Achieving Service Excellence through Enterprise Asset and Service Management

Ascom's Domenico Carapezza, Key Account Manager, Systems & Solutions discusses the benefits of the company's Enterprise Asset and Service Management solution which helps mobile operators to increase operational efficiency, responsiveness and customer satisfaction

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Domenico Carapezza, Key Account Manager, at Ascom Systems & Solutions. Domenico Carapezza has worked in the IT business for more than 20 years. During the last 8 years working in the Telco environment he became a specialist in the field of Asset- and Service Management, Workforce Management and Revenue Assurance solutions. He holds a degree in electronics engineering and computer science from Technical University of Aachen. Domenico Carapezza has the account lead for a major international customer of Ascom Systems & Solutions and is frequently speaking on telco events.

Q: What is the business scenario being addressed?
A: Today's telco market is more competitive than ever before. Excellent customer service, flexibility to adapt to a fast changing market and a maximum availability of network components and services rank among the critical factors for a successful telco operator.

Every organization uses physical assets - regardless of whether these are network elements, software, IT assets or non-IT assets - and logical assets to deliver services powering the business.

By concentrating on service delivery and taking a service management perspective on asset management, organizations can increase their operational efficiency and ensure they derive the maximum value from their investment.

Enterprise Asset and Service Management is a strategy and a solution which helps telecommunication companies to transform to a "lean, agile and business aligned operator".

Many enterprises have discovered that business processes which are fully supported by software systems bring many advantages. They can realize not only cost savings by removing all paper-related tasks - printing, manual dispatching, error-prone reporting manual feed back into maintenance management system etc. - but also increase the quality of their service by obtaining reliable and real-time data from the field.

To reach this goal customers need a reliable solution which enables them to automatically create and dispatch work orders to service technicians which are then also automatically transferred to their mobile devices. Field staff, need to be equipped with a mobile device which can be either a Laptop or a PDA. On these devices runs an application which fully supports all reporting capabilities needed to accomplish all the various tasks field staff perform in their daily business.

Q: What is the solution being put forward by Ascom?
A: Ascom's proposed solution for a company-wide Enterprise Asset and Service Management is build upon a fully integrated set of 3 best-in-class products combining their individual strengths thus following a best-of-breed approach.

1. IBM Tivoli Maximo Enterprise Suite
Maximo Enterprise Suite provides the service management tools that enable you to run your business more effectively and appropriately. It is the first (and currently only) cross discipline unified platform for managing Telecom and IT services. Maximo Enterprise Suite is centered on the three core elements of people, assets and processes that combine to assure services are managed effectively, enabling you to react quickly to changes and unplanned events, evaluate performance and continuously implement improvements to your service delivery.

These three elements are underpinned by contracts, inventory and procurement functionalities that can support a myriad of diverse business processes and policies. The entire solution is wrapped in a service level management solution that can be used to proactively monitor and manage the level of service delivery (by defined SLAs and KPIs) and/or quality of any entity within the system.

2. ClickSoftware Optimization Suite
The Service Optimization Suite performs realtime, on-the-fly, optimized scheduling and dispatching of work orders and simplifies the daily work of dispatchers by automating routine jobs. Dispatchers can concentrate on assisting the field service and resolving exceptions like unavailability of technicians, delays in job completion, high-priority jobs, etc. which require his attention. In order to change assignments he simply uses the drag & drop capability of the client application to reschedule work orders.

The Scheduler also provides a capacity overview and optionally geographic maps showing the actual location of the technicians. Work order types and status - in case of real-time reporting - will be displayed by different shapes and colors and provide dispatchers with a complete overview of the actual situation in the field.

3. Syclo SMART for Maximo
This mobile computing platform is reliable and proven. Over 700 customers worldwide have already implemented Agentry-based mobile solutions.

The features of this platform include: synchronization via GSM, GPRS, WLAN, LAN, Cradle; secure and guaranteed transmission of data into Backend systems; supports Clustering and Load Balancing allowing high scalability and performance; centralized configuration and administration of devices and applications; supports remote over-the-air update of applications; flexible connectivity to Backend- Systems via SQL and XML-Interfaces.

The SMART Mobile Work Manager application supports a rich set of functionalities including: lists of work orders; detailed information related to work orders such as asset location, customer, contact person, service level agreements, equipment, error code and security and acces information; usage and ordering of spare parts or tools and time reporting capabilities.

It can be fully tailored to customer's requirements. Field workers easily adapt to this new electronic way of reporting helping them spending more time on repairs rather than on documentation.

Fig 1.: Ascom's Integrated Enterprise Asset and Service Management solution

Q: What are the benefits from the overall solution?
A: Ascom's Enterprise Asset and Service Management solution enables telecom operators to increase the level of automation and quality in the area of OSS. It leads to a well managed, complete paper-less workorder processing and a highly automated process flow.- reducing operational costs, minimizing service degradations and revenue impacts and last but not least increasing customer experience. The aim is not only to satisfy the customer - wether internal (Operations Management) or external (Subscriber) but to delight the customer by delivering superior, excellent service!

By implementing Enterprise Asset and Service Management we have identified a lot of significant business benefits:

• Increased productivity, operational efficiency and more efficient use of dispatchers and field service resources

• Less call traffic and travel costs by delivering all relevant work order information to the field service technician

• Guaranteed reports with high quality of data no reports lost

• Reduced resolution (MTTR) and change implementation times

• Improved responsiveness to customer and user requests

• Immediate feedback to Network Operation Center and to Customer Contact Center after work has been completed

• Reduced unplanned outages / failed changes

• Minimizes the effects of business impactingevents/incidents via SLA-Monitoring

• Eliminates unnecessary / inefficient process steps

• Leverages unused capability (equipment and personnel)

• Increases asset availability (NE, Services, IT-systems etc)

• Provides reliable and accurate performance metrics (KPIs)

• Improves the visibility of business processes

• Cost reductions - prevents unnecessary expenditure (travel, resources)

• Cost reductions - avoids Service Level related penalties

• Access to accurate real time data enables more effective management decision making

• Enable the IT and OSS function in service delivery to demonstrate its value

Q: Where is Enterprise Asset and Service Management it being used?
A: Ascom's solution for Enterprise Asset and Service Management is successfully deployed at TMobile Germany. The system has been implemented since 2001 and T-Mobile has been voted "Best Mobile Network" in Germany by the readers of Connect, seven years in a row.

For more information:
Email: carapezza@ascom-ac.de
Website: www.ascom.de