Service Provisioning - Soft Cease & Hard Cease
Background
To confirm if a cease was required, this CSP would need to check 6 systems, including CRM, Trouble Ticket systems, SOM, Network Element Managers, and sometimes, external suppliers all of which needed a positive response. This was a manual process with a 30-minute MTTR for the other teams investigating each system, against each cease ticket.
More than 20,000 Orders ceased each year. As this CSP continued to scale successfully and launch new services, the case for Soft and Hard Cease automation was easy to justify.
Objectives
The objective was not just to eliminate superfluous activities, but also to increase the speed at which the checks were made.
Speed was important as some solution parts we 3rd party with real cost to this operator, none of which could be offset if the customer had cancelled or been terminated.
Solution
CORTEX was deployed to manage the process end-to-end. To do this, CORTEX was integrated with each of the systems, including hierarchical exception management. This means the process could effectively handle exceptions to process, as well as the clean process it was originally designed for.
Once fully established, CORTEX would be trigged by both Hard and Soft Cease conditions. Hard Cease would always terminate the services and Soft cease would simply interrupt, so as to limit exposure. A Soft Cease could easily be reversed so any disruption inadvertently caused could be remediated at machine speed, and services would not need to be reprovisioned from scratch.
Outcomes
After 12 months, the operator had been able to re-deploy 17x Engineers from the original team of 20. The 20x Engineers had also been high skill, highly paid resources. The remaining 3x Engineers we partly redeployed meaning this service was now operated by 3x FTE part-time.
Over time, as these engineers retired or redeployed, they have been replaced with lower skilled, lower cost resources.
This solution has scaled 200% since inception owed to its extension in to additional Business Units and Operations.
Design to Deploy Time – 5 months
Approximate Software Cost - £50,000 per year
Return on Investment – Month 9