., for example, employees might take the odd item of stationery but in Indonesia employees think it is within their right to provision family and friends with SIM cards. They don’t see it as crossing the line.”

In addition, Qtel Group has used elements of the TM Forum’s revenue assurance benchmarking program for fraud management where applicable.

“Where the five pillars [organization, people, process, tools and influence] of the revenue assurance maturity assessment model are relevant to fraud management we have utilized them,” says Stuart.

He adds, “Organizationally revenue assurance and fraud management sit under the same head within the Group, which has helped where we look at people and organization. The same head, with the same understanding, doing the same work in each discipline is important.”

Placing clear targets on fraud management and measuring success, remains difficult.

“A fraud such as PBX hacking will occur where default passwords haven’t been changed, for example,” says Stuart. “The solution to that is to change the passwords, but how do you report what the benefit of that has been? You can’t

TM Forum and fraud managementThe Fraud Management Group is run under the umbrella of TM Forum’s Revenue Management initiative and has a Collaboration Community that our members are most welcome to join to contribute to helping the industry tackle fraud – please see www.tmforum.org/FraudManagement for more information.

If you would like to get involved in the Forum’s work on fraud (or any other aspect of revenue management or enterprise risk management) please contact Steve Cotton, Head of Revenue Management, via [email protected]

The first edition of the TM Forum’s Fraud Classification Guide has identified more than 80 types of fraud to provide consistency across the industry in how we characterize the threats – it is free for our members to download from here www.tmforum.org/GB954FraudClassification.

The TM Forum Fraud Operation Management Guidebook Release 1.0 was published in May 2011 and is available free to members from www.tmforum.org/GB947FraudOperations. It outlines best practices drawn from the communications and other industries.


www.tmforum.org/GB947FraudOperations


"It is very hard to estimate the value to the business of fraud management because there is no model to benchmark yourself against."

put a number on it. In revenue assurance, on the other hand, prevention can be quantified. The simplest way is by doing pre-implementation testing and identifying an underlying leakage of 10 percent, for example. It is then clear that if you didn’t undertake revenue assurance you would be 10 percent down.”

Exaggerating fraudIn addition, the fraud problem probably isn’t as big as some of the headline statistics suggest. “The big four consultancies all put out survey results suggesting that all operators are losing 10 to 20 percent of their revenues and that gets everyone worried,” says Scargall. “Those surveys are designed to do that and bring [operator] customers in – we’re certainly not seeing 10 or 20 percent losses.”

Scaremongering aside, maturity aids detection. “We’ve analyzed several projects over the last six or seven years and we can see empirical data sets that show that in an operator at level one maturity, we’re seeing 0.25 percent leakage detection. At level two that rises to 1.5 percent and, by the time they’re up to level four, maturity detection rises to 3 percent,” he adds.

“It is very hard to estimate the value to the business of fraud management because there is no model to benchmark yourself against. We’ve trained the people and deployed the toolset. We’ve put in the alerts system and wiki sites to update across the group and in revenue assurance, we’ve got the group up from beneath level two maturity and are easily at level four.”

That improvement can also be attached to fraud, thinks Stuart: “If the fraud maturity model existed, you’d expect the fraud maturity model to be on par with revenue assurance because it’s all run by the same people.”

A mature approachFor Scargall, maturity is about having the understanding that, in addition to the clearly identifiable revenues recovered, there are less tangible benefits. “What we do isn’t just about revenue assurance and fraud management, it also aids the business in general,” he says. “A metric I would love to produce is one for the maturity of the whole organization.

“What you would see if you looked at Qtel Group revenues over the last three years is that we’re one of the few that continued to grow during the financial crisis. In terms of revenue assurance, last year we added $146 million earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization [EBITDA] contribution and that makes the difference between a good year and a very good year or a bad year and a very bad year.

“The years of bad recession have been going on around us and operators have seen people choose to make fewer calls,” he adds. “Over-the-top players are taking revenue from them so revenues are on the slide but, if you can generate an EBITDA increase that comes from revenue assurance that can be offset.”

For Stuart, that’s part of the reason why operators are so interested in fraud management and revenue assurance. “This project has been extremely well received across the entire group,” he says. “If you asked executives within the operating groups what are the top three things the group has done to aid their performance, the second or third item would be this revenue assurance program.

“They see real benefits from the toolkit, the dedicated processes and the training academies. Maturity has developed because we have linked people around the Group and they see the power of working together in this way. Revenue assurance has become one of the top items in terms of being well received by CFOs and CEOs.”


Assurance starts with sound advice and practical helpThe Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) is the leading communications provider in the Philippines. Through its three principal business groups – fixed line, wireless, and information and communication technology – the company offers the largest and most diversified range of communications services across the Philippines’ most extensive fiber optic backbone and fixed line, cellular and satellite networks.

The company is embarking on an ambitious business transformation initiative of its fixed infrastructure, including a two-phase network inventory build and the unification of various legacy OSS/BSSs. A crucial element of the transformation process is its primary network inventory system. The company recognized the importance of developing standard business processes throughout, and turned to TM Forum for expert input to help exploit the advantages offered by the Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices.

The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) is the leading communications provider in the Philippines. Through its three principal business groups – fixed line, wireless and information and communication technology – the company offers the largest and most diversified range of communications services across the Philippines’ most extensive fiber optic backbone and fixed line, cellular and satellite networks.

The company is embarking on an ambitious business transformation initiative of its fixed infrastructure, including a two-phase network inventory build (see panel). The OSS Transformation Program is an essential part of the strategy. It is intended to replace the various legacy OSSs with a unified OSS that will address, among other things, the need for an integrated, simplified, 360º view of the network as well as the customers’ subscribed services.

PLDT decided to prioritize network build because while it has established business analysis and business processes for fulfillment, assurance and billing, it was lacking business analysis for network planning and engineering. In particular, there were no established business processes for network-related activities.

A key element of the transformation initiative is a primary network inventory system. This is designed to provide an accurate database of PLDT’s current network as well as an

PLDT’s two-phase Network Build Project

The first phase of PLDT’s Network Build Project was completed in November 2012. It involves building up the inventory of seven network element types representing a cross section of its equally diversified access, core and transport infrastructure. The IP Address inventory has been included as the eighth ‘network element’. Some of these network element types are active (managed) and others passive (non-managed).

The major challenge is building up the integrated and simplified inventory in synch with the company’s full-blown network transformation, migrating the legacy network to a next generation network (NGN), deploying FTTx and upgrading its infrastructure to enable digital services for home and enterprise customers.

The second phase of the Network Build Project will begin in January 2013 and will cover the rest of the network elements. They include the backbone facilities on the one end and the last mile and customer premises equipment on the other, to complete the end-to-end view of the network and the customer

Once the network build is complete, the next stage will be enabling the service assurance functionalities founded on the work done for network inventory.



accurate view of activities that change the network. They include new build, migration and asset recovery and network audit activities. The inventory project’s main aim is to devise standardized processes for these activities and to cover the entire OSS/network lifecycle. It also helps avoid stranded assets and discovery of assets that can be redeployed.

As these processes are devised, the secondary aim is met: that of optimizing and standardizing the processes. These processes will be used as a basis for the operational activities, for recording planned and executed changes to the network and tracking the progress of such network projects via the network inventory system.

Development and documentation As a start point for development and documentation of these processes, it was decided to use the TM Forum Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6). This came about because at the start of the company’s Business Transformation Program, the project’s sponsor, Network Head and SVP George Lim, engaged Tech Mahindra to help draw a roadmap to transform the OSS.

Tech Mahindra carried out the study (OSS Transformation Journey) and used mainly the Business Process Framework (eTOM), an element of Frameworx, as the basis of assessing the existing situation and recommending goals for PLDT. When Ana Maria Sotto became PLDT's OSS Project Director in 2010, she used the output of that engagement as part of her guide in detailing the OSS Transformation Roadmap for the next three years.

Lim and Sotto recognized that Frameworx offers a whole suite of standards-based tools that PLDT can use to continuously refine and streamline business operations. Also that its use would minimize misunderstandings between other service providers and vendors because of Frameworx common standards and language. Further, Frameworx provides an excellent reference for aligning the entire organization as it covers all aspects of business processes, avoiding gaps and overlaps. Finally, in the fullness of time, PLDT could use TM Forum’s Business Metrics (see pages 7 and 29) to assess and improve business performance and benchmarking practices.

PLDT became a member of TM Forum in 2010. Sotto spoke

about the on-going OSS program during TM Forum Management World Asia 2011 and became increasingly interested in utilizing the rich information arising from TM Forum’s unique online Collaboration Community. More than 65,000 individuals participate to share their experience and knowledge to evolve TM Forum’s standards and best practices.

Sotto decided to run a pilot project, which would not interfere with the OSS timeline, but would have a big business impact. Network Build was the logical choice. PLDT had little experience with Frameworx and so called upon the TM Forum experts for help.

Three major challenges face the Network Build Project Team:

n how to fast track the build in the midst of migration to the (NGN) and deployment of new network equipment such as FTTx;

n how to effectively manage the inventory as soon as it is completed; and n how to harmonize the apparent changes brought about

by any network activity (new build, special build, migration, retirement/recovery), product launch, service fulfillment, service assurance.

