Routine Maintenance

Background

A Communication Service Provider (CSP) identified that their monthly maintenance checks were causing issues across their network resulting in extended periods of downtime and increasingly impacting the work life balance of their team of skilled engineers.

Over 25,000 monthly maintenance checks needed to occur across thousands of devices. Many of these checks were carried out in an inefficient and unreliable way and due to their menial nature, the team carrying out the work was often unmotivated and distracted. Due to the scale these processes raised many engineers were working long hours including nights and weekends.

Objectives

An automation initiative was devised to increase the speed at which the checks were made and to ensure they were resolved in a timely manner with minimal impact to the end user.

Where the automation could not remedy the issue a trouble ticket was raised and flagged to an appropriate member of the team.

Solution

CORTEX was deployed and integrated with the business inventory responsible for trouble ticketing and would perform a filesystem check and database check.

Once in place CORTEX would run the monthly maintenance checks at machine speed resolving issues where possible and appropriate for example removing unnecessary files, disk defragmentation, removing out of date roll back, and checking over-long access sessions. If issues were found an engineer would be notified without impacting the speed of the other checks.

Outcomes

On its completion the CORTEX automation had revolutionised the way in which routine maintenance was undertaken at this CSP.

As well as handling the process at a considerably faster pace than previously, engineers were no longer required to work evenings and weekend on a regular basis.

CORTEX enabled a first year improvement in service downtime, demonstrating a 10% reduction.

The CSP were also pleased to report an increase 90% increase in compliance when routinely auditing elements. This is to be increased as part of TSA and NIS2 regimes, also using CORTEX, to 100% in real-time. 

Approximate Functional Block Count: 900

Time to Value: 4 months

NOTE: The project to build out TSA and NIS2 compliance capabilities requires an additional Functional Block Count: 4,000 and 24 months to build and test over 5 phases in the UK and 12 phases, over 5 countries in Europe