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1. Background
Since China's entry into WTO, China Telecom has grown into
one of the major components of the international telecom
market. And the market evolution of China Telecom will
inevitably bring itself into the situation of thorough
opening-up, diversified development, and competitions with
numerous telecom businesses. Today, the telecom industry is
facing two challenges: the ever-increasing new technologies
and the rapid development driven by the applications of them.
The other refers to an urgent need to improve services and
management because, with the government ever-regularizing
telecom policies, competitions are being increasingly
intensified among domestic telecom carriers and international
telecom carriers who are entering the domestic market. Under
such an environment, China Telecom requires all carriers to
establish the world-class telecom business supporting system
and make continuous upgrades to keep abreast with the latest
technology development and provide better services.
As to China Telecom, the System 97’, namely, the integrated
local exchange management system which was sparkplugged by
China Telecom in 1997 and implemented in most telecom
carriers, has been running for five or seven years. However,
quite a number of problems of that system come up, such as
deficiencies in work load, poor scalability and slow speed,
which forms a tough barrier to prevent telecom business from
greater growth. In addition, new better services and marketing
strategies can't be launched on that platform, which proves
the necessity of a new generation integrate business
supporting system to strengthen centralized data and customer.
2. Current Status of the Telecom's System 97’ in Gansu
Deployed in
1996, the System 97’, which functioned as a unified internal
platform linking telecom agencies of all cities and counties
in Gansu, allowed centralized management on local exchange
resource, customer information, services and data share in
practices, ranging from customer respond, marketing and
accounting. Gansu's Telecom subscribers, therefore, rose from
600,000 in 1995 to 2.1 million at the present. It has
contributed significantly to telecom growth in Gansu.
However,
the System 97’, because of limitations on technology and
knowledge, uses C/S structure, fails to share data resources
and features throughout the network, and requires rather
complicated interfaces. Furthermore, the system addresses only
business’ internal needs, neither customers nor services, thus
producing the following systematic problems.
Non-sharable data resources: inconsistent data between
different subsystems may fail to ensure data integration and
interoperability with the ongoing system.
Low data relativity level makes it difficult to utilize
information to its full extend, for example, the same data may
get different statistic results in different subsystems.
Non-sharable functions: on the system 97’, different data
forms and operation models generate poor interoperability. For
this reason, more manpower is required in most cases.
Customers, therefore, need to visit different counters for
subscription, payment, and others.
Poor scalability:
The system 97’ generally uses C/S structure. With the rapid
growth of subscribers, its respond speed and performance
dropped down. Moreover, as the architecture does not configure
space for future business growth and possible performance
scalability, it may hinder a long-term business development.
Complicated
interfaces: as the system 97’
runs as the supporting system of China Telecom's core
business, it provides interfaces for other telecom application
systems, such as billing system, yellow book system, network
management system and customer service system. But these
interfaces are not made with standard interface so it is a bit
difficult to link different systems and add new functions and
systems. For this reason, a huge amount of maintenance has to
be involved.
Poor
respond capability to business status and marketing: the
system 97’
handles only internal processes, so it is considerably weak in
data analyses, prediction and decision making support as well
as in launching new products or services.
3. The Objective for Upgrade Is to Establish a New Generation
of Integrated Business Supporting
System
3.1 Basic Guidance
Today, Telecom in
Gansu faces the following three challenges:
How to satisfy existing customers
How to cut cost and increase profits
And how to develop more value-added services
Essentially, the coming telecom trends for development is
nothing but envisage these challenges, and transfer the
telecom industry from a business-focused model to a
customer-based one.
In 2001, executives of the provincial telecom company proposed
to innovate the System 97’ and restructure the business
supporting system. Innovations were made to integrate customer
service system, resource management system and CRM on the
centralized data, in hope for a successful transformation and
increasing competence.
3.2 Objectives of
the New Generation of BSS
Objectives of the integrated BSS include:
Fully understand
and meet customer needs:
The new system, implemented on the CRM concepts, aims to
attract, facilitate and satisfy customers, and to provide
diversified and personalized services with unified interface,
platform, service, standard and quality to achieve a higher
level of customer satisfactory and market value.
Carefully
integrate BSS, billing systems, network resource management
systems and customer service systems.