Cross-functional team A cross-functional team, with representation from Network Planning and Engineering, IT, Network Migration and Management and other impacted departments, was assembled and trained in the TM Forum’s Frameworx tools. The most important of these for this project was the Business Process Framework (eTOM), with use made of the Information Framework (SID) also. The wider team embarked on a range of official TM Forum training courses – see http://tmforum.org/TMForumTraining/5912/home.html for more information.

The training provided a solid foundation of the theory of the elements of Frameworx involved, so that everyone understood the same terms and basic concepts. From the wider team, a core technical team was created to move the project from theory to practical implementation.

For the duration of the project, this core technical team sat together as one group with input from TM Forum's experts. This allowed a better understanding of the interactions

http://tmforum.orgTMForumTraining/5912/home.html


between the various departments in the completion of each end-to-end process. From time to time, some of the wider team members are called upon to clarify the processes further. It was easy for them to enter the discussions because of the training and certification.

Following training, the team collated current process documentation. This, supported by the knowledge and experience of the team, was mapped against the Business Process Framework at Level 4. The result was a spread sheet which served two purposes: it defined the scope of the activity in Business Process Framework’s terms; and showed the relationship between the TM Forum standard processes and PLDT’s existing processes. This identified gaps, overlaps and mismatches, and prompted a further collation of current processes.

Looking at processes in detailThe next step was to discuss the current processes in detail. Some underlying principles emerged, which related to the way that PLDT wanted to use the standards. For each current process in scope, there were two steps:

n The first step was to extend the Business Process Framework to lower levels, which define the specific PLDT processes to achieve the generic Business Process Framework activities. These processes are needed at ‘leaf’ level, in some cases Level 8. Leaf level processes are those that comprise an activity of interest to the network inventory system, or one that achieves a specific delivered benefit (for example, ‘job’). Each of these processes was challenged to see if it was relevant to the ‘to-be’ world.

n These leaf level tasks were then organized into flows; sequences of activity that are logical, practical and necessary to achieve successful changes to the network.

In each of these steps, close scrutiny was given to the reason for the process, the availability of required information and triggers, the extent to which the process was generic versus product- or system-specific, and so on. This allowed the eventual flows to be reused for as many scenarios as can be foreseen.

Once a base decomposition and flow had been developed, similar activities (such as Fiber-to-the-Home migration, NGN migration and other complex services migrations) were discussed as uses of that flow, allowing the decomposition and processes to be reviewed and refined into reusable standard processes. While the processes are executed for different resource types by different departments, each resulting flow now diverges only where really necessary.

The flows were then drawn against swim lanes by organization, resulting in a basis for development of a RACI table for each – identifying which departments are Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed .

The RACI table and Swim Lane Process flow are then used together to show and discuss the passing of the process control between departments. Again, the reason for the transfer of activity was challenged and potential efficiencies discussed.

The next step was to gather performance expectations, in terms of the likely duration of each task. This set of key performance indicators (KPIs) will be recorded and used as a baseline in the network inventory system. When the processes are tracked in the network inventory system the actual durations can be captured and used to identify problem processes and ones that may benefit from re-investigation.

Performing final checksOne final check was performed – state change diagramming – using the Information Framework’s Aggregated Business Entities (ABES – see page 61). The lifecycles of the major ABEs within the Resource Domain were discussed and drawn, and the activities that cause state change mapped against the transitions. Those that were not present in the flow diagrams were identified and, in some cases, resulted in refinement of the defined processes.

Expert helpThe whole project was undertaken with support from TM Forum's experts. The artefact development was carried out immediately after the training, and was performed in two-week chunks with similar length gaps in between. This allowed progress to be made rapidly, while allowing the team to



maintain their day-to-day activities. The project activity was initially led by TM Forum's experts,

in the development of each type of artefact (decompositions, texts, flows and so on). As the activity progressed, the responsibility for undertaking the work transferred to the PLDT team, with TM Forum's experts taking a mentoring role.

In particular, the team mastered the art of business process mapping to establish what the outcome of changes would be and went to a high level of decomposition using the Business Process Framework, which was transferred to the network inventory systems. This has made it easier and faster to carry out configurations.

During the work, several inconsistencies in processes were discovered, as well as a number of ways to improve the efficiency of the processes. Furthermore, audit weaknesses were identified that exposed PLDT to potential loss or deterioration of assets.

In the future, PLDT wants to move away from using spreadsheets to deploying a business process management tool, and here too TM Forum's experts have offered information and guidance, including on the following areas:

n workforce management in the areas of Operations Support and Readiness (OS&R);n fulfilment of complex services, covering service configuration and activation, and resource provisioning;n assurance of complex services (service restoration) including

problem handling, service problem management and resource trouble management; and

n the assurance of complex services (service quality) including quality of service to customers, managing service level agreements, service quality management and resource performance management.



Cloud Catalyst demonstrates that fore-warned is truly forearmedTM Forum’s Catalyst program set out to make sure that cloud services are sufficiently resilient to support critical services – even when there are emerging threats, whether physical, such as Super Storm Sandy which tore up the East Coast of the U.S. in November 2012, or cyber threats. In particular, the Resilient Cloud: Maintaining Service in the Face of Developing Threats Catalyst, championed by Telstra, explored responding proactively to threats to maintain critical services.

Cloud computing is rapidly becoming a major sector of the ICT business. An estimate from Forrester Research suggests the private cloud market could grow from $7.8 billion in 2011 to more than $15.9 billion in 2020. Another, from Gartner, predicts public cloud services could be worth as much as $109 billion worldwide in 2012.

However, with attention turning to the cloud as an operational domain for defense and other mission-critical applications, questions are being asked about the security and practicality of cloud computing. This is not least because most network alarm and management systems only react after network performance has been compromised.

The Resilient Cloud: Maintaining Service in the Face of Developing Threats Catalyst project (see panel on page 54) set out to demonstrate that cloud is a viable technology for mission-critical applications. The Catalyst was championed by Australia’s Telstra. The operator’s primary aim was to use the project to research standards, techniques and products that would ensure the continued operation and survivability of mission critical applications operating in the cloud, despite the existence of a severe threat environment.

The other participants were: IT management solutions company CA Technologies; Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping software company Esri; Layer 7 Technologies, which provides integration for security and management products using application program interfaces (APIs); and Thales Communications, whose portfolio includes providing secure infrastructures, Internets and intranets for government and defense.

Defense viability tested The project aimed to establish a real-time understanding of events such as a developing natural disaster situation, a Denial of Service attack, or an emerging civil unrest situation that could affect services and threaten the enterprise in other

ways, and how to make adjustments to maintain continuity. The idea was that service could be maintained through moving the workload, according to decisions based on service level requirements.

Cloud standards are being developed in many areas to address service level agreements, security, billing and monetizing, as examples. As a consequence, the Catalyst team focused this phase of the project on a proof-of-concept system to maintain critical system resources by monitoring various threat vectors, and proactively managing the physical resources of a cloud environment that support those mission-critical services. This was shown through analysis of developing threats and the provisioning critical services as required.

The resulting demonstration included a threat ‘dashboard’ and secure management interfaces for cloud-based services and auditing. TM Forum interfaces (OSS/J – see page 21 under section 'The power of open APIs'), part of the Integration Framework, the Business Process (eTOM) and the Information (SID) Frameworks were used as well as ITIL. The three Frameworks are elements of TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6) while the Forum’s members have worked hard to closely align ITIL and the Business Process Framework (see panel).

The use of all these standards-based tool and best practices enabled the rapid response and alignment needed from IT and network management to create an end-to-end view of the network and services.

The Catalyst project used scenarios, such as the snow and ice storm that crossed the U.S. in 2011, to simulate a developing threat that could jeopardize the ongoing operation of several major data centers and endanger the mission-critical applications hosted in them.

The main requirements for the Catalyst project were: threat detection and notification; service management; and a security framework.


ITIL and the Business Process Framework

The Business Process Framework simplifies and assures consistent, enterprise-wide implementation of ITIL by providing an out-of-the-box set of business processes and flows.

ITIL is defined in terms of a set of suggested generic process steps (without detailed definitions of the processes themselves), plus a means to provide evidence that an organization is following them. These steps are general-purpose and could potentially impact a number of other activities, particularly as different departments within the same organization are likely to interpret and define the processes differently, creating problems at the boundaries, where the differently defined processes don’t match.

In contrast, the Business Process Framework defines specific processes within the steps that must be followed for an organization to be considered Frameworx-conformant. This greater specificity is to reduce the so-called ‘integration tax’ and procurement costs. Without this level of detail, integration becomes prohibitively time-consuming and expensive.

So an IT organization implementing the Business Process Framework inserts process steps and flows into ITIL steps and evidence points. To facilitate this process, the Forum has used ITIL terminology where appropriate in new process definitions, mostly at Level 4 of the Business Process Framework. In addition, it is adding ITIL notes to processes to indicate how they map to ITIL.

