Case study: Telecomm

Challenge  

  A telecommunications company in the Far East providing voice, data and Internet services was facing the challenges of growing its business in a highly competitive marketplace. Most of its competitors were providing similar services and the company wanted to differentiate itself from the other service providers in order to gain increased market share.
One of the major areas where all of the companies in the region were competitively weak was in the collection, processing and accurate delivery of billing information to customers. The company wanted to enhance its network operation to capture and transform usage data into the critical knowledge that it needed to manage the company’s network while at the same time increasing service levels, managing their new growth and improving profitability.

  The company has four modern switching centers based on the Alcatel E10B that are used to provide the primary services to its customers. These switches recorded usage and billing information on nine-track magnetic tapes. The tapes were collected on a weekly basis and sent to the company’s centralized data processing center. At the center, the tapes were mounted onto tape drives, the billing data read, converted into the appropriate formats, pre-processed for the billing system and then used by the billing programs to create bills for the company’s customers. The issues associated with this process centered on the quality of the information contained on the nine-track tapes, the time it took to process that information, and on the impact to the computing center (IBM AS/400) when all of the data was processed at one time.

  The customer selected to implement the DS2000 Data Server to help address these issues. The DS2000 replaced the nine-track tape-drive and now collects the binary file from the switch every hour. It then reformats the data from binary into ASCII/text-formatted data. After the file is converted, the DS2000 stores a copy of the converted billing records in its network-attached store (NAS) for warehousing. It then filters the billing records so only billable information is contained in the file. After all of the pre-processing is completed, the DS2000 automatically sends the file over a wide area network to the IBM AS/400 for processing. To help insure the accuracy of the billing information, the DS2000 provides to the company with an audit trail of all collected and distributed billing files that includes reports, on an individual file basis, on the number of billing records read, collected, and distributed. It also alerts the operators of any duplicate files or duplicate blocks received from the switching system. 

  By improving the data capture and processing system using the DS2000, the company was able to capture billing information that had been lost using the previous workflow process. This change enabled the company to collect an additional 8% in billable usage revenues. The DS2000 also allowed the company to work more efficiently and gain information in minutes that normally would take hours or even days to obtain resulting in accurate, timely invoices to its customers. The net result was to reduce its operating costs, increase revenue and substantially improve overall customer perception of the company.