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In 2012, the average revenue growth rate for carriers was less

than 8%. Continuous growth of both revenue and profit has ceased being easy, so carriers

must foster a user-centric operational management model

that exploits network potential in terms of evolution, operational

management, and customer experience management (CEM).

Huawei is there to help.

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User-centricoperational management

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From analog to digital communication, from 2G to 3G to LTE, telco networks are increasing in their enormity and complexity. The configurat ion of a

large number of network parameters imposes unprecedented challenges to network planning, optimization, and O&M. Revenue growth is slowing, as over-the-top (OTT) services encroach on carrier territory. To enhance competitiveness, investment is needed that improves service quality and user experience, so that the customer feels satisfied.

E2E Network Planning and Evolution

Carriers must increase the return on investment (ROI) for network evolution projects. Most of their networks are multi-standard, multi-vendor, and multi-type hierarchical networks, with the end-user experience not determined by any one network. Evolution is risky in such a situation in terms of the technical & engineering challenges. During the process itself, unified management of multi-vendor devices, multi-scenario coordination, and inter-department communication and interoperability require experienced project management teams.

As such, carriers need a strategic partner who understands their business strategies and objectives,

and can cooperate in depth, innovate jointly, and plan a future-oriented network. Huawei has the understanding of services, networks, and their construction, to be that partner.

Huawei proposes its E2E Network Planning & Evolution Solution that is smooth and efficacious, in terms of ROI. Based on a carrier’s overall business requirements & service planning, this process begins with a Huawei E2E associational analysis of the traffic, network resources, services, users, and terminal types on a carrier’s networks, with the results analyzed to determine network & investment hotspots so that evolution both starts & remains on the right track. Through E2E planning that can encompass a plurality of vendors, devices and networks, Huawei further breaks up the carrier’s business strategies into workable network plans that cover all stages of the evolutionary process. Huawei tests and verifies key network evolution technologies at various stages to ensure predictability, verifiability, and compatibility, so that processes are manageable and services remain uninterrupted.

Huawei solutions can be applied in different delivery scenarios and for different internal business processes. With its 20 years of experience in establishing standard operating procedures (SOP), Huawei can help carriers undertake projects quickly, accurately, and economically, with quality results.

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User-centric management transformation

As telco technologies & services advance, with numerous technologies coexisting, networks are larger and more complex than ever before. Managed services have become the first & last resort for many carriers looking to reduce O&M costs. However, network-centric management operation can no longer accommodate customer requirements, as carriers are now more concerned with service quality, user experience enhancement, revenue growth, and value operation.

Kris Szaniawski, Principal Analyst at Informa, has noted, “Efficiency improvement and cost control are still carriers’ most desperate requirements. To improve customer experience and develop new digital services so as to stand out from fierce competition, managed services is a must.” Carriers must transform to a service- and user-centric operational system with their own operations & organization streamlined in terms of networks, services and business.

Carriers try to improve network efficiency by standardizing, centralizing, integrating, and smartening their hardware. Firstly, carriers must standardize O&M and monitor/manage key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve service. Secondly, carriers must integrate O&M organizations, resources, platforms, and tools to share expertise and centralize the overall process.

Next, they should integrate organizational, process, and employee skills to converge O&M for IT & CT and fixed & mobile networks. And finally, to attain intelligent operations & management, network planning, construction, O&M, and optimization must all be streamlined, with processes & tools innovated and O&M platforms integrated based on service requirement analysis, prepared network resources, and supply-chain management.

Carr iers must transform network O&M into service O&M. They must also change their Network Operation Centers (NOCs) into Service Operation Centers (SOCs) and focus on service quality management in a proactive & E2E manner. By leveraging an SOC’s accurate & timely fault location, the network, marketing, and sales departments can solve problems collectively.

Carriers need partners who can support their data/cloud services and timely service provisioning, and collaborate with global content/service providers. However, to realize this and the other aforementioned goals, a powerful OSS is needed that implements centralized and automated O&M so that services are continuously optimized. Firstly, the OSS must carry out centralized operation by planning O&M processes, organizations & capabilities, and application systems, to enable the sharing of O&M personnel, data, and experiences. Secondly, this OSS will optimize the O&M rules library, based on industry practices, and automate O&M through

Efficiency improvement and cost control are still carriers’ most desperate requirements. To improve customer experience and develop new digital services that stand out from fierce competition, MS is a must.