TM Forum’s members can tune into one of our most popular ever webinars, ITIL and the Business Process Framework Working Together, from January 2012, by going to: www.tmforum.org/ITILandBPF

TM Forum’s Digital Services Initiative

TM Forum’s Digital Services Initiative focuses on overcoming the challenges of managing complex digital services and enabling an open, vibrant digital economy. The initiative brings all members of the value chain (enterprise customers, digital service providers and technology suppliers) together to remove barriers to adoption of cloud and other advanced digital services.

As a core part of the Initiative, TM Forum’s Cloud program has already produced enabling technology and enhancements the Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6) to help the development of a vibrant enterprise cloud services market. The program is guided by the Forum’s Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council.

To learn more, please visit www.tmforum.org/digital or contact Robert Cohen, Director, Enterprise Cloud Program, TM Forum [email protected].

Threat detection and notification were needed to provide the dynamic identification and notification of developing threats and to build a visual representation of emerging threats. It also covered the issue interfaces between partners.

Service management was responsible for identifying critical services, analyzing the quality of service policies, transferring critical services based on threat analysis, and brokerage between cloud services.

The Security Framework protected and managed the APIs, managed identity and access rights, ensured messaging was secure, and handled auditing and alerts.

The GIS technology provided an added level of capability to the network monitoring and management system to detect and identify the developing threat and model its potential impact on the network. This advance notice provided time to identify which critical services might be disrupted and relocate them to safe network resources. This ensured the continued availability of services without relying solely on the usual network alarm, and without waiting for an interruption to services to trigger the reallocation of resources.

Take-aways from the CatalystThe take-aways from the project were that a proactive approach to developing weather threats ensured that there was no disruption of mission-critical applications. Visibility into resident applications in the threatened center allowed the administrator to identify mission-critical applications in advance of service disruption.

Safe centers could be located and an application transfer could be initiated prior to any degradation in network capabilities. Execution of the transfer required a well-coordinated, proactive response, making certain that the appropriate resources were available in the new location.


End-to end resource management improves service and customer satisfaction China Mobile is the country’s leading mobile services provider, with the world’s largest mobile network and its largest mobile customer base. As of August 31, 2012, the group had a customer base of over 698 million (including over 75.6 million customers for TD-SCDMA), and in 2011 it enjoyed a 66.5 percent market share on Mainland China. So far, China Mobile’s services have mainly been based on GSM and wireless local area networks, but the group has plans to offer a range of 4G and mobile Internet services. It is beginning to deploy technologies such as fiber closer to premises, Packet Transmission Networking and IP Multimedia Subsystem.

At the same time, competition in the Chinese marketplace is intensifying, and demand for basic connectivity slowing. The company felt that the only possible way to meet all these challenges at once was to develop and deploy a much more efficient, flexible, scalable and easy-to-integrate OSS to replace the previously fragmented processes, systems and data repositories. Furthermore, China Mobile intended that in the process this would dramatically improve the operator’s digital service capabilities and boost customer satisfaction. A key part of the OSS transformation was the construction of an end-to-end resource management and service provisioning system. This has resulted in capital and operating expenditure of thousands of millions of Chinese Yuan and slashed some service delivery times.

Over the years, China Mobile has been evolving from a giant mobile operator, with the world’s largest mobile network and most numerous customer base, into a major, full service player. To facilitate its transition from a provider of voice and text services to offering converged, voice, broadband data, and value-added applications, the group needed to overhaul and streamline its OSS/BSS capabilities.

This meant replacing multiple, fragmented support systems with an integrated multi-network management system, which provided comprehensive support for an advanced converged network and new services made up of multiple components. Or as Dr. Liu Aili, VP, China Mobile, put it: “[The] network should be visible, controllable, analyzable, traceable”.

At the time the decision was made to go ahead with the OSS transformation, there were a large number of ‘unknowns’ concerning the relationship between customers, products and resources. Nor was it possible to carry out impact analyses across different domains. All of these factors had serious impacts on China Mobile’s business, in particular preventing the rapid production and commercialization of new, converged services.

Its infrastructure comprised something like 50,000 core network equipment elements and 900,000 base stations of various types provided by about 100 different vendors. It was

also struggling to figure out the root cause and impact on customers and its business of the 14.37 million fault alarms it had to handle every day.

In operation, cross-domain network resource allocation could not be realized and customers’ quality of service could not be guaranteed. As a consequence, the service capabilities and customer experience were difficult to manage effectively. At the same time, it was becoming too difficult, costly and time-consuming to manage resources in the established stage.

In short, China Mobile wanted to achieve five aims through its ‘CM-OSS’ implementation:

n establish and manage complex relationships between resources;n establish the association between different network

elements (such as the air interface and the base station controller, return circuits, through the transmission network to the outside plant);

n have a clear line of view from the customer to the resources involved in providing a particular service, such as a leased line for an enterprise customer;

n have this information (in bullet point immediately above) available in pre-sales stages; andn be able to locate problems rapidly and carry out an impact



analysis to decide on the best plan of action – whether that’s contacting the customer to warn of a problem and advise them how quickly it will be fixed or alternative routing, which customers aren’t aware of or need to be involved in.

This was a hugely ambitious goal given China Mobile’s starting point and the scale, scope and complexity of the situation – potentially being able to look at every point involved in any given issue, from the nearest manhole cover to a port on a device.

Managing resourcesA particular challenge was presented by inventory and resource management. Resource management systems were segmented by network domains, contained in separate management systems, and could not provide an overall end-to-end view. This meant that the group was unable to assure the accuracy, completeness and consistency of data. The diverse and complicated resources were becoming ever more difficult to manage as networks and types of network expanded, along with a sharp increase in the number of new services on offer, including enterprise and residential customer services.

Some idea of the scale and scope of the problem can be gleaned from the fact that just one branch of China Mobile had a system which stored 140 million resource entries, and more than 10,000 orders for enterprise customers’ services.

The group needed a platform where it could see layers of customers’ topologies, and from which service and resource layouts could be generated for all resources across multiple domains. These multi-layered views were designed to support business operational processes such as customer self-service, product and offer design, resource survey, and customer impact analysis. All of them underpin more efficient service delivery and greater customer satisfaction.

End-to-end visibility Accordingly, China Mobile embarked on its ‘CM-OSS’ project. This included a focus on the construction of an Integrated Network Resource Management (INRM) system, oriented towards full-service operation and lifecycle management. It was developed in collaboration with esri.

The view of resources it provides combined inside and outside plant for the first time, so that a complete data model could be compiled showing a consistent, end-to-end view. The model has a three-layer (customer, service and network) structure, correlating resources across multiple domains and combining logical network layer data with physical bearer layer data (optical cable, channel, and so on). This can overcome problems such as separate cross-domain resources, difficulties in end-to-end resource presentation, invisible resources and a lack of effective processes.

The system is designed to be highly flexible and scalable. It uses a hierarchical model, which includes layers concerning

data management, service, application and access. The interfaces of each layer are standardized and extendable. ‘Link’ and ‘element’ concepts are used to provide a unified, abstract representation for processing by a generic topology engine. Based on a network view (comprising an access layer, collection layer and core layer) combined with round and tree layout management, the resource topologies can be generated to accommodate network changes, and enable bi-directional navigation between customer, service and network views.

TM Forum in the frameThe development and implementation of China Mobile’s new system made use of TM Forum’s Information (SID), Business Process (eTOM) and Application (TAM) Frameworks in a number of areas. They are all elements of the Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices.

The group created its own business framework using the Forum’s Business Process Framework as a reference. By mapping the old processes with Business Process Framework’s Level 3 processes, broken processes and missing steps were identified and many more processes were optimized.

The new, standardized process flow is more comprehensive, efficient, clear and effective with optimized operational rules and requirements. It is also easier to execute and assess, and enables the efficient transfer of information and knowledge-sharing between team members.

In particular, the system relies heavily on the reference located in the Operations Support & Readiness (OSR) part of the Business Process Framework, which involves customer relationship management, service and resource domains. It can determine the correlation between customer, service and resources through a provisioning flow. It supports resource change management processes, and maintains details of the full relationship between resources throughout their lifecycle management.

The project gained from using the Business Process Framework by shortening system requirements analysis and gap analysis cycles (from the previous three months down to two months, a reduction of 30 percent).

China Mobile designed the overall resource model by making full use of the Forum’s Information Framework’s advantage, including its uniformity, stability and extensibility. To build an end-to-end, customer-focused system, China Mobile generated a consolidated China Mobile Operations Support System (CM-OSS) Information Model using the Information Framework.

The Information Framework is abstracted from a higher level compared with other models for specific networks so it meets management requirements for the converged network. This means it could be used for full-domain alarm correlation and root-cause analysis. For example, China Mobile provides more than 600,000 leased lines to customers for voice, data and transmission. By acquiring information from enterprise


Sharing experience through a ‘Catalytic converter’

Drawing on its real-life experience, China Mobile initiated the Catalyst project, Converging the resource view to improve service capabilities.