The new system
gives support to all forms of possible new practices. It can
effectively increase operation efficiency and cut cost.
By transferring
manual and distributed model to digital and internet-based
one, the system can be used to support all forms of possible
new practices, marketing activities, effective resource share
and e-business, getting the competing edge that is needed in
future markets.
Help improve
results of timely decision-making.
The system
provides all-round, timely and accurate reports as well as
analyses and estimates for more effective decision-making.
4. PowerIBSS 8.0 Deployed in Gansu Telecom to Innovate the
System 97’
For this innovation, Gansu Telecom has selected Powerise
Company's Integration Business Support Systems, PowerIBSS 8.0,
to upgrade the System 97’.
PowerIBSS 8.0 is
developed on the basis of Powerise's abundant experience in
telecom business support systems and the latest technologies,
especially the NGOSS and eTOM architecture with the customer
information cater as the corn element. It is not only in
compliance with standards of China Telecom, but also features
high scalability.
PowerIBSS 8.0,
supported by a dynamic work flow engine and a good array of
flexible options of suite management modular, effectively
solves inherited problems in the System 97’in terms of loose
data resources, complicated interfaces, difficulties in
resource sharing and in defining and launching new products
and offering new services. Telecom operators may use this
customer and data-based system to deploy timely marketing
strategies and launch all kinds of new services dependent on
the workflow engine.
PowerIBSS 8.0 utilizes a three-tier architecture that includes
the access platform, interim business tier and the large
backend distribution relative database, and presents ideas of
objective programming, modern management and internet security
technology with features ranging from telecom marketing, order
scheduling, telecom cabling, resource distribution to
management. Through restructuring telecom business process,
this highly automatic system may prevent repeated investment,
optimize telecom network and lift telecom business from a
single/fixed operation model to a multiple/flexible one. In
addition, as CRM concept is used in PowerIBSS8.0, telecom
operators may get clear ideas about what kind of customers are
the most valuable through its customer statistic and analysis
subsystem, and provide differentiated services accordingly.
5. Main Features
5.1 Sophisticated
Software Architecture
The object-oriented
analysis, design and programming technology and three-tier
architecture provide super-stability and flexibility,
increased performance, scalability and maintainability. It
also supports cross-platform development.
5.2 Outstanding
Flexibility and Efficiency
The system, with superb database architecture, not only
supports all existing telecom operations and functions, but
also data business, wide band business, intellectual website
business and multi businesses.
5.3
Customer-Orientation
The system offers a
good selection of features to facilitate users, who may pay
their bills or subscribe not only in telecom offices, but also
through the internet, phone calls and in telecom agencies and
even from other regions. It also supports discretionary
product package, customized pricing, dynamic marketing
management features, customer group management, including
premier customers, business customers and mass customers, and
complete channel management, including distributors, premier
account manager system, community manager system,
responsibility system in rural areas and customer service
centers.
5.4 Work Flow
Technology
The system allows
different process management in all kinds of telecom
operations. As process management is independent from
operation process, it also offers workflow building block
icons, workflow schedule implementation and control and a
higher level of flexibility.
5.5 The Unified and
centralized Customer Information
PowerIBSS 8.0
utilizes an independent and centralized model to manage
account information, that is, all customer-related data are
saved in the customer information center, which offers data
share to many other systems, such as the business office,
billing, accounting and CRM. Through a classified management,
the center may provide differentiated services according to
corresponding credit, loyalty and account levels.
5.6 Effective
Resource Management and Restructure
The system adopts an independent telecom resource management
system to share and restructure all available information, and
at the same time, to provide dynamic resource occupation
analyses.
5.7 Flexible Product
Model Makes It Easy to Offer New Operations
The system utilizes nonobjective product models that are
irrelevant with real operations. In a product model, the
system automatically denies sources as services and equipment,
which can form perfect matches, that is, product packages, in
line with actual needs. Through the workflow scheduler,
telecom companies may configure dynamic combinations of
products and package based on the same resource.
5.8 Open Interface
Management
The EAI-based data exchange platform is successfully
transplanted into PowerIBSS 8.0 to provide data exchange
features such as format conversion, transaction routing
selection, event management, mission management and file
transmission.
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