Reality Check: Time for wireless operators to rethink offer design and order delivery

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
For many years, wireless operators as a whole have not viewed order management as a top technology priority. The process of designing new offers was focused and manageable, and the fulfillment of wireless orders was relatively quick and straightforward. Although order volumes were high, the degree of pain was low, so wireless operators did not feel the order management space warranted as much attention as developing their networks to increase coverage areas and capacity. Now that wireless operators are maturing, we are seeing a rebalancing of priorities, and the apathy toward order management and its importance in wireless is changing.
Today, many factors have begun to reverse the lack of attention given to order management in the past, including:
1. More complex wireless services and plans
2. Increased volume of offers required to compete in today’s environment (the old days of providing 10 new offers a year has yielded to the requirement to produce thousands of new offers annually)
3. An ever-increasing number of wireless access technologies focused on taking networks to 4G and beyond
4. New service delivery platforms that enable the development of innovative new services across multiple access and fulfillment platforms
5. Growing number of sales channels for users to purchase new content and services
Combine all of these factors with increased customer demand for wireless voice and data services and we see that order management has become much more complicated – posing new challenges for wireless operators running siloed legacy order management systems. This complexity – coupled with the intense “time is money” competitive nature of the wireless industry – is elevating order management from an afterthought to a place at the forefront.
Meeting the challenges of today’s wireless environment
Today’s wireless consumers come in all shapes and sizes. There are both individual consumers and small to large enterprise customers. There are customers that want a prepaid account so they can limit their monthly expenses, while others go for the all-you-can-eat plans with unlimited voice, texting, and data. At the same time, with the vast majority of teenagers (75% of U.S. teenagers between 12 and 17-years old according to recent Pew Center Research) and many younger children now having their own mobile devices, wireless operators must handle a significantly higher demand for value-added services being purchased through multiple channels. These value added services offer strong revenue growth for the operator and a high degree of choice for the consumer but they also can pose serious challenges for wireless operators’ order management systems. These challenges are further heightened with the addition of wireless broadband, bulk ordering, pre-provisioning through partners’ sales, and custom offers required for the enterprise space.
Wireless operators today struggle with several challenges throughout the process of creating and delivering a particular offer or service, including slow offer creation times, a lack of visibility across business lines, disparate sales order capture mechanisms, insufficient coordination between pre- and post-paid billing systems, and revenue leakage due to value-added services that are added outside of the primary CRM system (such as via a short code or service delivery platform).
On top of that, partner models add complexity because wireless operators must work with partners like electronics retailers, MVNOs, or content providers to deliver competitive offers and ensure fulfillment no matter where the consumer makes the purchase or what systems are affected. Mergers and acquisitions only add to the confusion and inefficiency as wireless operators work to integrate overlapping and often siloed systems.
Further, the addition of broadband wireless has created some longer fulfillment cycles with customer premise equipment and more complicated activation, so when those broadband services are bundled with mobile phone plans it results in a mixture of short and long fulfillment cycles within the same order, which requires careful coordination across multiple systems and people, including billing systems.
Following best practices for centralized order management
All of these challenges have made it difficult for wireless operators to serve consumers efficiently, and even more difficult to serve the lucrative enterprise market. To address these needs, more and more wireless operators are realizing the importance of centralized order management. By focusing on this area, wireless operators can accelerate offer creation, provide complete lifecycle visibility, enable low-cost automated execution of in-process order changes, reduce order fallout, and lower IT costs.
It starts with the offer creation process, where wireless operators must establish a central product catalog to define offers and to ensure changes are automatically synchronized across the CRM, billing, and order management systems. This becomes imperative as most operators have grown organically or through acquisitions and likely have multiple product catalogs within a diverse set of CRM, billing, provisioning and other key systems that often remain siloed. Establishing the product within the catalog and synchronizing the various product catalogs should only take a couple of days, not months.
Furthermore, wireless operators need a centralized approach to the mapping and testing of new offers. That process alone can take many wireless operators eight to 12 months, which is much too long to compete in today’s business environment. Operators should leverage an order management engine that has a full view of the underlying systems and components to help unify the fragmented approach that exists today where groups often work in isolation and in a very slow, disparate manner. Wireless operators should also develop “zero configuration” offer design capabilities that enable them to create similar offers more quickly through the reuse of existing order fulfillment flows. These changes can enable operators to cut offer introduction from months down to just days, which is vital to keeping up with competing products and prices.