TM Forum Catalysts are short-term, collaborative projects which strive to create solutions for critical industry operational and systems challenges, as defined by different types of service providers, MSOs, defense agencies, enterprise IT departments and others. The projects last between three and six months and their culmination is a live demonstration at one of TM Forum’s Management World events. They are based on the Forum’s standards-based tools and best practices and typically feed their work back into the Forum’s Collaboration Community to extend and enhance those tools and best practices for the good of all TM Forum’s members.

This particular Catalyst project demonstrated how to construct and apply end-to-end customer-resource views for converged networks, to improve service capability and customer satisfaction, which is essential for transformation from a single mobile network to a converged network.

Different layers of customer topology views, service topology views and resource views were generated for all resources across multiple domains, and utilized in business operational processes, such as customer self-service, product/offer design, resource survey, customer impact analysis; all of which help support improved service efficiency and customer satisfaction.

China Mobile Communications championed this Catalyst, supported by Alcatel-Lucent, ZTEsoft Corporation, Beijing BOCO Inter-Telecom Technology Co., Ltd., Inspur Communication Information Systems Co., Ltd, Huawei Technologies Ltd, Ericsson, ZTE Corporation and Beijing University of Posts and Communications.

customers, services, and performance and alarm data from network equipment, China Mobile was able to establish the relationships between customer-product-service-resource for enterprise customers, based on the Information Framework.

The model allows convergence of the original and separate domain models into a unified end-to-end system model, including outside plant resources to construct a full domain network resource model. It correlates inside and outside plant, and solves such problems as resource separation across different types of networks.

The OSS application’s structure is based on the Application Framework, so that integration between processes, data and applications can be achieved progressively, accommodating the integration of legacy applications with new systems. The development and implementation cycle of the system was also shortened by using the Application Framework’s specification to form standard service-oriented architecture-based interfaces with other systems (for example, the joint interface debugging and the other integration processes). This reduced the risk of delay during the construction period.

The new system is component-based, multi-layered and independent of any technological platform. New types of equipment and alarms can be integrated into the system quickly, with less coding and lower costs associated with change. For example, it used to take one month to integrate new equipment in the old network management system, but that’s now down to two weeks.

The entire project used Frameworx as the common language for business requirement analysis and documentation, which also reduced the communication cost and time by 10 to

20 percent, and this also influenced China Mobile’s choice of suppliers. The service provider preferred those whose products and solutions have received Frameworx Conformance Certification from TM Forum – or who stated that they are committed to gaining the Certification. In addition, China Mobile is pushing other vendors to do so.

This is because choosing products and solutions that have been certified as Frameworx Conformant shortens and simplifies the procurement process: China Mobile says using TM Forum Frameworx as a common language and for technical negotiations with the OSS vendors shortened the negotiation cycle about 10 percent.

Those who have products and solutions certified by TM Forum already and were involved in China Mobile’s ambitious project include Huawei, Nokia Siemens Networks and Oracle. Please see page 55 for more information about Frameworx Conformance and Certification.

With the help of Frameworx, the INRM system has been now implemented in the 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and directly administered municipalities throughout mainland China that are home to the group’s 698 million-plus customers. The project was completed on schedule, and covers full-technology resource management on wireless, transmission, IP bearer, passive optical and IP Multi-media Subsystem (IMS-based) networks, etc.

In all, thousands of network elements and over one million pieces of equipment are included to support the key processes of resource management, such as network change, customer service provisioning, and resource survey. A number of other highly efficient integrations were also implemented



TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standard-based tools and best practices (see page 6) is already widely recognized as the standard for business processes, information and applications, and rapid integration.

Frameworx Conformance Certification Assessments enable service providers and suppliers to verify an implementation, product, or solution’s conformance to Frameworx Business Process and Information Frameworks’ models and improve the overall efficiency of an organization’s procurement processes.

Frameworx Implementation ConformanceThe Frameworx Implementation Conformance Assessment provides verification of a service provider's internal business processes and enterprise data model enabling you to validate and improve the efficiency of your organization, comparing adherence to the proven Frameworx Business Process and Information standards, on a sliding scale.

Implementations which meet the rigorous certification standards are awarded the TM Forum Frameworx Implementation Conformance Mark.

Combined with TM Forum Benchmarking (see pages 6 and 29), Implementation Conformance Assessments provide a clear assessment of how your enterprise-wide operations compare to industry leaders, and where to direct transformation investment for maximum effect.

Frameworx Product and Solution ConformanceBy demanding Frameworx-conformant products and solutions you can reduce implementation cost, time and risk.

Product Conformance Assessments provide an independent verification of a supplier's product conformance to Frameworx. Each assessment verifies adherence to the Frameworx Business Process and Information models, providing an easy way to assess a product's conformance. Since service providers can procure discrete products and/or pre-integrated off-the-shelf solutions, the TM Forum also offers Solution Conformance Assessments that assess a solution suite's conformance to Frameworx.

Procurement (RFx) Training and SupportTo help simplify the process of procuring Frameworx-conformant products and solutions, TM Forum provides RFx templates and training for your procurement staff, helping you request and check Frameworx conformance quickly and simply.

In addition, TM Forum offers a broad range of support and expert advice for service providers striving for Frameworx conformance.

The business impact of standards-based conformanceto realize end-to-end service provisioning and assurance process flows.

Huge business benefitsThe standards-based tools and best practices that helped design and build the INRM are helping deliver some massive benefits to China Mobile’s business. They include:n the accuracy of network resource data has increased from 70

percent to 90 percent, and the completeness of on-site circuit information has increased to 98 percent;

n there has been a saving of thousands of millions of Chinese Yuan;n service provisioning is much faster. The efficiency of

dedicated line service fulfillment has increased four times, which greatly improves customer satisfaction;

n service response times are better, down from hours to minutes, again improving customers’ experience;n time to market for new services has been reduced;n dramatic reduction in fault processing time due to the

creation of a single view of alarms. The drill-down analysis improved the efficiency of fault handling and processing customers’ complaints. The active fault detection rate was increased from 32 percent to 82 percent and customer satisfaction for fault restoration was increased;

n the number of manual trouble tickets was reduced by 46 percent, while incorrect trouble tickets have been reduced from 17 percent to 3 percent and the average fault processing time is reduced by 42 percent, from 23.4 hours to 13.6 hours.

Building on its huge success so far, China Mobile is planning further research on a number of other aspects, such as full-domain alarm correlation to improve the efficiency and accuracy of root cause analysis as well as the standardization of the converged network alarm interface.

The multi-domain alarm correlation mainly focused on the radio network in the first phase and in the next, it will cover correlations between core network and transmission network, between data and transmission network and between data and core network.

In addition, the operator will move to a performance alarm model to identify the potential faults or problems proactively and look to introduce a higher level of automatic fault restoration using routine inspecting and intelligent processing, which will greatly reduce labor costs.

China Mobile is keen to progress to end-to-end service monitoring for individual customers. The plan is that by integrating and monitoring all the information collected from the service platform, network and terminal, customers’ problems will be quickly revolved.

Finally, but not least, China Mobile intends to continue sharing its experiences with TM Forum and contributing to the development of TM Forum standards and best practices (see ‘Catalytic converter’ panel on page 54).


Process-oriented governance delivers better control and efficient, end-to-end operationsPart of the wider Liberty Global Inc. cable group that has operations in 13 countries worldwide, UPC Netherlands is the second largest cable TV operator in the Netherlands. It has 3.7 million subscriptions to its digital and analog video, broadband, and digital telephony (VoIP) services across 1.8 million customers as of June 30, 2012. The company’s customers are located across six regional clusters, including the Netherlands’ two largest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. All its networks have been upgraded to having two-way capability, and almost all of the households it provides cable to are served by a network with bandwidth of at least 860MHz and speeds up to 120Mbps.

In 2010 the company decided to complement its vertical, ‘siloed’ operational management structure with a horizontal structure that would provide overall oversight, governance and control of the interactions of these departments. It established a new team in 2011 to usher in the profound changes to the company’s operations and structure that were based around end-to-end processes which involved customers and program management. They were developed using TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM). The resultant new approach to governance gave a senior executive ownership of processes from end-to-end to achieve better control, greater effectiveness in a dynamic business environment and improve service to customers.

UPC Netherlands is the second largest cable operator in the Netherlands, with 3.7 million subscriptions to its digital and analog cable video, broadband and digital telephony (VoIP) services from its 1.8 million customers as of June 30, 2012. Breaking this down, the company has 1.8 million video subscribers, of whom 1.1 million are also digital cable subscribers consuming services including digital video recording, high definition and video-on-demand. It has 1 million broadband customers, offering speeds up to 120Mbps, and 902,000 telephony subscribers. The company’s 2011/2012 revenues were $1.2 billion.

Due to considerable growth, increased digitization and convergence of its services, the company recognized that it needed to improve its processes and control of the processes to grow to the next level. This was not only to support new products and services, but also to offer its customer a better experience. Among other innovations, UPC Netherlands was the first European company to roll out DOCSIS 3.0 to gain competitive advantage, but faced a ‘disconnect’ between governance of its operations and changes to them.

In 2011, the company set up a new team to streamline and gain end-to-end control of customer and program management processes. UPC’s legacy internal operational management

structure was siloed, which meant that although different departments could and did work together, there was no overarching ownership structure that dealt with the interactions and interconnections between them. In particular, there was no overall view of the operational processes which flowed through different departments.

