BrazilAustrian telecom operator A1 upgrades service order management
A1, a subsidiary of A1 Telekom Austria, has rolled-out a new service order management process and system. The telecom company was supported in its transition by consultants and digital experts from BearingPoint.
With more than 5.3 million mobile and around 2 million fixed line customers, A1 is Austria’s largest communications provider. The company is part of A1 Telekom Austria, a group that serves some 24 million customers across seven countries in the Central Eastern Europe region.
As part of a larger digital transformation programme, A1 last year launched a project to upgrade the systems used to manages service orders – known as the Operations Support System (OSS landscape). The company’s landscape consisted of many disparate (legacy) solutions and complex underlying processes, with harmonisation, standardisation and a more agile approach earmarked as the key objectives.
“The primary catalyst behind our Next Generation Service and Resource Order Management (NG-SOM/ROM) project was to undertake an OSS transformation to significantly reduce the number of systems and complexity in their OSS environment,” explained Alexander Stock, A1’s Chief Information Officer.
After conducting a vendor and solution selection process, A1 selected BearingPoint’s Beyond Infonova as its preferred platform. This system works as a solution layer, ensuring that orders are sent to downstream systems and applications. Compared to the legacy approach, the new way of working enables quicker and simpler provisioning and better assignment and handling of tasks for the operations team, resulting in lower provision failure rates and an increase in speed of order fulfillment.
“We have migrated to a single platform that is streamlined, automated and much easier to handle. A1 Austria now has more control of its own business, a shorter time to market for new products and easier to handle technical support requirements,” explained Stock.
One key requirement for A1 Telekom Austria was that the transition would be completed without disrupting services to clients. Always a critical part of IT transformations, Stock said that together with BearingPoint, the project team managed to nail this element of change. “In a highly cross-functional team of experts of A1 and BearingPoint we have mastered the technical and project challenges to replace and improve existing processes to the new platform without interruption of ongoing end to end processes and services.”
Reflecting on the work with the leading Austrian operator, Angus Ward, a partner at BearingPoint in the UK, said: “By leveraging our technology, A1 now has a reliable foundation to support its future business goals and a scalable platform to adapt as times change and the business grows.”
The project’s positive results have meanwhile not remained unnoticed. A1 and BearingPoint made the final round of the TM Forum Excellence Awards, a European ceremony that recognises innovative achievements in among others the field of digital transformation. The award in the respective ‘Business Transformation Award’ went to Netherlands-based KPN for a transformation in its services division, executed in collaboration with Vlocity and Salesforce.