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IT platform standardization. Thirdly, the OSS will thoroughly investigate the root causes of O&M inefficiencies and support the benchmarking of real-time management against O&M baselines. This will help carriers smarten their network O&M, which is key to sustainable value operation.

Huawei’s evolving managed services solution is designed to facilitate O&M transformation for fixed/mobile & IT/CT convergence and shift network quality management to service quality management. It utilizes a service delivery platform (SDP) to support single-point access for a large number of CPs/SPs, and the converged management thereof, to deliver true value operation.

CEM across the lifecycle

User experience has a direct impact on both user loyalty and carrier revenue. However, network quality indicators (KQIs) do not necessarily gua r an t ee u s e r e xpe r i ence ( an ab s ence o f complaints). In fact, sometimes there may seem to be no correlation at all. Key quality indicators (KQIs) are needed that reflect real service quality for voice and data. The Customer Experience Index (CEI) is the closest thing we have to real life right now. After mapping/correlating the relationships between CEI, KQIs, and KPIs in terms of services, user experience can be evaluated & optimized.

Another key component of customer experience

management (CEM) is per-service, per-user-based quality management. Today, most CEM activities merely focus on the siloed management & optimization of individual user touch points. However, genuine user satisfaction is more aggregate, requiring long-term, multi-aspect and multi-channel data. Therefore, CEM must also focus on the entire lifecycle of a service, as this has been shown to be 30 to 40% more accurate than single touch-point measurement. In the future, CEM will transform from a single-point to lifecycle basis, across the entire industry.

Comprehensive CEM also requires carriers to collectively plan networks, IT, services, terminal usage, and business objectives to gain more business value, with probes, software, platforms, and professional services integration into a closed loop also a prerequisite. Innovation is needed of top-down organizations, processes, tools, and platforms, and transformation to service- and user-based O&M is inevitable, with SOC as its engine. The SOC conducts unified management of operating systems (centered on services & applications), helps related personnel better understand service quality, and guides network maintenance and troubleshooting to be more in line with end-user experience. This can significantly reduce both troubleshooting time and complaint rates. It can also finally help break down the barriers to inter-departmental cooperation, making end-user experience the sole driving force and evaluation yardstick.

Customer experience management must focus on the entire lifecycle of a service, as this has been shown to be 30 to 40% more accurate than single touch point measurement.

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Currently, Huawei is cooperating actively with global carriers. By integrating platforms & process and focusing on the entire lifecycle of user experience, Huawei has set up a use-case library covering multiple scenarios to effectively improve user experience from end to end.

Huawei professional services for seamless ICT transformation

Challenges and opportunities coexist. With the emergence of SDN and NFV technologies, t remendous chal lenges are brought to the network planning, design, deployment, O&M, optimization, and l ifecycle management of networks. Meanwhile, SDN/NFV inherits IT networks’ advantages in that networks are made more flexible through separation of the control/forwarding planes and the decoupling of software from hardware. After all, what carriers essentially need is a reliable and stable network, which is the very basis of service access. Therefore, new professional services are required for ICT transformation to support IT network agility and promote telco services in general.

Business consultation is indispensable. Carriers need reliable prediction of their network traffic so that network planning & design are effective. For the

planning part, hardware-software decoupling makes the relationships between service traffic, software licenses, and hardware resources more complicated. If we lack sufficient understanding of service traffic and software licenses, planned hardware resources may not be appropriate or accurate, making for a huge waste of time & money.

For network design, carriers need an overall solution that supports reliable service operation. Due to the aforementioned architectural separation, different network layers must be recombined in a structured way to ensure that reliability & stability stay up to par. Issues of multi-level interoperation after decoupling, work arrangements, and inter-layer problems also need to be addressed, as decoupling leads to a growing number of suppliers with complicated dependencies. And finally, for O&M, problems that were once intra-system become inter-system, making fault location and troubleshooting a process that involves multiple contracts, thus requiring synergy of technical & managerial capabilities.

Thanks to our thorough understanding of carriers’ business objectives, customer-centered O&M processes, joint innovation with telcos, swift response to customer needs, and customized solutions, Huawei is destined to become the best strategic partner for carriers in the era of ICT convergence, helping them build service- and user-oriented operations and management processes that achieve true business success.

Editor: Linda Xu xushenglan@huawei.com