This made it difficult to obtain a proper overview of any inefficiencies in the process chain, or identify where improvements could be made, and there was no end-to-end control mechanism in place for those processes. The company also recognized that the controls governing how individuals change operational processes could be optimized. Without overall oversight, a change in one department could have unintended consequences for another, or even adverse consequences for the customers’ experience.

A project to improve process control and management was initiated, as part of a move towards being able to make changes that could deliver benefits across the whole process chain.

Better business processesUPC Netherlands’ new, process-oriented governance system was built from the ground up, starting with an inventory of processes regarding customers and program management. In all, the company defined 18 core business processes which directly or indirectly affect customers, creating an initial inventory of processes, work instructions and documents which ran to about 1,000 files. Moreover, the company identified an even larger number of activities that were executed, but without being standardized or documented.

Items in the inventory were grouped into logical clusters of responsibilities using TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM), part of the Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6). Using this Framework helped the company map of the documents into different functional areas, which in turn it arranged in logical areas of responsibilities.



The new governance framework included an overarching change management structure to accommodate the new responsibilities that would arise from introducing new products and services. Similarly, it had to be able to deal with responsibilities moving from one area to another after any organizational changes. At each stage, the changes were synchronized with the Business Process Framework.UPC Netherlands complemented its management structure to reflect this new process-oriented approach, assigning responsibility for each business process to an operational director, who manages the process from end-to-end, rather than basing the structure around departmental hierarchy. The IT change management structure was also amended to support the new management model. Previously change management was driven by a business need from a particular team, then the IT team was tasked with building it. Once completed, the process or function was typically automated and run autonomously, without clear operational ownership as of go-live.

Now if IT builds an automated solution, the team concerned uses it to run a process and whoever requested each change must designate someone to be responsible for the end result. As changes to systems and changes to processes are managed in an integrated way, the information model built using the Business Process Framework is continually updated. The end-to-end process owners are at Vice President or Director level, whereas the owners of sub-processes are mostly manager-level staff.

High scores Departmental teams are still getting used to working in this more horizontal way and the mapped processes are becoming more meaningful to the business. For instance, teams are working out which are the most important performance indicators for each process, and which projects and problem-solving initiatives contribute most to those performance indicators. The Business Process Framework prioritizes activities so that the company can optimize customer experience across the whole chain, rather than just in one department.

Overall, UPC Netherland now has more control of its processes and so can make entire processes more efficient rather than decisions only affecting part of the chain or possibly creating conflict with another department’s goal(s) and even undermining customer experience.

The company has defined and established ownership of processes, so it is clear who is responsible for which part of the operational chain which directly or indirectly touches the customer.

UPC Netherlands keeps a revolving scorecard of around 50 items to track and monitor the key initiatives resulting from the new way of working. These scorecards are used to establish whether initiatives increase revenue, reduce costs, improve

problem solving, provide customer experience, or combinations of these. In all cases the outputs have been very positive. There has also been a much faster through-put for projects and solving problems due to individuals having responsibilities and the corresponding mandate to act right across the chain.

The futureThe company is investigating rolling out this way of working into other areas, for example, integrating product and platform changes into the new change management structure to further support convergence. For example, to set up a dedicated process work stream within each key program to involve the future process owners earlier in the design and implementation process. It is also working to introduce a problem management structure based on the ownership model, as well as investigating the possibility of introducing program budgets based on customer processes rather than departments.

It is also possible that the lessons learned by UPC in the Netherlands will be applied the group’s other European operations: indeed the Liberty Global group already deploys Frameworx widely, particularly where the group’s IT and architecture development is supported as a centralized activity. In addition, UPC Netherlands plans to put what it has learned to another good use – collaborating with TM Forum through the Cable Initiative to contribute to the continuing development of the Business Process Framework for the cable industry (see pages 20 and 21).

Prioritizing for the greater good

Prioritization is another important area of improvement resulting from the implementation of UPC Netherlands’ process-oriented governance system. As well as clarity in terms of what needs be changed and who will be involved to make the change effective, it’s now easier for the company to determine where its priorities are, the positive or negative impacts of changes, and to balance the advantages and disadvantages.

With the old management structure, potentially a change by one department caused problems for another – the waterbed effect. The goal for the Average Handling Time (AHT) of a customer service team may for example lead to additional truck rolls or box swaps.

By contrast, the new system pulls together all the interests across the board, and determines what is best for the full service chain and the customer. To continue with the made-up example above, analysis would perhaps suggest a better outcome could be achieved by a temporary reduction in customer care tooling and a re-allocation of resources to more preventative maintenance on the network to avoid the complaints in the first place.



Frameworx enables rapid launch of new cable services, maintains operational excellenceFierce competition is driving cable operators to offer increasingly complex products as well as raising customer expectations for service level excellence. They need to develop and launch these new services faster to better monetize their assets while reducing costs, improving operational efficiencies and increasing customer satisfaction. With this is mind, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and UPC/Liberty Global championed the Frameworx for New Cable Services: Rapidly Design and Fulfill New Services Catalyst project. It presented an implementation of TV Everywhere, the cable industry’s move to deliver IP-based video services to multiple devices on demand. In a new departure, it looked at how Frameworx can be applied to issues around subscribers’ entitlements.

The Frameworx for New Cable Services: Rapidly Design and Fulfill New Services Catalyst project (see panel on page 54) was demonstrated live at TM Forum Management World in Dublin in May 2012, championed by Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable and UPC/Liberty Global with Oracle and Incognito Software supporting them and their aims.

The Catalyst demonstrated an implementation of a new cable service, known as TV Everywhere*, which enables delivery of IP video services to devices other than set-top boxes – such as tablets, smartphones and PCs. As TV Everywhere is a benefit of a cable subscription, It also addressed the approach of subscriber entitlements (rather than device authentication). The business process used in the demonstration was based on the TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices adapted by the Cable Working Group (see pages 20 and 21).

The demonstration showed how a TV Everywhere service could be rapidly designed and fulfilled on top of a subscriber’s existing digital services. The project proved that using products and solutions that are certified by TM Forum as Conformant with Frameworx improves the design and delivery of new services (for more about the role and importance of TM Forum’s Conformance Certification, see page 55).

It also showed multiple-play service providers how to reduce

the risk during changes to IT and operations by sharing the investment with, and leveraging the experience of, mobile and wireline network operators, cable operators or cloud services providers.

The demonstration system integrated Oracle’s Rapid Offer Design and Order Delivery system, with Incognito’s service elements supporting IPTV and CableLabs’ standards. It represented a cable operator providing video and broadband services, who wished to add TV Everywhere whenever new video and broadband services were ordered.

The operator did not want to change the original product model but to focus on designing the service and deploying it using Frameworx. The service provider wanted to decouple network technologies from its IT service processes, not only to improve agility but also to allow the deployment of new broadband access technologies. Finally the operator intended to introduce more subscriber-centric services for better targeting applications in future.

What the Catalyst showedThe live rendition of the Catalyst had a number of demonstrations, displays and worked examples. There was an overview of the new Quick Start Pack** from TM Forum’s

*See our Quick Insights report, Tablet-based services: Cable's next frontier, which is free for all employees of the Forum’s member companies who register on the website at: www.tmforum.org/QItabletbasedservices**GB949, Quick Start Pack: TV Everywhere on Mobile Device, Version 0.6 can be downloaded from www.tmforum.org/GB949quickstartpack


Cable Business Process working group to show how the Pack could be used to help add the new TV Everywhere service, to other broadband and video services.

The Pack defines the business processes necessary to deliver the new service using common cable concepts mapped to TM Forum’s Frameworx. Using these processes, the Catalyst project was able to demonstrate the service design, order capture, order delivery and provisioning for subscriber focused entitlements for the TV Everywhere service alongside existing legacy digital services.

The Catalyst illustrated the processes required to design a new service using Frameworx. For instance, the Information Framework (SID), part of TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices (see page 6) was used to model the new TV Everywhere service. Another requirement was exposing network resources to IT and yet another was to decouple services and resources from legacy video systems.

Relevant network standards were shown in context, and there was demonstration of the reuse of processes to deliver new services and resources. The new TV Everywhere service was also modeled using the Information Framework (SID).

The Catalyst provided a guide to how fulfillment of the new service could be accomplished without impacting existing commercial offers and services. Here the emphasis was on leveraging the rapid design of new fulfillment processes for TV Everywhere, and issuing of orders, maintenance of order visibility, review of order status, and the means of activating legacy and new services.

In addition, the Catalyst demonstrated how to measure and monitor service delivery using metrics and analytics. This involved the alignment of the Information Framework to new key performance indicators (KPIs) from the TM Forum’s Cable Initiative (see pages 20 and 21 for more information). Oracle’s Communication Data Model (OCDM), which is certified by TM Forum as being conformant with the Information Framework’s data model, was used to expose information to derive KPIs, metrics and analytics. The Oracle's OCDM Business Metrics Automation Conformance Certified Product was also used to allow comparison among operators.

