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With Ofcom, the UK telecommunications regulator, and the industry scrutinizing Openreach's delivery of first mile' local loop unbundling and wholesale line rental services to competitive service providers, the business was under pressure to deliver exemplary customer service. Openreach called in Amdocs Consulting and used its Business Transformation service to help deliver a road-map to achieve its 95 percent target for right first time' on its fault resolution and provisioning process. As a result, Openreach is undertaking a major change initiative across its service and operations divisions, both of which will help Openreach achieve its goal of being the number one service provider for customer service. With that well underway, Openreach is now working with Amdocs to ensure that the benefits of this program of change are realized and the component projects deliver successfully. Underpinning this initiative has been a highly successful Business Deployment engagement to improve acceptance of new systems changes within Openreach's Operational community; a Release Management function to improve the efficiency of systems delivery; and Design Assurance.
"We wanted a partner that would talk straight with us, and that's exactly the Amdocs approach. This is the true role of a close advisor and the value that Amdocs has brought to Openreach."
Colin Windsor, former CIO of Openreach
Openreach under the regulator spotlight
Openreach is a division of the BT Group, one of the world's leading providers of communications solutions and services, operating in 170 countries and delivering services such as networking; local, national and international telecommunications services; higher-value broadband and internet products and services, and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT's other lines of business are BT Global Services, BT Retail and BT Wholesale.
Openreach provides installation and maintenance services on behalf of the UK's service providers. It is responsible for the first mile' of the national access network the place where millions of calls, web searches and business deals are started each day. Openreach services, supports and maintains the wiring, fibers and connections which link millions of homes and businesses in Great Britain to service providers' networks.
"Amdocs has acted as a valuable partner enabling the change, telling us what we needed to hear rather than what we might like to hear, and focused very single-mindedly on delivering the right business objective."
Openreach aspires to become number one in customer service and delivery of services across all its major products. Two key services are Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) and Wholesale Line Rental (WLR). Local loop unbundling enables other providers to offer voice and broadband services over the first mile' from a point of presence into businesses and homes. Wholesale line rental enables providers to offer private-branded telephony services over the BT network. These products are high profile and key to Openreach because of a series of undertakings that BT Group has agreed with Ofcom, the UK telecommunications regulator. These undertakings require BT to make its network available on an equal basis to competitive service providers in addition to BT itself. In addition, an increasing uptake of these products has led to significant pressure on the new platforms and processes that have been built to support the Lead to Cash (provisioning) and Trouble to Resolve (repair) processes.
The central pillar of Openreach's objective is to achieve a 95 percent Right First Time (RFT) performance when customers place orders or submit faults for its local loop unbundling and wholesale line rental services. To identify the barriers to achieving this target, Openreach partnered with Amdocs Consulting and Amdocs Business Transformation service.
Amdocs sets about helping to transform the business
Openreach is already using Amdocs solutions as part of the foundation for BT Neo, a strategic Service Management platform across all BT businesses, supporting Service Fulfillment (or Lead To Cash) and Service Assurance (Trouble To Resolve) processes.
"Amdocs blended rock-solid technology and people with real operational skills to enable Openreach to deliver a much improved customer experience to service providers and end users."
Openreach brought in Amdocs Consulting to help the business meet the regulatory requirements for its voice and data products by working alongside Openreach to analyze key areas of failure and help build up a program of work to reduce measurable failures. The goal was to support increasing demand and growth, and identify roadmap recommendations for future transformation. Amdocs Consulting worked closely with Openreach's Customer Experience team to develop a transformation roadmap to address the immediate concerns and recommend solutions for long term system improvements. The project was broken down into several defined phases:
- Establish a base line of current performance against specific key performance indicators
- Develop a deep understanding of core end-to-end processes
- Assess and quantify areas of failure
- Agree on and initiate projects to deliver quantifiable improvements to internal processes
- Agree on and define a matrix for ongoing measurement of improvement.
The analysis carried out by Amdocs Consulting and Openreach into causes and barriers to achieving the 95 percent Right First Time target highlighted both problems and potential solutions. For example, Amdocs Consulting found that if a fault required further action by a second engineer, then the likelihood of this failing to hit the Right First Time target was as high as 80 percent. In parallel, if the test and diagnostics platform reliability is below a certain level, this has a ripple effect across the whole Trouble to Resolve process, leading to up to 10% of Right First Time failure
"The work that Amdocs Consulting has done with Openreach has been tightly focused on business transformation: not just recommending system improvements, but looking beyond to where other people and process changes could help improve the way wholesale line rental is operated."
Colin Windsor, former CIO of Openreach, says, "The work that Amdocs Consulting has done with Openreach has been tightly focused on business transformation: not just recommending system improvements, but looking beyond to where other people and process changes could help improve the way wholesale line rental is operated. This has included training solution development and business critical reporting solutions. Working with Amdocs has enabled development of options to resolve particularly complex operational issues."
Amdocs helps bridge the gap between Business and IT
Openreach has also been leveraging Amdocs' capabilities to improve the way in which its systems releases are deployed and communicated across the organization. The approach has evolved to become a highly effective operation where planning on business impact is factored in early in the release cycle and tasks assigned to business owners, in order to prepare the business to maximize usage of new functionality when it becomes available. Openreach's Operational units have been extremely satisfied with this service, which has greatly improved communications and feedback loops, as well as reduced the number of change requests after production.
"Working with Amdocs has enabled development of options to resolve particularly complex operational issues."
Further areas where Amdocs has helped have been:
- Release management: ensuring smooth requirements gathering, impact assessment and financial planning, alongside technical program management
- Design assurance: ensuring alignment between systems requirements and the Openreach systems architecture
Business ready to hit target
According to Openreach, one of the key achievements of the business transformation program has been Amdocs' delivery of a framework to enable Openreach to meet its 95 percent Right First Time target.
"Amdocs Consulting has demonstrated the companys ability to work at the value-add level, partnering with Openreach as a close advisor."
Windsor says, "Amdocs Consulting has demonstrated the company's ability to work at the value-add' level, partnering with Openreach as a close advisor. With their professionalism, intelligence and dedication, the Amdocs team was a powerful business and technology enabler. Amdocs blended rock-solid technology and people with real operational skills to enable Openreach to deliver a much improved customer experience to service providers and end users."
The Right First Time measure is designed to act as the internal driver to enable Openreach and BT Group as a whole to become 'number one for Customer Service' in all markets and to continue to deliver services in line with contractual commitments. Amdocs' recommendations have led to significant business benefits for Openreach, including improvements of the automation levels of its systems, and a reduction in cost-to-serve and fault cycle time. Amdocs Consulting was able to identify specific barriers and provide Openreach with simple, practical recommendations. An example is a series of suggestions on how to improve the way end customers are contacted prior to repair visits. Currently Openreach deals with a significant proportion of missed appointments because the end customer is not present. To drive this down, Amdocs Consulting recommended better systems integration with Openreach's service provider customers through simple changes to the interfaces.
"With their professionalism, intelligence and dedication, the Amdocs team was a powerful business and technology enabler."
"Helping Openreach improve its operations and services processes is a highly complex transformation challenge," says Windsor. "Amdocs helped Openreach steer the implementation to take a phased approach to such challenges."
Windsor concludes, "We wanted a partner that would talk straight with us, and that's exactly the Amdocs approach. Amdocs has acted as a valuable partner enabling the change, telling us what we needed to hear rather than what we might like to hear, and focused very single-mindedly on delivering the right business objective. This is the true role of a close advisor and the value that Amdocs has brought to Openreach."
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