Service Assurance

Background

A major Communication Service Provider (CSP) faced a host of issues within their service assurance process.

Like many CSPs they found faults were taking too long to resolve with MTTR in certain services taking 2 hours and in other services, over 24 hours.

Coupled with a backlog of minor issues, the business was swamped with around half million event alarms per month going unchecked or missing SLA.

The business had also recognised the overstaffing of their NOC’s with many highly skilled engineers spending hours monitoring screens and managing alarms, rather than dealing with Root cause and fault prevention.

Objectives

The We Are CORTEX team were deployed to develop an automation solution which would reduce MTTR, clear the backlog and check for any false or duplicate alarms. As well as automatically resolving issues where possible and flagging those that required human intervention.

By implementing this solution, it would allow most engineers based in the NOC to be reassigned into customer facing roles as well as retaining information held by those engineers and ensure a knowledge transfer to a centralised location.

Once the engineers were redeployed it was hoped that this would drive a significant increase in customer experience and innovation due to new product development.

Solution

CORTEX was deployed and an end-to-end event driven automation put in place.

The automation integrated with the NMS and took the validation, classification and enrichment of root cause analysis and automated the resolution of network alarms.

By integrating with the fault management system CORTEX was able to receive alarms enrich them and raise, assign, and update trouble tickets at machine speed. This automation alone reduced MTTR by 40% as well as guaranteeing consistent application of business and technical standards.

As a result of triaging false and duplicate alarms the CORTEX solution was able to reduce the number of tickets flagged to the team by 50% using.

Outcomes

Implementing CORTEX was a huge success for this client.

The end-to-end automation of their fault management system drove the next phase of their innovation for their business allowing 30 FTE’s to be redeployed from the NOC and into customer facing roles or new product development allowing for more positive employee experience as well as increasing revenue.

Benefits included

• Reduced MTTR by 40%
• Trouble tickets reduced by 50% eliminating false and duplicate alarms.
• Half a million alarms per month automated by the CORTEX solution.

Approximate Functional Block Count: 1,200

Time to Value: 6 months