As well as the Business Process Framework, Information Framework, TM Forum Application Framework (TAM) and the organization’s Policy Information Exchange (PIE – see panel), use was made of the standards work of CableLabs, the Broadband Forum and ETSI.

TM Forum’s policy management and interface activities

TM Forum’s Government and Defense Market Support Center has long recognized the importance of policy-based network management, to enable more flexible, efficient, secure and resilient networks. We started collaborating on this core technical area in 2010, when the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) contributed its Policy Exchange Information UML Model to the Forum.

The first Policy Information Exchange (PIE) project factored the DISA contributed model into the Forum’s Information Framework (SID).This work was completed in October 2010 and made available to members through Frameworx 11.0, released in May 2011.

The second phase of the PIE project will be launched in August 2012, and will produce one or more standards-based interfaces for exchanging policy information. It’s being developed in a generic way, so that various flavors of policies can be exchanged (pricing and security policies are two examples). This project was incorporated into Frameworx 12.0, which was released at TM Forum’s Management World 2012 event in May.

For more information please go to www.tmforum.org/policyinformationexchange or contact Christy Coffey, Director, Industry & Security Programs, TM Forum via [email protected]

"The emphasis was on leveraging the rapid design of new fulfillment processes for TV Everywhere, and issuing of orders, maintenance of order visibility, review of order status, and the means of activating legacy and new services."

www.tmforum.org/policyinformationexchange


Reaping the benefits of deploying Frameworx across many operating companiesFrance Telecom-Orange is one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators with sales of €45.3 billion for 2011 and had 170,000 employees worldwide at 30 September 2012, including 105,000 employees in France. Present in 33 countries, the Group has a total customer base of 227 million customers at 30 September 2012, including 169 million mobile customers and 15 million broadband Internet (ADSL, fibre) customers worldwide. In 2008, it began a Service-oriented Architecture Program with the aims of reducing costs, maintenance and integration effort through needing less customization thanks to standardization, all while improving customer experience. To this end, it is reinforcing the use of Frameworx, the standards-based suite of tools and best practices, across all its operating companies. So far, it is, for example, serving customers 35 percent more quickly from multi-service order capture and has reduced the number of time-consuming tasks undertaken by back office staff by 10 percent. Its approach has also ensured that IT is focused on aligning its efforts with business goals.

The beginning of the journey stretches back to 2008 when France Telecom-Orange started a group program to complete an in-depth transformation at the heart of its IT strategy to better service the business. It is known as the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) Program. It is a great example of how TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices is constantly evolving, through extensions and refinements, to meet Forum members’ changing business and operational needs. Frameworx was developed by members for members, and its evolution is driven by them.

Reinforcing the use of FrameworxThe SOA Program was based on the pillars of France Telecom’s business process framework, the Orange information framework and the Orange application framework. A key aspect of the SOA Program was to reinforce the use of TM Forum’s Frameworx across all the countries the company operates in. This means aligning its own frameworks with the following elements of Frameworx respectively, the Business Process Framework (eTOM) and the Information Framework (SID).

The goals of the SOA Program include reducing costs, maintenance and integration effort through needing less customization thanks to standardization, all while improving customer experience.

To help meet these goals, France Telecom-Orange has defined customer journeys and its business process framework in a single repository. This goes from a high-level view of those

customer journeys and business processes down to detailed corporate business process flows and country-specific areas including business processes and customer journeys.

Put another way, the company wanted to move from having a ‘big heap’ of applications that were all tangled up with too many interfaces and too many different technologies. The company already had a number of SOA-based initiatives in place, but they were hindered by the proliferation of services and a lack of governance, so had limited success. Even worse, many business and IT staff viewed SOA initiatives as just being a new set of technologies.

Reusuable building blocksBy creating Enterprise Business Services (EBS), France Telecom-Orange created a set of reusable ‘building blocks’ that could be used by business staff (also see panel copy on page 61). The EBS are a technical and semantic representation of service standardization; a way of making the complex appear simple and the building blocks easy to use. The EBS are held in an SOA Service Library, a governance tool.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the EBS is to ensure IT people focus on alignment with business processes.

The SOA Program combines a top-down and bottom-up approach to define EBS and to provide universal semantic governance – the use of a common terminology. Some idea of the scale and scope of the Program can be gleaned from the fact it involved the following operationally:



n specifying and publishing 150 Enterprise Business Services in the Service Library;n live implementations (exposures and consumptions) of 266 Enterprise Business Services;n Enterprise Business Services already represent more than 25

percent of the total information system Web Services – that is 25 percent of global traffic equating to 293 million requests per month.

From the customers’ perspective, the SOA Program is designed to improve customer experience and quality of service. One instance is by serving customers 35 percent more quickly from multi-service order capture due to a unified front end using a standardized service to create orders in different back end systems. It also reduces the number of time-consuming tasks undertaken by back office staff by 10 percent by using a standardized service to provide an up-to-date view of the offers already taken up by the customer.

The rollout of the SOA Program to France Telecom-Orange’s other operating companies outside its domestic market started in 2011. Since then, a second successful implementation of the SOA’s EBS has demonstrated their relevance to small and medium-sized mobile operating companies. Beyond this success in deploying ‘state of the art’ SOA in information systems, the SOA program is now supporting transformation projects in the BSS domain for European, Middle East and African countries, relying extensively on Frameworx and the EBSs for designing the architecture and integration of ‘pre-integrated’ solutions.

Challenges in alignmentThe SOA Program continues apace, although challenges remain. The company aims to decompose its business process library down to Level 6 with its preferred software vendors, relying on the Forum’s existing Business Process Framework

Within the Information Framework, an element of TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices, an Aggregate Business Entity (ABE) is a well-defined set of information that characterizes a highly cohesive set of business entities which are loosely coupled with entities in other ABEs.

An entity could be a tangible thing (such as a customer), an active thing (such as a customer order), or a conceptual thing (such as a customer account). Business entities are characterized by attributes and participate in relationships with other business entities, and typically move through a well-defined life cycle.

standard decompositions, which go down to Level 3. This would allow the company to have a reference implementation of business processes in systems down to Level 6 for each main software solution and thus to reduce the need to customize packages.

To achieve this, France Telecom-Orange is working with TM Forum to build a library of business processes that have already been implemented for various vendors’ products down to Levels 5 and 6. In addition, the company is proposing extensions to TM Forum’s Business Process Framework to standardize a number of Level 4 processes.

The company has also contributed decomposition processes, down to Level 4, which it would like to see incorporated in the Business Process Framework to the team responsible for the Framework’s evolution. The processes concerned are sales, order handling, service activation and configuration and resource provisioning along with process flows. That work is continuing within the team.

France Telecom-Orange’s own information framework is 90 percent based on the Forum’s Information Framework, extending or ‘enriching’ a number of Aggregate Business Entities (ABEs – see panel).

The company’s application framework is structured differently than the Forum’s Application Framework and to bridge the gap between the two, France Telecom-Orange has been working on a new version of its application framework throughout 2012 to extend the alignment between them at domain and sub-domain levels.

The company has encountered a number of issues with adopting the Forum’s Application Framework (TAM) in terms of some inconsistencies between the organization of domains and some redundant or non-existent functions. It is providing valuable contributions through the Application Framework team to address them.

A domain is defined as a collection of ABEs associated with a specific management area. Domains that make up the Information Framework are consistent with Business Process Framework Level 0 concepts.

An Enterprise Business Service defines as an SOA Service the interactions between applications or systems to serve a specific business purpose (such as manage a customer order).

The granularity (level of detail) provided by the EBS is aligned with the level of decomposition of the business function so that it is meaningful to business stakeholders. An EBS specifies the required applications interfaces, that is the operations and associated data flows whose content is based on the Information Framework’s ABEs.

What is an Aggregate Business Entity (ABE)?


Upgrading Integration Service Layer protects investment, cuts costs and increases applications’ stability and availability Telstra is Australia's leading communications and information services company, and one of the best known brands in the country. It offers a range of products and services, providing vast geographical coverage through both its fixed and mobile network infrastructure. As of June 30, 2012, The company had a total of 13.8 million domestic mobile customers, 2.6 million retail fixed broadband customers, 1.4 million customers on bundled plans; and 3.5 million mobile customers in Hong Kong.

As part of an ongoing drive to improve its Business Support System (BSS) and Operational Support System (OSS) capabilities, Telstra undertook a complex upgrade of its Integration Service Layer WebSphere Process Server, the flagship integration layer that brings together the operator’s BSS and OSS domains. This migration project was driven by the mandate to de-risk this business-critical platform from future product end-of-support decisions. In addition, this flagship component required the integration of several third-party tools and plug-ins for enhanced transformation and monitoring capabilities. Among the key business benefits that resulted from this successful migration were a 30 to 40 percent reduction in product license costs and a similar reduction in hardware costs due to a smaller infrastructure footprint.

Telstra is Australia's leading communications and information services company, offering a range of products and services, providing vast geographical coverage through both its fixed and mobile network infrastructure, and servicing many millions of customers. In 2011/2012 Telstra revenues were A$25.4 billion. As of June 30th, 2012, Telstra had a total of 13.8 million domestic mobile customers, 2.6 million retail fixed broadband customers, 1.4 million customers on bundled plans; and 3.5 million Hong Kong mobile customers.

