Change Management at Orange

Keeping up with incoming job tickets…

Every job of incoming scheduled work on Orange’s network equipment has to be verified by the Change Management team. There are, on average, 25 such jobs per day, each of which can take between 15 minutes and two hours to process manually.

These tasks cause downtime on the Orange network, so the team’s role is to identify their impact and then notify any affected parties, which may well include customers. The job tickets have to be appended to include information on the site, those affected and what work needs to be done.

Implementing automation…

All the necessary information comes from the team’s GE SmallWorld network inventory configuration management platform. Before the automation, Change Management team members had to analyse the impact of each scheduled job. They then had to spend time in the configuration management platform finding data for each network element and contact all the relevant parties.

By contrast, the CORTEX automation has been able to intelligently orchestrate the flow of information. It manages incoming scheduled work tickets, gets the relevant data from the network inventory configuration management system, and then automatically creates jobs on the Change Management team’s work order management system.

These end-to-end automation flows are fully optimised. Obsolete steps have been removed from the process – such as having to manually delete unnecessary information from thousands of lines in a spreadsheet. Working at machine speed means that the notification of scheduled works to those that will be impacted is now immediate.

Looking forward…

Since implementing these automations in 2020, Orange Romania’s change management has gone from strength to strength. The team continues to update the CORTEX software as necessary – to keep pace with new configurations – and the technology is also now being used by other areas of the business.