Copyright Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC Mar/Apr 2007Co-sponsored feature: Ericsson. Over the past year Ericsson has explained in articles in Global Telecoms Business the company's approach to managing telecoms networks at maximum operational efficiency. Now Anders Sjoman goes into the details of how the company can make it happen
There are three cornerstones to telecommunications management, says Anders Sjoman, strategic solution manager for telecom management of Ericsson.
Ericsson has covered the first two of these in articles published last year in the OSS/BSS supplements of Global Telecoms Business, in March-April and September-October.
The key aim of telecommunications management is to support the network transformation, says Sjoman -- the transformation to new-generation networks and the new set of services that NGNs will permit.
"It's vital to have the knowledge and experience of how that is carried out," he says. Operators need to move away from the stovepipes in the network -- one stove pipe for each service, each one independent of the next -- to a layered approach.
Let's go back first though and recap the two cornerstones covered in those previous articles. A year ago Ericsson described how a simplified reference architecture can reduce the total cost of ownership.
And then, in the second article, the company pointed out that all aspects of telecom management -- organisation, process and tools -- need to be applied in order to improve operational efficiency.
"Now for the third step: how to make it happen," says Sjoman. "This is the telecom management transformation programme." The whole approach is a combination of these three different cornerstones.
They cannot be tackled separately, he explains. "We have to transform the three different cornerstones in sync, in order to achieve the transformation to the NGN and to new services."
This is all driven by the business goals of organisational efficiency, he adds, and the total cost of ownership. "A company needs to be transformed into a lean organisation."
That's not just a bland goal. "It's important to be able to measure that and follow it up," says Sjoman. You need to be able to measure the efficiency and the key performance indicators in the network and the operations and to be able to follow up the information.
"That's the next step: to define and benchmark the operational efficiency and the TCO in order to motivate the team. You have to know where you're going and what business value you can gain by increasing efficiency and reducing TCO. You need to benchmark the values -- the KPI values -- so that you know what it is possible to achieve."
But then, says Sjoman, in order to achieve it "you need to leverage your own expertise in transformation programmes".
And that's where Ericsson offers its experience and knowledge: "We can leverage our skills -- we are a big player in the managed service business," he says. And Ericsson is a sizeable systems integrator, so it has plenty of experience of best practice in a diverse range of operations across the world.
"This experience means we can use the KPIs for operational efficiency as well as for total cost of ownership," says Sjoman.
"We know by our own experiences what can be achieved. For example, we know how many people are needed in a field operation and in network operation centres and what can be achieved there. We understand the different activities. We know how it is possible to transform a situation to achieve benchmark values."
These in-depth experiences, understanding and knowledge are gained because Ericsson manages network operations for telecoms service providers serving more than 100 million end-users worldwide, says Sjoman.
"Our customers are both wireless and wireline operators, and we are operating their multi-vendor network environments".
The company has its own network operations centres in Australia, India, Brazil, the US and in Europe. "It is from those NOCs we operate and manage our customers networks, like the 3 networks in UK, Italy and Australia, Bharti in India as some examples," he says.
"Our knowledge comes from the network operation part of our managed services offering and as a systems integrator in telecom. We deliver more than 1,000 systems integration projects a year to our customers, majority of them direct linked with telecom management solutions," says Sjoman.
"We re-use our experiences from our own NOCs operations when we deliver Systems Integration projects to our customers."
He continues by giving some examples: "General you can say that as a systems integrator of telecom management solutions we ar e focusing on opex savings on first-line operations and we reduce the integration cost through the use of best practice experience build up and defined by delivery of all our integration projects over the years."
Ericsson has also built up the deep understanding of the possibilities of tools and opex savings through its own NOC consolidation programmes.
"There are operational efficiency gains through best practices -- for example best practice in trouble ticketing process, where the result is that we not only reduce mean time to repair or time to do required adjustments but also increase revenue potential by improve service availability."
In systems integration projects with operators the company has seen examples where it has achieved increase in revenue on specific services simply by improving availability of the service as a result of our best practice for trouble ticketing.
As the industry knows, it is very often operators having a diverse range of tools and systems in use.
"By implement our developed reference architecture in our NOCs we reduce the total cost of ownership of the telecom management systems. The reference architecture allows us to replace the'stovepipe' tools with more generic solutions without losing service availability to end-users and revenue streams for the operators."
He uses the stovepipe analogy again. It's typical, says Sjoman, for an operator to use completely different OSS/BSS tools in each service offering.
"There are different tools in different stovepipes, tools for billing, for activation, for mediation and so on," he notes.
"The reference architecture is the base you need to have," says Sjoman. "It has the tools for a multi-service environment. It means you can use more generic solutions for different services without splitting them into stovepipes."
The next question, he says, is: "How do we make the whole operation leaner, to use the benefits we've gained, and to define correctly the KPIs to ensure that we are focussing on the right things?"
Operational efficiency and customer experience are both closely linked to revenue and margin, says Sjoman.
"That is why you need to have a holistic view and have a clear view of the relationships between those elements. As described in the diagram the KPI definitions required to'make things happen' have to be represented in all three areas, operational efficency, customer experience and revenue margins."
To ensure that Ericsson have the holistic view in telecom management systems integration projects and to focus on the delivery and solution definitions to met the TOC and operational efficiency requirements Ericsson has a strong focus on knowledge sharing.
Within Ericsson "we are constantly reusing all the knowledge we gain", he adds. "We use the knowledge we gain from our 24,000 people within Ericsson global services."
The company has set up knowledge sharing processes with all its people. "We have invested significantly in knowledge sharing tools and processes so we can access and share information. People can gain information from colleagues and we also re-use processes from our best-practice definitions. We know how to make it happen."
For example Ericsson is "one of the dominant players" in delivery of full service broadband solutions to operators and service providers: Ericsson has delivered and deployed major broadband networks covering IP backbone networks, wireline broadband access, HSPA mobile access and IMS on top of the different access technologies.
"We have gained lots of experience in these projects from a telecom management view."
He continues by giving another example: "As a systems integrator we are using our telecoms management experiences when we for example are defining and integrating service delivery platforms," says Sjoman.
"You can't take one area in isolation. You need a holistic view -- to make sure everything is working together from an end-to-end perspective supporting both the business process requirements and the technology requirements."
When the company works with its customers in the telecoms management area -- supporting for example the full service broadband and the service delivery platform requirements -- "we can advise them on how they can reuse the investments they've already made in the telecom management area, and show what's required to become more lean operators", he says.
It's not a "big bang" that Ericsson is proposing to operators, he is quick to point out. "It's an evolutionary process. So the KPIs are one way of analysing how you're doing and so you can see that you're taking the right steps."
Sjoman ends by stating: "In the transformation process to become a lean operator you have to take a decision on which parts you have to focus on, from both the business perspective and the technology perspective. And at the end, the goal is to obtain operational excellence through a transformation of management systems and business processes, synchronised with the move to new-generation networks and efficient support for revenue generating end-user services." GTB
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