transforming kpn bss into a simplified future-proof ... · their agile methodology to create a road...

Transforming KPN BSS into a simplified future-proof platform

KPN provides communications, media and information services to more than 11.5 million subscribers in the Netherlands. As a leading provider of mobile, internet and TV services, KPN seeks to ensure that its customers benefit from the latest and greatest innovations available in the market, along with offering the highest possible levels of customer service and support that are a powerful differentiator for KPN.

With the development of fiber as well as copper networks, multi-play services and the expansion into OTT TV along with cable, KPN’s business has become progressively more complicated. Over time, therefore, the Business Support Systems (BSS) that KPN had developed to support its customers with product, customer, revenue and order management also became more complex as more services with new systems had been added and additional functionality was required to support customers. Increasingly complex infrastructure leads to higher costs and inhibits the agility and responsiveness that are the hallmarks of operating as a truly digital business.

Bouke Hoving, Executive Vice President Simplification & Innovation and Chief Information Officer

2 | KPN: Leading in the NEW Accenture Way

“KPN has always been keen on moving towards a simplified yet powerful Business Support System (BSS). In our endeavor to strengthen the customer service and lower the business’s total cost of ownership, Accenture was an unequivocal choice. Their agile methodology to create a road map guided us to a new, simplified technology landscape. It helped us accelerate the software delivery, drive a faster time to market and raised the customer satisfaction index. Accenture has been a true end-to-end integrated technology partner that helps us through this major transformation.”

Accenture worked with KPN as one integrated team to transform its ability to meet the needs of its customers in the digital age.KPN was keen on moving towards a simplified but more powerful BSS platform—in line with its strategy to simplify, strengthen and grow —that would also increase its ability to serve and sell to its customers and lower the business’s total cost of ownership. KPN’s major business priority has always been customer service and it wanted to ensure that its customers experience a ‘non-disrupted service’ in the transition from the old copper to the new fiber platform.

Following a rigorous competitive process, in 2012 Accenture was selected to design, develop and execute the transition from the existing system to the new BSS—Leverstraat3.0 (L3.0), based on Oracle technology. With more than 1.9 million customers in scope for migration, the new system had to support new propositions and ways of marketing in order to ensure KPN retained its competitive market position.

KPN customers would experience ‘non-disrupted service’ in the transition from the old platform to the new.

More than 1.9 million KPN customers were in the scope for migration.

KPN: Leading in the NEW Accenture Way | 3

SIDcompliant

Validation Engine

Error Handling Framework

Batch Control Framework

TRANSFORMATIONSOURCE

• Customer• Customer Statistic• Service• Service Configuration• Service Usage• Service Specification• Service Strategy & Plan• Agreement

• Resource• Resource Configuration• Resource Usage• Resource Specifications

Source BSS

Source OSS

TARGET

• OSS Integration• Provisioning• Rating

• CRM• BSS Integration• Billing

BSS Data integration layer

OSS Data integration layer

Informatica

To achieve this transformation, KPN needed to address some key challenges:


Aligning the different and complex product and pricing strategies for both copper and fiber customers

Supporting a significantly higher volume of customers on the new system, rising from 500,000 to 2.5 million


With a project of this scale and business criticality, how Accenture delivered is as important as what we have delivered. By bringing the full range of management and technology consulting, along with digital expertise and operations capabilities, we have provided an end-to-end integrated service to collaborate with, and support KPN throughout this major transition. In addition to managing the complex technology, Accenture has also helped support the wider organization to be ready for change, equipping the business and key points of customer interaction such as the call centers with the know-how they needed to ensure the new L3 system was adopted as rapidly and effectively, as possible.

Migrating customers without any impact on operations, business and customer services

Continuing to develop systems in parallel while preparing for the migration

Introducing and implementing new unified ways of working after migrating the customers


Technology consulting: Simplicity, speed and innovationKPN’s existing BSS was fragmented and complex leading to rising costs. In the existing structure, the copper and fiber customers had variable strategies. This meant a system landscape that had to support complex products and pricing model, along with multiple customer care centers that were increasing cost and deteriorating the brand experience. As the inflexible legacy systems were proving hard to scale and the integration between them was minimal, marketing and cross-selling was hard, if not impossible, to achieve. Keeping pace with innovation in a fast-changing digital business environment was hurdled as much by the long lead times required to introduce new features and services.

To help KPN achieve its goals from a new BSS system, Accenture’s Technology Consulting team created a road map that could guide KPN to a new, simplified technology landscape with fewer systems and lower costs while providing the power and innovation to operate successfully in a digital environment.