During the previous 12 months, the group handled 3 billion local calls, 4.7 billion national long distance minutes, 12 billion text messages and more than 16 billion mobile voice minutes. It also handled more than 300,000 calls in its contact centers each day, on average completed around 23,000 customer service jobs – new services and fault repairs – a day, and over the year sent out more than 100 million bills.

As part of an ongoing drive to improve its BSS/OSS capabilities, Telstra with partner Infosys undertook a highly complex upgrade of its Integration Service Layer (ISL) WebSphere Process Server, the flagship integration layer that brings together the operator’s BSS and OSS domains. The ISL

WebSphere Process Server Migration project was driven by the mandate to de-risk this business-critical platform from future end-of-support decisions for products. In addition, this flagship component required the integration of several third-party tools and plug-ins for enhanced transformation and monitoring capabilities.

The key objective of the project was to obtain the following operational benefits:

n reduced operational costs;n reduced product license and hardware costs;n increased application stability and availability; andn risk mitigation and future-proofing of the platform.

Scoping the solutionThe ISL migration solution encompassed the following programs:

n Software currency upgrade, which was the core activity of the project. The upgrade allowed all the solution component applications to be run on a WebSphere Process Server 7.0



platform, and involved two major tasks: code migration and the migration of application runtime environment.

n Code level enhancements, which involved enhancing the application framework to improve its manageability and to provide a degree of abstraction when modifying components shared across services.

n Phased deployment was undertaken to mitigate the risks associated with deploying a completely new stack into production. The migration approach involved a staggered deployment of components into production, initially starting with a pilot application service and then moving the remainder over two releases.

The ambitious scope of the overall program is suggested by the large number of technology components to be migrated to the latest platform. Included were:

n 200 individual WebSphere applications or modules migrated;n migration and updating of relevant solution components

from all of the following: Solaris Operating System (V9 to V10); IBM WebSphere Application Server (V6.0.1 to V7.0.0.7); IBM WebSphere Process Server (V6.0.1 to 7.0.0.0); Progress DXSI (V8.4.0to V8.4.2); IBM WebSphere MQ Server (V6.0 to V7.0); IBM HTTP Web Server (V2.0 to V7.0); HP J2EE Diagnostics (V8.0 to V9.2.3)

n key data points impacted: 43 end systems (communicating via SOAP/JMS, IBM MQ, Web Services, File Transfer, DB Sync); over 250 distinct business scenarios; over 75 highly critical business scenarios; and 240 technology components.

Standards do the businessTelstra’s OSS foundation is based on TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards-based tools and best practices. It uses the Business Process Framework (eTOM) to organize the key functions such as fulfillment and assurance and billing into the OSS/BSS systems. The ISL migration project was an implementation using IBM WPS 7.0 to achieve key fulfillment and assurance functions (Business Process Framework’s Level 2 processes). The service-oriented architecture-based implementation enabled seamless integration of key OSS and BSS systems.

The project leveraged the Business Process Framework for order, fault, workforce and inventory management.

ISL business services, such as order activation, trouble ticket management, field work order management, and inventory management, are modeled on the Business Process Framework. These business services address key business requirements in the Telstra OSS/BSS landscape.

The ISL migration project enabled ISL with service isolation

and service versioning abilities. This, in turn, helped to segregate implementation from the business process, and also prioritized the critical from the non-critical functions (service decoupling enabled by Frameworx).

A key enabler Telstra’s OSS Common Information Model (OCIM) is a unified modeling language (UML) model derived from Telstra’s implementation of TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) model, another element of Frameworx, known as TSID. This is used to integrate a multitude of strategic customized package products, Web Services and legacy application systems in the OSS landscape.

A core component of ISL, Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator (DXSI), is used to import, maintain and govern Information Framework model-based data services. It also provides precise data transformation that retains the original business semantics, making ISL the core for all Information Framework-based interactions in all OSS domains. Progress DXSI can also import the Information model (in the form of XMI files) created from the RSM tool.

As per TM Forum's Information Framework, service specific Aggregated Business Entities (ABEs – see panel on page 61) were created, along with serviced specific data models and data transformation services derived and maintained from the common model. As part of the ISL WPM initiative, the Progress DXSI Exchange Model was isolated and further split into multiple exchange models.

This addressed the issue of flexibility when making changes to the mapping components implemented in Progress DXSI, with the objective of limiting the number of components that need to be built, tested and deployed when making changes to the monolithic DXSI model.

Filling out applicationsThe ISL adopted the TM Forum Application Framework (TAM) as an ‘indicative model’ to develop a consistent application component design across the fulfillment, assurance and inventory domains. The Application Framework was leveraged to build TM Forum’s Information Framework compliant application integration framework. This facilitated seamless integration of different disparate application systems into a reusable, extensive and scalable solution.

The functional environment and technology landscape utilizes Telstra’s proprietary Application Building Blocks (ABBs), which are based on Frameworx, isolating business logic and data as services from complex technical implementation details.

The ISL migration project re-engineered common components and isolated dependent modules, which in


turn improved the build and deployment time of the overall application. With this upgrade, the application’s reliability, scalability and predictability improved, and the application is now able to seamlessly integrate OSS and BSS systems.

Upgrade flyingThe ISL migration project delivered benefits and improvements in three main areas.

Lower costs, with a 30 to 40 percent reduction in product license costs, and a 30 to 40 percent cut in hardware costs due to reduced infrastructure footprint. In the case of the latter, by utilizing Solaris Logical Domain (LDOM), running on fewer multi-core physical servers, the project reduced its infrastructure footprint from 20 physical servers running 18 logical instances of the applications, to just nine physical servers hosting 21 logical instances.

Increased application stability, availability and deployment speed were also big wins. Here there was an 80 to 90 percent reduction in non-functional issues per release, enabling faster testing cycles. Similar improvements were achieved in production, resulting in higher availability of the application. Deployments were 65 percent faster thanks to re-engineering of the deployment scripts. This will allow faster turnaround time for production and testing releases in the future.

Common component re-engineering reduced deployment time for framework updates by up to 500 minutes, and improved build times by a factor of six. Again, DXSI Isolation provided a level of segregation for deployed components, thereby reducing full baseline deployments by over 18 percent.

The successful ISL migration project additionally de-risked and future-proofed the platform. There were a number of parts to this:

n Better system resilience was achieved by the project addressing the availability of key non-functional requirements for the production environment. Related aspects included: multi-instance and automatic failover MQ set-up, providing high availability to business transactions for legacy applications; load balanced web-server, providing greater

availability for web traffic; enhanced application topology and clustering for better load distribution and fault tolerance; shared IP storage area network enabling fault-tolerant batch processing; and high availability of database with Oracle Database RAC cluster.

n The revisited runtime environment exploits the capabilities of the product, such as multiple application clusters. This enables parallel activities to be performed on the platform while the application is still running. The result is a reduction in build and deployment times which, in turn, reduces overall testing effort and also improves the defect turnaround time.

The ISL migration project was one of the most complex and critical integration programs for Telstra in 2011. It is acknowledged by IBM as being one of the largest such upgrades in the world. The new platform was deployed successfully into production without any issues and has received multiple accolades from both internal and external stakeholders.

The future Telstra roadmap for ISL improvement is expected to include the following programs to further reduce operational costs and/or provide additional efficiencies of operation:

n ISL service isolation – this is an initiative to convert ISL fulfillment from a monolithic application stack to multiple distinct business services, each manageable as a separate entity. It is anticipated that this re-structuring will provide benefits such as reduced management efforts, deployment time, agility and flexibility of solution.

n ISL continuous integration – the intent is to completely automate ISL deployment and testing with minimal manual effort with a view to providing agility to the platform

n ISL content-based filter will enable dynamic assistance with service order fallout management.n Continued and expanded exploitation of the features offered by the new WPS7 product platforms.n ISL platform optimization, in which further rationalization of

hardware will be achieved through migration of applications to new hardware.

"The ISL migration project was one of the most complex and critical integration programs for Telstra in 2011. It is acknowledged by IBM as being one of the largest such upgrades in the world.”



Boosting customer experience management through index-linked processesJust about every communications service provider’s annual report recognizes that customer experience is central to their profitability and sustainability. Constantly monitoring, measuring and refining how they are meeting their customers’ expectations and needs looks like a good way of ensuring their success. However, suitable measurement and management may not be easy to accomplish as a subscriber’s ‘footprint’ involves so many direct and indirect points of contact. All these ‘touch points’ must be taken into account to understand how customers are feeling about the service their service providers are providing/offering. In 2012 a TM Forum Catalyst team explored the possibilities of this approach through the Advancing Customer Experience Management With Analytics Catalyst project.

Customer experience management is itself a big business which is getting bigger all the time. According to a new market research report*, the total analytics market around customer experience and the voice of the customer is expected to reach $6.61 billion by 2017, with a compound annual growth rate of 19.8 percent. As the report notes, companies rely on delighted customers to accomplish market growth while unhappy customers can defect, damage brand names and negatively impact businesses. Happy customers, by contrast, use more services, promote their service provider to friends and churn less.

