Telcordia - the WORKS - April/May 2009

APRIL / MAY 2009

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Restoring Order in a Broadband World

Erv Tistler, Operations Excellence Consulting, Telcordia

The conveyor belt is moving faster and faster. Broadband orders are falling off and piling up. Frantic work center staffs are working furiously to put orders back on the belt, only to have them fall off at the next station.

Broadband access growth represents a huge success for communications service providers (CSPs). However, fulfilling all those new orders is taking too long, aggravating customers and driving up operational expense. CSPs need to fix the leaky pipe and reach the level of flowthrough that they have achieved in traditional services.

Triple Play, Triple The Work

The complexity of broadband services, and the corresponding complexity of the converged networks that they ride on, means that old methods for fulfilling orders simply don’t work well any more. New systems are linked to old ones; systems never designed to work together must share data. It’s inevitable that orders will fallout.

However, analyzing all that fallout is laborious and inefficient, to say nothing of the time and effort to fix all those errors. In fact, when one agent fixes an error in one system, they often create a discrepancy that will cause the order to fallout again in a downstream system. What’s needed is a two-pronged approach that finds ways to reduce fallout at the source and also optimizes handling of orders that do fallout.

There’s No Silver Bullet

There can be no systemic improvement without understanding the root causes of fallout. However, experience indicates that there are no “silver bullet” answers; no single fix will address massive numbers of errors. Rather, many different small errors – as mundane as spelling, punctuation, capitalization or formatting discrepancies – can cause orders to fallout in different scenarios.

What’s needed are sophisticated tools that can analyze batches of errors and determine root causes. Such tools can correlate data between systems, comparing the output of the upstream system to the input requirements of the downstream system. Automated screen-scraping techniques can be a powerful diagnostic tool as well. With root causes identified, the CSP can assess the cost to prevent each type of errors (often small compared to the benefit) versus the cost to handle a given discrepancy with a planned manual step.

When Manual is Best

Some manual steps are planned. Sometimes it’s most cost effective to handle certain types of fallout manually, rather than undertake an expensive system change. These orders go to work centers. But to which work centers, and to which agents with what training? What is the agent supposed to do with each order? Often the agent is either faced with a lengthy investigation to determine the best resolution to the error, or else they must apply a Band-Aid™ and hope the order does not fallout again.

What’s needed is an exception handling solution that properly categorizes, groups and routes orders to the right agent. Combined with the right training, methods and procedures, and business processes, manual handling can be made as smooth as possible.

Patch the Pipeline

Broadband growth is a huge opportunity for CSPs, but to earn the projected returns, CSPs must capture the projected operational saving from broadband networks. And that means patching the pipeline and making sure orders flow smoothly.

Telcordia provides in-depth order flowthrough consulting to assess and design the right approach to fulfillment systems and processes, based on decades of fulfillment experience and solution development. Telcordia Exception Manager is a leading work item management solution. For more information, contact Erv Tistler at etistler@telcordia.com, or visit our website.