Connectivity Circuit Writing

Background

A Customers stack used to be seriously laborious. Not only did it involve many steps as these processes normally do, but it also required a significant level of manual data entry.

This inefficient process was not only time consuming and expensive, but materially affected end customers. An order could take up to 70 minutes to implement, but over the course of several weeks.

Circuit Writing for this customer was not different to most CSPs. For example, it involved taking a customer's order for a new internet service and building the corresponding customer premises equipment, access circuits and connectivity services in an inventory system. At this particular CSP, this was largely led by Network engineers who heavily relied on local work instructions for data gathering, designing, and building circuits in inventory systems.

The chaotic environment was materially interfering with quality of service, staff morale and cost a great deal more than it ought to. It also impacted time-to-revenue for the business. Further worsening the problem, the business also recognised that human-centric, manual processes, led to rule and logic being applied without uniformity increasing inconsistences and impacting on SLA’s. This meant many orders (approximately 4 out of 5) were not right-first-time, so orders needed to be re-started or re-processed, wasting yet more time and more money. A frustrating experience for all.

Objectives

The customer needed to remove all of the inefficiencies and improve the quality of the processes through automation for the current set of products.

They understood at the project initiation that gaps appear, and were concerned about having to find all the gaps BEFORE being able to put the system in to production and achieve any value from the solution.

They also understood their capacity constraint. They needed to increase capacity without adding cost, and ideally reduce cost. This was only achievable if they were able to reduce manual intervention.

Ultimately, they already understood that the answer was in an Automation practice for the business. This should have roles and a delivery framework aligned with other IT systems and their releases, enabling further automation of both existing and future products. They needed help with building this practise.

Solution

CORTEX delivered a fully automated circuit writing for SD-WAN and this was later to be extended to related topologies.

The CORTEX integration leveraged both modern stack and legacy stack. For example, it utilised JMS queues for novel communication from the inventory system. It also integrated with solutions which had performance limitation. For example, part of the stack could only cope with with just 5 concurrent sessions with Network elements. CORTEX needed to be configured sensitively to these kinds of challenges, and it could be.

To enable automation for the business, CORTEX incorporated automation break points. These are logical architecture constructs which provided sufficient confidence in the design. Automation flows were able to be tested by the customer’s team using the Enterprise grade functions of CORTEX to mitigate any possible operational risk. As a result, the somewhat fragile legacy systems didn’t hang or fail under the new super-power of automation. This built trust and confidence and with that, the automation was extended to the critical billing processes. All the time, the customer was able to document and discover its processes, increment improvements and build up an automation practise of its own.

CORTEX was also integrated with a custom UI allowing users control over interactions between CORTEX and the inventory system, as well as past orders that had been processed. Associated logs from each active process were visible, as were historic logs from previously executed processes.

Ultimately, the customer's journey has ended where they intended it to; a fully automated circuit writing automation. Significantly, 80% of this value was achieved in less than 6 months from project initiation.

Outcomes

The CORTEX project with this client was a phenomenal success within a very short period of time. Being able to design MVP brings about a reduced time-to-value.

Within 6 months, 80% of the solution was in production, with time-to-revenue being reduced from several weeks to days or just hours. A four fold increase in 'right first time' metrics was also observed. Much less waste, and an improved service to the customer.

Time on task was reduced from 70 mins with lots of demotivating, dull manual intervention to a fully automated process taking less than 2 minutes processing time. Even when legacy stack was necessary, the near real-time solution took just 6 minutes due to performance constraints of those legacy systems.