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Success Stories: Telecommunications
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SES Develops one of the World’s Largest & Most Complex Telecommunications Billing Systems
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Challenge:
As the Telecommunications market exploded in the 1990’s a key differentiator for the long-distance carriers was their ability to expand their marketplace through speed to market for new and modified features and products.
This was especially critical in the Billing / Invoicing for the large business customers that generated the majority of the revenues.
Getting new products to the market through provisioning and billing became a major roadblock to success for the marketplace and a major constraint to growth.
Solution:
Through a strategic relationship, SES delivered development, enhancements and maintenance one of the world’s largest and most complicated large-business telecommunications billing systems.
SES contributed to a large and complex team that accelerated a traditional 18-month sequential delivery cycle (18-months to deliver a new product) to a series of 4-releases in one-year that was able to introduce new products within 6-months.
Included in the solution was the institutionalization of a robust development methodology.
This included an aggressive “business engineering (Quality Assurance)” program, the project management process with a standard template of over 1200 activities per release, the cultural transformation to a “must do” team and the quick action communications and decision making process.
Benefits:
Through this success a new “major” product for a new market was implemented within 6-months (12-months ahead of any competitor), the “cash float” was drastically reduced as the invoices were delivered 5-days after the end-of-the-month versus 28-days.
The capacity of billing grew from 1-million transactions (call detail records) in a single-cycle to over 400-million transaction per month in multiple cycles and the invoicing progressed from the lowest rated by the market to one of the premier billing success stories.
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SES Establishes Centralized Testing & Quality Assurance Team for International Wireless Telecommunications Company
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For this F100 Wireless Telecommunications Client, SES recognized the opportunity for the Client to reduce production downtime, increase employee morale and dramatically reduce the costs associated with maintaining and testing their mission critical software.
After working for several months in the Client’s Production area, SES noticed that a number of mission critical systems spent an abnormal amount of time ”down”.
These downtimes were costing our Client millions of dollars in lost revenue every year.
After some investigation, SES determined that the reason for these downtimes could be directly traced back to the testing of pre-implementation software.
Upon this determination, SES offered the Client an on-site assessment of their current processes and efficiencies, and provided recommendations to reduce the amount of “downtime” and to improve processes in their life cycle development.
SES spent 2 weeks on the overall assessment. At the end of this time, SES had produced a step–by-step action plan to improve every area in the testing process, from standardizing testing environments and procedures, to stabilizing the current Production environment to reduce and prevent the amount of downtime in these systems.
Utilizing our Collaborative InSourcing approach, an integrated team was created to implement the SES solution resulting in a 43% savings in the process area and significantly reduced mission critical downtime.
This was primarily due to the standardization and stabilization of their testing and production environments.
This collaborative effort developed and implemented more than 22 recommendations to improve process efficiencies and reduce downtime, which saved the client millions of dollars in lost revenue.
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SES Goes Global for an International Telecommunications Joint Venture!
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Three international companies officially launched a worldwide joint venture offering a single source for the solution of voice and data needs of businesses, carriers, and consumers around the world.
The formation of this spin-off between these 3-companies, our combined Client, required development and implementation of a Common Trouble Ticket System (CTTS), on a global scale, to track and manage customer problems with the products and services.
The CTTS had to provide an efficient, reliable mechanism for identifying, managing, and resolving these problems.
The technology to be utilized on this project involved an Intranet system consisting of Client/Server platforms running on UNIX with an Oracle database, C, ProC, HTML, Java Script, TCL, and Netscape.
SES began supporting our new Client at its inception when the parent company, a long time Client of SES, was incorporated into this new subsidiary.
Working collaboratively with our new Client’s management, SES was involved in every area of the project’s life cycle.
SES initially provided a core team of 12 engineers to plan, design, develop, implement and maintain the Common Trouble Ticket System (CTTS).
This system had a distributed multi-tier architecture and five servers worldwide with replicated Oracle databases.
An object oriented Intranet application was used corporate wide to monitor the problem tickets generated by the backbone network.
SES also managed and led two interface projects related to CTTS.
One application interfaced with the parent company’s Mainframe Trouble Reporting System and the other linked to the newly formed subsidiary’s Client/Server Network Management System that generated automatic Trouble Tickets.
Today SES continues to support the functionality of these systems.
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Telecommunications Company Joins 21st Century by Dialing-In SES
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This trans-Atlantic telecommunications company’s Billing Services Division faced a challenge presented by IBM's decision to drop support of OS/VS COBOL and only support COBOL II.
The need to convert existing COBOL code and upgrade all systems to newer releases was evident.
In addition to resolution of the support issue, conversion to COBOL II would also allow our Client greater flexibility in converting applications from IDMS to DB2 and then to client server RDBMS.
The conversion effort encompassed compiler conversion of approximately 1500 production COBOL modules, residing in 15 separate systems.
Along with the conversion effort, our Client desired to populate its new Automated Testing Facility (ATF) with test data and test plans for future use.
Diverting key Client personnel onto the conversion project would distract from ongoing business driven development efforts, which required their attention.
SES developed and submitted a proposal to do this project.
To support development of the proposal SES, in cooperation with our Client, placed a systems analyst on site for several days to analyze the code, and research programs in libraries.
SES discovered that a large portion of the code was META COBOL, COBOL routines that expanded into multiple lines of code.
Uncovering the META COBOL functionality magnified the conversion effort, but allowed SES to accurately evaluate the level of effort in its proposal.
Our Client awarded a contract to SES for the COBOL II Conversion Project.
The SES project plan called for the loading of an automated conversion tool to the Client’s mainframe, the formation of a project cookbook, the establishment of conversion criteria, the creation of the libraries, resolving compile error messages, creating test plans, unit and system testing, and a limited time of production support.
Since SES utilized automated conversion tools the majority of the effort was in the testing and documentation phases of the implementation.
SES successfully initialized and used our Client’s Automated Testing Facility for unit testing and acceptance testing.
Because the Automated Testing Facility was a new and untested in-house product designed specifically for them, SES proposed and accomplished this effort on-site at their facility.
In this effort SES utilized a team consisting of a project manager, senior systems analysts, senior programmer analysts and several junior programmers inspired with enthusiasm, energy and a diligent work ethic.
The blending of senior and junior level resources and the use of conversion tools allowed this telecommunications company to accomplish their objective at a lower cost while not sacrificing their time demands.
This approach also allowed for utilization of the staff at more efficient levels than by having numerous senior developers working beneath their skill levels.
The project was highly successful.
SES completed all goals and objectives of the project on time and within budget with a great deal of satisfaction expressed by our Client’s executive personnel.
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