The Challenge
Back in 2009, Vodafone Turkey faced a significant challenge. It needed to evolve and transform itself into a modern operator, ready to tackle the future.
Vodafone Turkey’s IT architecture was billing centric, with many bespoke applications, proving to be difficult and costly to keep up with the business requirements and market dynamics. Furthermore, customer satisfaction has always been crucial for the Vodafone Group, and in order to achieve the highest levels of service, the entire operation needed to be leaner, simplified from process and technology perspective, and refocus on customers and their needs.
Vodafone Turkey underwent a profound transformation that included both the EBU (Enterprise Business Unit) and CBU (Consumer Business Unit).
How we do it
In 2012, Celfocus’ engagement began with an assessment of the ongoing EBU transformation project by:
- Reviewing architectural and functional deliverables
- Improving project governance teams support
- Actively participating and restructuring development testing and both configuration and fast track, and solution architecture teams
- Ensuring proper alignment between all involved parties
Together with Vodafone Turkey, and following the assessment conclusions, Celfocus was awarded with the CBU transformation project for post-paid customers, focusing on ensuring that the end-result would deliver the best real-time customer experience based on the most efficient and effective business processes, supported by the most flexible IT systems in the Turkish Telco Market.
The Solution
Celfocus’ approach was plinth on a set of key architecture principles followed closely when designing the overall Convergent IT Architecture for CBU/EBU at Vodafone Turkey:
- Data ownership / Mastering - In order to be able to determine which information should be trusted when performing customer and product data inquiries and updates.
- Single update path for data (SUPD) - Data should only be updatable through the master system.
- Componentization - There shouldn’t be any functional overlaps among systems.
- Systems Decoupling - Every two systems in the IT Architecture should be as independent as possible from each other.
- Single front-end for users - Reducing most business process requirements (from a user perspective) to a single system.
The outlined core architectural principles converge and are bound to each other in what Celfocus has dubbed the “virtualization” model – the creation of a systems independent working model for products and services.
A key technological success factor was the use of a dedicated Order Management system, responsible for decomposing and orchestrating Vodafone Turkey’s commercial orders, ensuring every order is correctly instantiated and processed, regardless of its origin, and thus mitigating costly errors and poor customer experience.