Accenture’s skilled resources supported the analysis, design, build, test, implementation and project/program management capabilities needed to meet the goals for KPN’s system and technology landscape, and address all the phases of software delivery to transform to the “new.” To achieve this, we lay our foundation on the knowledge platform we had gained from working with our other clients who had faced similar challenges. We worked in collaboration with the KPN teams with the sole aim of delivering its successful transformation. We succeeded: KPN’s approval rating for how we worked together remained high throughout this challenging and complex engagement.

Accenture helped KPN achieve faster time-to-market and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Accenture simplified KPN’s IT landscape and accelerated its day-to-day business.


By introducing the new delivery approaches, including Agile and DevOps, Accenture helped KPN accelerate the speed of software delivery, driving a faster time to market and higher levels of customer satisfaction as the innovation they demand reaches them quicker than ever.

Technology Consulting: Results achievedAccenture helped KPN realize the business case for L3.0, delivering tangible cost reductions and creating a simplified landscape with fewer systems holding business data, thereby accelerating the ease and speed of day-to-day business. The updated IT landscape now offers out-of-the-box telco functionalities that lower the cost of new IT implementations in the future. New approaches to delivery have transformed KPN’s efficiency and significantly increased the speed at which they can deliver high-quality code.

Digital expertise for complex data migrationWork started with a comprehensive mapping of the KPN BSS system landscape as it was, along with the target system to which customers’ data would be moved. Customer data residing in the legacy platform had to transfer over to a completely new target platform, which meant a data migration which extracted, transformed and loaded data into a total of 30 applications. The key principle underpinning the migration of data from one to another was the imperative that customers would experience no interruption to their services—and that aside from a new bill format, they would, in effect, be oblivious to any changes. Yet this transition was an extremely complex undertaking. This unique set of circumstances demanded the development of a completely new approach to data migration. Accordingly, Accenture developed a Data Migration Factory (DMF)—a wholly new way to move customer data with some purpose—built features that would achieve KPN’s goal of a seamless transition.

With 300 workflows involved in every data transfer from one platform to another, each individual customer record had to undergo a highly complex set of processes to make sure that the integrity of information was preserved. The data migration was designed to move batches of up to 50,000 customers: a conventional approach to data migration would have resulted in an error detected in one record stopping the entire batch. To overcome this, Accenture built a complex rollback mechanism that was able to detect individual errors and isolate the specific customer record in question. This was then rolled back, allowing all the other customer data to pass through unhindered. As the transition took place in a live environment with source and target systems fully operational, it was essential to make sure that the time and cost implications of errors were kept to a minimum, and to ensure that customers experienced no disruption.


Customer data would transfer from 30 to 9 source systems in the new target platform.

Accenture developed a Data Migration Factory (DMF) to move customer data seamlessly.

With such a revenue-critical system at stake, it was understandable that the business was concerned about the possible impacts of errors. To reassure them, Accenture carried out a series of pilot transitions, taking one or two customer records and tracking their migration paths in minute detail. This approach verified that any potential sources of error were identified and remedied before moving to execution at scale. By proving the success of DMF, batch execution could be increased to confidently meet the target number of customer records per day. A succession of migration pilots was also carried out on the production environment. This not only helped iron out any IT issues, but also prepared the business (e.g. service desks, complaints processes, etc.) to service copper customers from the L3.0 platform. That meant executing, among others, a technical pilot, a commercial pilot, and a pilot bulk migration of the first 10,000 customers.

Digital: Results achievedAs well as the rate and speed of data transfer, KPN also sought assurance that the new target systems would be capable of managing the significantly higher volume of customers that the new systems had to support. In response, Accenture detailed a team to manage the performance and stability of the new IT stack, ensuring that it could cope with the significant increase in customers (from 500,000 to more than 2.5 million) without any effect on the quality of customer service delivered.

The new platform is capable of supporting more than 2.5 million customers with quality customer service.



Management consulting: Preparing for change, and making it happen!Migrating customers to the new system would require a new set of processes and a different way of working across domains. As KPN started developing those new processes, it needed support to ensure that creating criteria for migration, managing change in the different domains and providing “business-aftercare” would all contribute to achieving its business goals.

Accenture’s management consulting and KPN worked as a joint team both before and during the migration. KPN and Accenture developed criteria for the start and run of the migration, determined and modelled the impact of the migration on operations and managed change in operational domains. During the migration, Accenture trained resources for new processes and ways of working, and tracked KPI’s in order to execute continuous improvements using Lean Six Sigma tools.