On the order delivery side, especially as bundled services and broadband wireless come into play, it is vital for wireless operators to have a unified order capture system and a centralized order management engine. These two factors are critical to enabling a smooth delivery process from the moment the customer places the order – no matter the channel – by coordinating the fulfillment workflows and providing the ability to track order progress and automatically update changes. The unified order capture system ensures a successful start to the fulfillment process, and then the centralized order management engine provides the intelligence to ensure the right information gets to the right people and systems at the right time. This includes coordination across billing, ERP, service fulfillment, workforce management, and other systems. The engine also provides the complete order lifecycle view required to ensure that customer service representatives can immediately see and inform customers of the order status and projected delivery times.
Further, with a central order management engine managing orders across both the front- and back-office, wireless operators can address the pesky and costly problem of order changes by making low-cost, in-progress changes to the fulfillment process. For example, if a customer signs up for a basic mobile plan but then decides to add unlimited texting and broadband wireless service, the sales representative can easily make that change to the existing sales order and the order ma
nagement engine will automatically cre
ate a new fulfillment plan and tell the underlying systems and people what to keep doing, what to undo, and what to redo – thus avoiding an inaccurate or incomplete order. Currently most operators manage this process with a large number of manual workarounds that drive up costs, or in some cases just have to cancel the first order and re-process a new one. The capability to make “in-flight” order changes allows wireless operators to increase overall order accuracy and reduce order fallout. This becomes even more critical as wireless operators move into triple and quad-play offers.
Making it all happen
The solutions described in the last several paragraphs may sound like a tall order to many readers. The good news is wireless operators do not have to start from scratch and they do not have to replace their multiple siloed systems and move onto one billing system, one provisioning system, etc. By deploying a central order management engine that integrates with all these systems, operators can continue to take advantage of existing investments while reaping the benefits of unified processes.
What makes this possible is the evolution over the last several years to an application-based approach for core order management engines and the development of service-oriented architecture (SOA) methodologies. By properly putting the business logic in a central order management engine and leveraging a SOA-based integration approach to act as the flexible “fabric” connecting the various systems, the wireless operator can increase offer time to market, decrease offer testing time, and stop the creation of more silos. Establishing fulfillment flows in the central order management application to work across all underlying systems provides decoupled flows and creates the opportunity for reuse. This decoupling of fulfillment flows from underlying systems makes it possible to leverage existing investments by working across existing silos while incorporating new services coming from service delivery platforms.
Seeing it in action
A good example of the results that wireless operators can achieve with integration and automation comes from Aircel, one of India’s fastest-growing wireless companies, which has more than 30 million subscribers and is the market leader in four regions in India. Aircel’s massive growth put significant strain on the operator’s existing system in the face of order volumes exceeding 800,000 each day. Those volumes, coupled with the need to address enterprise market demands for automated fulfillment of enterprise functions and manage the complexity of enterprise orders, necessitated rapid evolution. In addition, the absence of a subscriber service catalogue (the existing CRM and order management systems reflected a billing view but provided no service view) complicated the situation still further.
The last straw was when Aircel launched its all-you-can-eat caller ringback-tone service. The product has a monthly charge and provides unlimited ability for users to change their ringback tones; they can change every minute if they want to. This unlimited service contributed to peak order volumes as high as 100,000 orders per hour, forcing Aircel to seek a different approach to its offer creation and order delivery processes. By bringing these two complex processes together in a centralized, automated system, Aircel was not only able to support the ring back service, but also to eliminate revenue leakage, support more order capture channels, coordinate timely order delivery, and minimize operational costs overall.
Wireless operators worldwide can replicate Aircel’s results if they take the time to revisit their offer creation and order delivery systems and implement the best practices described in this article. And, with reports coming out daily about the expected growth of mobile devices and usage, it is clear that they will have to. For wireless operators, business will only grow in volume and complexity, making emphasis on order management systems critical to their success and growth – as well as their ability to meet future challenges including even more complex service offers and technologies.
As a director of product marketing for Oracle Communications, Brian Kracik is responsible for establishing and executing industry and solution strategy, particularly in the order management product area. With more than 16 years of telecommunications experience, Kracik is a frequent speaker on the subject of service delivery platforms and next-generation network technologies and is well-versed in the business and network aspects of global operators.