Against this backdrop, the Catalyst project (see panel on page 54) Advancing Customer Experience Management With Analytics set out to establish an interactive, dynamic model for measuring customer satisfaction across the service provider’s enterprise domain, utilizing the vast array of key performance indicator and key quality indicator (KPI/KQI) data available. This was used to build a ‘CxO’ score; the industry average across participating service providers.

The Catalyst project team comprised Genband, an IP infrastructure solutions provider, IBM, network-monitoring specialist Network Critical, and network OSS company Ventraq. Their work was highlighted as a live demonstration at TM Forum Management World 2012 in Dublin.

Legacy systems found wantingThe factors influencing the customer’s experience are many and diverse, ranging from point of sale service to tariff plans and data throughput. The explosion in mobile data usage means

*Customer Experience Management Market & Voice of Customer Analytics Market – Worldwide Market Size and Forecasts (2012 – 2017)’, published by MarketsandMarkets

that the number of factors influencing a customer’s experience is growing.

Today most customer experience management measurements are taken from actual customer interface exchanges via the call center, trouble desk, billing inquiries or customer surveys. These relate back to the experience that the customer has undergone, with the next step being to attempt to correlate these various exchanges into an experience value. Given the many methods of communications available to the average customer, this process of gathering customer experience management information is too slow and not sufficiently comprehensive to enable service providers to understand their customers’ attitudes formed by their experience.

Live network data can provide a treasure trove of actionable information to help improve customer experience. However, monitoring and managing network activity against cross-functional KPIs can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Automating the process, with fail-safe data access, next generation analysis and federated presentation allows service providers to focus on trouble spots and reduces time to improvement. The result is happier customers who are less likely to be attracted by competitive offerings and more likely to add new services.

Implementing such a framework to manage the customer’s experience requires:

n accurate measurement of the quality of experience for each interaction with the service provider;



n collation of these measurements from disparate sources into a Customer Experience Management Index (CEMI); andn drilling down from the CEMI to the factors influencing the experience.

The volumes and complexity of data generated in networks makes analyzing it for customer experience purposes a tough challenge. Large quantities of relevant data also reside in social media and social networks. It can be achieved, thanks to advances in data integration, storage and analytics. The combination of big data and information integration techniques make it possible to generate insight from vast quantities of data, fundamentally changing the way organizations use information. This can include:

n filtering petabytes of data per second from almost any connected device;n analyzing the data while still in motion, and deciding what, if any, data should be stored; andn using analytics tools to virtually integrate the data with data stored in traditional warehouses.

Enhanced indicesThe Catalyst project team developed a strategic and enhanced set of customer experience indices (CEIs). They addressed the analysis, manipulation and structured presentation of complex data from across the enterprise by identifying the key components of TM Forum’s Frameworx (see page 6) needed to present information to executives. It was possible to calculate these metrics regularly (for example, hourly, daily, and weekly) and, as a result, to use them to ‘operationalize’ the enterprise CEMI.

The metrics were displayed in the form of reports, dashboards, and so on, and could be used at different management levels, ranging from department heads through to directors, to support questions driven by the traditional senior executive dashboard. By capturing disparate KPIs and bringing them to light as contributors to the customer’s experience, the

Catalyst team heightened operators’ awareness of the impact of one small KPI on overall customer satisfaction.

By developing the processes to establish a set of CEIs it proved possible to enable network VPs, directors and managers to more quickly take action to resolve issues contributing to unsatisfactory CEI scores. By linking disparate KPIs into a common index the team was able to provide the drill down capability to establish and fix to root causes much faster than had previously been the case.

The possibilities this opens up are many and interesting. For example, a Customer Experience Management system embodying the above characteristics could be used to identify that a high spending customer had just terminated their service for no known reason. It could then identify the next 20 customers with similar profiles and take a proactive approach to ensuring they are happy and preventing them churning. It also means that service providers can truly look ‘outside the firewall’ to capture what customers are really saying about their products and services – and benefit hugely by acting on that input.

Where do we go from here?Lessons and information from the Catalyst will be fed back into the Forum’s Customer Experience Management Index (CEMI) project. A technical report (TR193 Customer Experience Management Index Release 1.0) has been issued to set the stage for a Technical Specification of how the CEMI will come to be measured in the Business Metrics Solution Suite, Release 1.0 (BM1000 – see www.tmforum.org/BMandkeyindicators for more information). This effort is centered in the Big Data Analytics group, as it is a question of how best to aggregate the measures into an aggregate. Part of the inputs to this do come from the Customer Experience Management work on KPIs (GB962 Addendum A – CXM Service Metrics published October 2012 – see www.tmforum.org/GB962addendumA).

For more information about any of these activities, including how to participate, please contact Steve Cotton, Director, Business Assurance programs, TM Forum via [email protected]

"The combination of big data and information integration techniques make it possible to generate insight from vast quantities of data, fundamentally changing the way organizations use information.”


AnalyticsAdvancing Customer Experience Management with Analytics Catalyst project 65

Application Framework (TAM)Reliance 3G 22TTNET 24China Mobile 52France Telecom-Orange 60Telstra 62

Big data and analyticsTelekom Malaysia 15Media Networks (Telefónica Digital) 19Business Assurance Automation Catalyst 41Frameworx for New Cable Services: Rapidly Design and Fulfill New Services Catalyst 58Advancing Customer Experience Management with Analytics Catalyst project 65

Business Benchmarking and MetricsTelekom Malaysia 15Celcom Axiata 28Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) 46Advancing Customer Experience Management with Analytics Catalyst project 65

Business Process Framework (eTOM)Hughes Telematics, Inc. 8Portugal Telecom (SAPO) 11Telekom Malaysia (with LEAN principles) 15Reliance 3G 22TTNET 24Celcom Axiata 28Saudi Mobily 31Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) 46China Mobile 52UPC Netherlands (Liberty Global Inc.) 56France Telecom-Orange 60Telstra 62

Cable Initiative Media Networks 19UPC Netherlands (Liberty Global Inc.) 56Frameworx for New Cable Services: Rapidly Design and Fulfill New Services Catalyst 58

CloudPortugal Telecom (SAPO) 10Bandwidth Exchange Catalyst 13Media Networks (Telefónica Digital) 19

Customer experience management Telekom Malaysia 15TTNET 24Celcom Axiata 28Saudi Mobily 31Telefónica Latin America 38China Mobile 52UPC Netherlands (Liberty Global Inc.) 56France Telecom-Orange 60Advancing Customer Experience Management with Analytics Catalyst project 65

Cyber security – DoneFrameworx 6Hughes Telematics, Inc. 8Resilient Cloud: Maintaining Service in the Face of Developing Threats Catalyst 50Saudi Mobily 31

Data analyticsSee entries under Analytics

FrameworxSee entries under Application Framework, Business Process Framework, Information Framework and Integration Framework

eTOMSee entries under Business Process Framework

Frameworx Conformance CertificationHughes Telematics, Inc. 8Telekom Malaysia 15In detail 55

Information Framework (SID)Reliance 3G 22TTNET 24Celcom Axiata 28Saudi Mobily 31China Telecom 35China Mobile 52France Telecom-Orange 60Telstra 62

Integration FrameworkBandwidth Exchange Catalyst 13

IPDR (Internet Protocol Detail Record)Media Networks (Telefónica Digital) 19

ITILFrameworx 6See panel on ITIL and the Business Process Framework 51

M2MHughes Telematics, Inc. 8

MTOSI (Integration Framework)Bandwidth Exchange Catalyst 13

Partnership management Frameworx 6Hughes Telematics, Inc. 8Media Networks (Telefónica Digital) 19TTNET 24Celcom Axiata 28Saudi Mobily 31

Product lifecycle management Portugal Telecom (SAPO) 10Reliance 3G 22China Telecom 35Saudi Mobily 31China Mobile 52

Revenue Assurance (and Maturity Model)Telefónica Latin America 38

Revenue Management Frameworx 6Hughes Telematics, Inc. 8Telekom Malaysia 15Media Networks (Telefónica Digital) 19Celcom Axiata 28QTel Group 43

Service Management Interface (SMI)Portugal Telecom (SAPO) 10

SIDSee entries under Information Framework

Software-enabled Services (SES)Portugal Telecom (SAPO) 10

TAMSee entries under Application Framework

TelematicsHughes Telematics, Inc. 8

Training servicesPhilippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) 46

inDEx

Everything that can be digital will be.We’ve seen the future. And it’s digital. In just ten years, the way we communicate, consume information and entertainment has been changed forever. And that’s just the start.

The Digital Revolution is transforming our personal and professional lives. We demand simplicity, but the complexity behind our interconnected digital lives is only growing.

TM Forum’s Digital Services Initiative focuses on overcoming the end-end management challenges of complex digital services, enabling an open, vibrant digital economy.

There are five core principles of the Initiative:

For more information on the TM Forum Digital Initiative visit www.tmforum.org/digital

DigitalServicesAD2012.indd 1 11/23/12 10:51 AM

TM Forum Case study handbook_2013

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