Digital transformation has impacted CSPs’ business and operational strategies over the last years, changing the customer relationship and leading to the emergence of a new digital ecosystem. The telecommunication industry responded by becoming more digital and closer to customers, by evolving from traditional Communication Service Providers to Digital Service Providers.
For this transformation to be effective, it must impact the entire IT infrastructure, covering both BSS and OSS systems to provide a holistic and integrated perspective. In the OSS domain, the Network Operations Centres (NOCs) is where this transformative potential is higher.
The opportunity for automation and tighter integration is very significant due to the predictable and standardised nature of network events, along with the exponential data growth.
The Challenge
The Vodafone Group’s NOC mission is to monitor, control and ensure network availability across multiple geographies. To cope with a dynamic and unsteady environment, the company designed a long-term strategy for its OSS transformation, composed of three stages:
- 1. Operational Centralisation
- 2. Tools Centralisation
- 3. Process Automation
Bearing this in mind, the Vodafone Group set a 3-year goal of reducing 80% of the effort allocated to first-line support activities through automation. In addition, the challenge included the creation of an Agile Centre of Excellence, introducing DevOps methodology and a specific team to implement it at a certain stage of the project, assuming the mission of continuous improvement.
Celfocus’ investment in areas like Machine Learning and Big Data Analytics, combined with a deep understanding of the OSS layer, made it the right partner to deliver this next-generation Network Operation Centre.
The Solution
Celfocus supported stage three of Vodafone Group’s OSS transformation strategy, aimed at improving efficiency and reducing by 80% the effort of first-line support activities through cognitive intelligence and automation. The project comprised two streams:
- Automation & Cognition Suite Setup, relying on three building blocks – Analytics and Cognitive, Automation and Unified Operations Portal;
- Automation Improvement DevOps, in a collaborative model between Vodafone and Celfocus that ensures a consistent delivery of every sprint from different geographies.