Management consulting: Results achievedAccenture helped train the copper back-office fulfillment teams in just 6 weeks, so that they were ready for KPN’s new world. Accenture was also able to achieve a 10% reduction in call volumes through an improvement program, and helped KPN ensure that it was totally prepared, with an impact plan that identified the need to shift 1,500+ KPN employees and ensure that they were ready for the new world.

Accenture and KPN achieved a 10% reduction in call volumes.

Accenture prepared an impact plan predicting shift of 1,500+ KPN employees.


“During migration to the new provisioning systems, a main goal of KPN was to ensure that customer impact was minimized. KPN’s collaboration with Accenture, both during and after migration, was essential in realizing this. Accenture’s combined expertise in Digital, Technology, Operations and Consulting proved essential in managing, preventing and solving potential problems, resulting in happy customers and a happy KPN.”

Vladimir Cibic, Director Change & Innovation Fixed


Operations: Mission-critical aftercareA dedicated aftercare team was setup to ensure that both during and after migration impact on customers were minimized. This team helped quickly address and resolve any issue that were raised due to transformation. By setting up a governance and process with one single point of contact for all issues within the BSS domain and DevOps style of working, Accenture helped prevent adverse impact on customers by executing data fixes in a combined effort with the teams responsible for migration and innovation. By using this approach, Accenture helped prevent more than 460,000 potential calls by the customers.

To achieve that, the team had to understand the potential impact of any issues and solve them as and when required, including outside of regular business hours. Preventing any impacts on customers was not only limited to executing data fixes from the aftercare team but also addressing structural fixes, adjustments and agreements from all perspectives of the transformation: migration, innovation and organization.

Operations: Results achievedIn total, the team executed more than 1 million data fixes, and took control of over 150 aftercare issues for more than 200 customer data batches—attending to nearly 2 million customers.

Development• 20 end-to-end releases and 80 minor releases on time and to budget

• Software developed for nine different technologies

Organizational readiness• 290+ business criteria fulfilled

• 1,500 FTE impact predicted

• 6 KPIs monitored and improved

• 20 KPN domains managed through organizational readiness track

• 10% reduction in call volumes

Migration• 1.92 million customers migrated

• 30 applications in scope

Operations• Prevented more than 460,000 customer calls

• Executed over 1 million data fixes

• Handled more than 150 aftercare issues

Accenture helped KPN prevent more than 460,000 potential customer calls during the transformation.


KPN: Pivoting to the “new” at scale, pace and certaintyFour years is a long time in the fast-moving telecoms and the media space. Unsurprisingly, the innovation is constantly changing the land-scape and the possibilities. With the newly implemented system and migrated data, the KPN’s people are prepared for a change. It meant that the Accenture teams had to be able to hit a moving target as developments and improvements to the systems arose. To achieve that required Accenture to work closely with KPN to accommodate innovation and adopt a flexible approach that ensured we were constantly innovating to meet the business needs. As the project progressed, we moved from a traditional delivery methodology to an agile delivery model. This meant that we were able to make required changes as the data migration was underway, without causing interruptions or delays. We stood up an application development and management team that handled changes and releases that maintained the pace of delivery. In fact, by moving to an agile approach, we were able to double the pace of delivery.

During the roll-out of the new system, we accommodated new business requirements including an early transition of customers that had expressed an interest in upgrading from copper to fiber as well as adding 400,000 customers of KPN’s TV service, Digitenne.

This was the first-of-its-kind decommissioning in the history of telecoms in Europe and KPN’s to shutdown complete delivery street. By collaborating closely with KPN from start to finish, Accenture not only helped develop a compelling business case for change, we also ensured that the business benefits were achieved and helped KPN create and execute simplified processes to accelerate KPN’s time to market for new products and services. And all this was achieved at an unprecedented pace.

Overall, by bringing together the distinct skills and capabilities from across the Accenture business and by working as one integrated team, we helped KPN transform its ability to meet the needs of its customers in the digital age.

Accenture transformed KPN into an innovative, digital business and agile BSS.

Accenture guided KPN through its first decommissioning—the first-of-its-kind for a telco in Europe.

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About AccentureAccenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions—underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network—Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 384,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

AuthorsMarc Dijks Managing Director Communications, Media & Technology [email protected]

Mohamed Kamoun Managing Director Accenture Technology [email protected]

Hanneke ten Hove Managing Director Communications, Media & Technology [email protected]

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