Off-Net Management
Global CSP establishes savings of $1.6m per year in just 38 weeks.
As part of its first automation project, this North America-based provider set its sights on resolving the operational inconsistencies of its partner-management team. It successfully reduced the overall head count by over 60%, and sped up order provisioning from nine months to within nine days, and with near-zero latency.
The CSP’s Head of Automation said: ‘Now that we’ve 100% automated all the communications with our off-net providers, nothing ever gets forgotten. There are no more lost customer orders at our end, and no more partial deliveries of services at our customers. And the manpower costs we’ve avoided in doing that are staggering.’
The CORTEX software acts like a project management backbone for all the communications between the CSP and its base of suppliers, from coast to coast. Once orders are placed with those third-party providers, automated workflow is activated that ensures they’re all seen through to completion.
That’s brought clinical efficiency to a somewhat disorderly management of these approximately 130 external partners – or ‘off-net providers’ as they’re known internally. The off-net partners may be located nationwide – East or West coast, State-based, or even County-based. Irrespective, CORTEX has enabled this customer to work with its partners to deliver in excess of 2,000 last-mile connections per month, as well as a wide range of other network services.
It’s easy to understand how – with this volume of off-net orders being processed manually – not having a solution like CORTEX would result in errors, missed deadlines, lengthy delays and, indeed, failures in delivering services.
Order placement…
CORTEX now places orders with all the off-net providers automatically in one of three different ways:
- API interfaces that connect with six of the supplier’s procurement systems
- Procurement portals for some of the other providers
- Automated e-mail for the rest.
CORTEX holds policy data for each of the 130 different off-net providers, so the software knows what to do for each provider, and when. As well as knowing how to place the order, it also holds data about process timings – i.e. when to follow up – and how to access each provider’s services catalogue.
This order placement follows on from the validation and decomposition use case – a further, subsequent application of CORTEX by the CSP, that extended automation back towards the customer.
E-mail management…
Order placement establishes a workflow stream for each off-net service request. According to the policy data CORTEX holds for each off-net partner and service, it will then assign tasks to the relevant people, await their responses, and then trigger the next stage of workflow. Where responses don’t come back in time, CORTEX will automatically follow up and, if necessary, escalate the issue as an exception to someone at the CSP.
The collaboration between people and technology is a key reason why CORTEX was chosen and, more importantly, a factor in achieving such success. The customer recognised that their operational complexity meant it would be impossible to automate everything right from the start. CORTEX’s approach – machine-led, but with human follow-up – provided the optimal mix of consistency from technology and pragmatism.
Increasing velocity and customer satisfaction…
The results have been dramatic. As well as generating major workforce savings, the customer experience has been transformed. It was taking up to nine months in many cases for new customer orders to be delivered – and then often after a series of false starts. That’s now been reduced to nine days, on average.
Customers get the service they asked for, with almost none of the unexpected surprises that had become commonplace. Those surprises arose because, previously, the process was so slow that it wasn’t uncommon for off-net providers to have updated their service offerings by the time they were deployed.
Diverse capabilities…
CORTEX’s automated e-mail management is capable of a wide range of tasks. That includes sending automated e-mails to off-net providers—chasing orders, requesting technical data, and many other things—and processing their responses. In fact, it can essentially schedule any communication-based action.
That means it can also coordinate with people from the CSP’s project management office (PMO). CORTEX can keep track of all the data relevant to off-net service provision as it becomes available, which then acts as an up-to-date source of information for the PMO.
Moreover, CORTEX can provide a consolidated management vehicle for the logical and physical design and assign work done by partners. Indeed, it effectively performs that role, albeit by harnessing and coordinating the efforts of the off-net providers’ engineers.
Overall, CORTEX’s e-mail management capabilities provide a comprehensive management layer around all the provisioning activities for the CSP’s off-net services. This means nothing gets forgotten, so the CSP is more confident about delivering its own solutions.
Changing roles…
In addition to its wide range of actions, CORTEX has actually just brought calm to this CSP’s off-net provider team. Their roles have changed significantly. Previously, they were engaged in placing orders and then attempting to manage them to delivery with off-net providers. Meanwhile, they also had to attempt to remediate errors created by the disorderly manual processes.
Now, they simply have to manage the predictable workloads created by the system. That typically comprises scheduled telephone calls or handling exceptions for the relatively few scenarios that are not yet automated. Culturally, this has had a material impact, too, improving working conditions, morale, and employee welfare. The team are now automation fans, and they also look to find ways to improve their operations and service using CORTEX.