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"Patni is our strategic partner to enable CPW's transformation to become a major player in the UK and pan-European telecom markets. Patni's strong solutions capability, best practices, and experience in building next generation telecom back-offices, are critical for the success of our IT organization."
Simon Post
Chief Technology Officer
Carphone Warehouse
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| Case Study |
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Patni enables Business Transformation at
Carphone Warehouse |
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Carphone Warehouse (CPW) is UK's leading independent retailer of mobile communications and one of the largest alternative telecom operators in the UK. Carphone Warehouse partnered with Patni to transform its IT systems, introduce key communications business processes and deploy a scalable and integrated platform. With this platform CPW now has superior IT agility, is able to quickly respond to market demands and rapidly launch new services.
Patni’s innovation cell further helped CPW to leverage this platform and monetize on this next generation solution. This was achieved by applying a generic framework over best-of-breed COTS and tailoring it to suit the typical business requirements of a communications service provider — an Intellectual Property (IP) named atoms™ which is jointly held by Patni and CPW.
The Client
The Carphone Warehouse group is Europe's leading independent retailer of mobile phones and services, with over 2,000 stores in 10 countries. Over the past 5 years, The Carphone Warehouse has built up a significant telecommunications business, which already contributes half of the group's revenue and is set to be a major driver of future profitable growth. The Carphone Warehouse group (CPW) comprises the trade names and brands The Carphone Warehouse, Carphone Warehouse Services, Fresh, TalkTalk and The PhoneHouse.
The Challenge
The Carphone Warehouse, UK operates in a highly competitive marketplace that requires rapid launch of new products and services ahead of the competition. CPW’s blistering growth rate required them to cope with an increasing subscriber base and add new services to their current portfolio of telecom services as it moved up the telco value chain.
The CPW applications portfolio was characterized by a plethora of legacy and home grown systems working in disparate silos. Carphone’s Group IS had developed different systems over a period of time to service its multiple business units including fixed line, mobile and broadband services. However, extending these legacy systems had led to an architecture which was incapable of supporting new services and business needs. The architecture was inflexible and expensive to maintain, hampering CPW’s competitive ability. Every product or feature change that CPW needed to make also required significant changes to be made in their IT systems, increasing their time-to-market.
The customer management platform operating on varying CRM processes and multiple CRM systems across different business lines led to CPW’s inability to cope with the increasing subscriber base. This led to different levels of service delivered to the customers, and increased training and ownership costs. CPW’s proprietary billing system was also facing increasing difficulties to accommodate customization requests from multiple services units operating across Europe. Independent processes in the CRM and billing systems for different types of services and addition of numerous applications to its IT infrastructure had resulted in serious scalability and performance issues. With this current IT infrastructure, CPW was not able to offer bundled services for its customers.
The Solution
Patni Approach
Carphone Warehouse selected Patni as a strategic systems integration partner for the development of a common IT platform to handle the entire communication services portfolio of CPW. To enable CPW to provide all the telecom services on a single platform, Patni followed the approach of using a “solution accelerator” which is essentially a platform prepackaged with critical telecom business processes and frameworks. Patni then did a gap analysis to match the CPW systems with these best practice business processes and frameworks. Using this as the base, Patni built a multi-service delivery platform consisting of integrated CRM, billing and order management & provisioning systems with best- of-breed COTS products. The integration of various components was based on a service-oriented architecture.
Patni built a next generation integrated OSS/BSS process-centric services platform, now called Patni atoms™, which meets the current and anticipated needs of CPW and delivers majority of the required functionality. atoms™ platform also addresses the integration challenges created by the proliferation of BSS/OSS applications and the need to provide a flexible framework which supports rapid delivery of converged telecom services. The platform is built to leverage leading industry standards and best practices such as ITIL and eTOM compliance, providing CPW with a comprehensive set of business and operational support services and applications.
Patni Solution
Patni atoms™ is the culmination of Patni‘s experience and Intellectual Property frameworks in the OSS/BSS arena, based on its experiences with multiple operators around the globe. Patni’s knowledge of telecom domain combined with industry standards and best practices provided CPW with customizable and pre-packaged business processes in the form of a framework. This framework was used for comparison with CPW’s business processes and requirements and helped in identifying the right vendors to fit in with CPW’s processes. The atoms™ framework has the following key elements:
Telecom and Media Business Process Library
The atoms™ framework adds a feature rich Business Process Library layer on top of Business Process Orchestration. The atoms™ Business Process Library is a repository of industry standard business processes based on eTOM and spanning Fulfillment, Assurance and Billing. The atoms™ Business Processes are BPEL compliant making them technology agnostic and are modeled with a view for easy customization and extension to meet service provider specific needs. Business processes include details of process hierarchy, process decomposition, cross functional linkages and process behaviors.
