Project : Automate Provisioning Interactions With Third-Party Systems

 Business Problem

France Citevision's business plan called for significant growth in subscriber numbers. This could only be achieved through geographic expansion away from its core network in Amiens, France. It had to offer its' services over networks in other cities where the networks were owned and operated by different companies . This required :

  1. Creation and management of new products localised for these different geographic areas
  2. Automatic creation of a Service Provisioning Request immediately after creation of the customer order in SmartPack  
  3. Automatic creation of a Provisioning Request File using different formats for each remote network operator
  4. Updating the remote network operator's systems with Provisioning Requests
  5. Accepting and managing automated feedback and Provisioning Status updates
  6. Creation of a tracking and management system to support follow-up processes and procedures

Limited budgets and short timescales ruled out migration and implementation of new CRM, Billing and OSS systems.

 

Solution

The solution that was developed had to employ inexpensive, readily available tools and make use of the existing systems and to accomplish the necessary tasks, albeit that these systems had not been developed with this kind of integration in mind.

A fully automated solution was created using the innate capabilities of Amdocs' SmartPack and the underlying Oracle database for the Customer and product management. The process management and automation layer was implemented using an open source ETL tool (Pentaho Data Integration or PDI) which captured changes of state, took appropriate actions and managed automation, reporting and integration with external systems.

Example workflow using Pentaho Data Integration

 

PDI was chosen for its ease of implementation, its flexibility and its diverse capabilities which ensured that a single core could be developed that would interface to a wide variety of third-party systems whether file-based or using WebService interactions.

Results

The solution was developed in a Windows-based test environment and, following debugging and refinement of processes, it was migrated to a dedicated linux server where the various processes ran continuously to completely automate the new inter-operator interactions. The new tables created as part of the project became the basis for management reporting for follow-up and operational troubleshooting.

Last modified on Thursday, 27 November 2014 14:12
Richard Caplin

Richard has spent his entire career in and around the broadband service industry. His first cable TV company in 1985 provided about 50 TV channels. He has watched with interest as the number of channels on offer has quadrupled and telephone, internet and mobile services have been added.

Fascinated by science and technology from an early age, he's still waiting eagerly for the the early promises of flying cars and holidays on the moon to be fulfilled.

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