Technology Neutral Solution Designs and Interface Contracts
The platform consists of set design artifacts to describe E2E solution of a business process implementation. The designs are technology agnostics specified in terms of logical systems (CRM, Billing, Order Management etc). Along with design, atoms™ platform also consists of set of Interface specifications (contracts) among various BSS/OSS systems at a logical level. These designs along with interface contract forms basis of the technical implementation of the BSS/OSS platform.
Telco Data Model (TDM)
TDM represents Telco enterprise data model containing all major entities associates with telecom and media service providers. The TDM provides a “common language” for all participating OSS/BSS components within the atoms™ platform. It also provides third party integrators and vendor standard information, which in turn allows easier and more effective integration with atoms™ platform. TDM provides a representation of business concepts from atoms™ business process library, their characteristics and relationships which are described in an implementation independent manner.
This framework was developed further and combined with the right blend of COTS products to create an SOA-based, extensible service delivery platform built of the following core components:
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Chordiant CRM solution providing a 360 degree view of customer profile to the CSAs |
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Intec’s Singl.eView providing a highly scalable convergent billing &
rating platform |
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Implementation of TIBCO for order management and provisioning enabling enforcement of desired business rules with more flexibility
and ease |
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The TIBCO suite forming the enterprise messaging backbone for service orchestration and service oriented framework |
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Enterprise product management applications including a unified
product catalogue |
atoms™ Platform Design
Patni atoms™ platform follows a business process led system process development that ensures end-to-end solution integrity, providing traceability between business deliverables at important milestones — effectively linking business requirements, process definitions, architectural solutions and detailed designs. The atoms™ framework has integration capabilities that can enable existing systems and new systems to communicate with each other in a seamless manner. This is achieved through an enterprise messaging scheme for communication between various end points via SOA that gives flexibility of plug and play, an enterprise data model and business process orchestration capabilities for managing workflows.
The value-add for CPW is the leverage of pre-built business process elements that can be rapidly tailored to its specific needs. All these industry standards-based processes are eTOM compliant and cover around 70% of operations and product functionalities of e-TOM for an operator’s business support stack. Patni also designed the atoms™ platform to come with ITIL compliant multi-tired operations and support processes. These processes cover post-production support in terms of NOC, multi-level technical support, Quality control, Change Management and Release management.
The Benefits
The creation and implementation of atoms™ platform resulted in a host of benefits to CPW:
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Enabled successful acceleration of CPW’s business and IT transformation programs |
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Enabled CPW to undertake portfolio rationalization for rapid integration of existing and new systems and network environments |
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Shortened software development cycles due to atoms™ platform’s pre-defined processes, speeding up the launch of new offerings for CPW, thereby helping it achieve quicker ROI |
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Enabled CPW to be more competitive in the market by means of better and unified customer insight for more effective customer profiling, segmentation and targeting |
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Maximized customer life time value via product bundling and up-sell/cross-sell enablement |
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Reduced cost of initial investment for new systems, and on IT maintenance and operations due to the managed services model supported by atoms™ |
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Enabled portfolio rationalization and easy integration of the customer base and systems of acquired companies like AOL, UK due to its scalable model, thereby allowing CPW to successfully execute its M&A plans |
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Allows CPW to launch in multiple geographies, and at the same time provides it the flexibility to migrate to a new CRM or billing system, as per the regional requirement |
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Helped CPW to monetize on its IT investments by the building of the atoms™ platform, which could be replicated to benefit the rest of the industry. |
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Conclusion
More than a year ago, Patni set out to build a technology platform for CPW that would allow them to grow with agility. The presence of atoms™ has allowed CPW to place its multiple business lines including fixed-line, broadband and mobile on a single platform and offer triple and quad play services effectively. It has allowed CPW to easily and quickly respond to market requirements, without replacing existing systems. CPW is now able to support and cater to its growing customer base in a consistent and unified manner with a single consolidated view of the customer available to its CSAs. Carphone Warehouse enabled on Patni atoms™ is now able to better manage growth and competition and is poised to become a telecom giant in Europe.
Besides this, the atoms™ platform is allowing CPW to monetize on its IT investments. New applications development and enhancements for all other atoms™ implementations worldwide are readily accessible within the atoms™ community, thus substantially reducing time and investment to upgrade technology and acquire business process maturity. Today, Carphone Warehouse is well-positioned to take advantage of upcoming innovations in telecom that promise to enhance its stature as it advances along its growth trajectory.
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