Drive revenue, innovation with Amdocs smart project orchestration

Amdocs’ Network Rollout Solution provides end-to-end toolbox to increase Service Provider efficiency, agility and time to market

In an era of unprecedented growth in consumer demand for bandwidth, network operators have to quickly adapt to maintain a competitive edge in an increasingly saturated market. Gaining efficiency through business process management is a fundamental aspect of retaining customers and profitability.

Aging network planning tools and processes can hinder an organization’s ability to quickly and affordably deploy network upgrades, effectively scale and allocate network resources and stifle innovation by slowing time to market for new services.

Global software solutions provider Amdocs is ready to help enterprises excel with its Amdocs Network Rollout Solution (ANRS), which integrates with existing business process management (BPM) platforms to provide the next generation of smart project orchestration.

Amdocs OSS Product Marketing Manager Graham Wright emphasized the holistic nature of the ANRS platform, noting it provides consistent, real time data to all system users.

“Business process tools require the capability to scale and handle in-flight changes. They should facilitate a single source of truth for all users—from the project manager, network planner and finance team, all the way to the field engineer and external partners.”

Wright continued: “Most importantly, process tools need the capability to integrate with the network inventory to ensure that when the time comes to execute the massive rollout plans, there won’t be any fallouts and discrepancies.”

ANRS compared to BPM

The ANRS doesn’t replace existing BPM platforms but, rather, allows a Service Provider to easily integrate Amdocs’s orchestration, visualization and scalability capability with the specific offerings of our partners to realize more utility than out of current BPM systems.

ANRS provides a smart end to end orchestration layer, which leverages your existing BPM to manage workflow across a wide range of systems, people and processes. By abstracting the orchestration layer above the underlying system functions and incorporating dynamic plan management, the entire system becomes more agile and flexible compared to traditional approaches based on BPM only.

Users can easily visualize and navigate data points as well as access best practice templates and integrate with network inventory through a shared platform.

Despite having access to complicated legacy systems, many network planners still congregate around whiteboards covered with familiar yellow sticky notes in an effort to understand and overcome process gaps.

“I remain a big fan of stick notes,” Wright said, but, “I think we can all agree that when it comes to big network technology, for rollouts involving multiple systems and organizational groups, they might not be the best tools.”

Trading up for the ANRS can reduce network rollout time and associated cost by 25%  while easily scaling to support thousands of simultaneous projects.

Network process automation reduces operational expense by cutting the man hours needed to plan then engineer a particular deployment.

At the same time, an enterprise gets the added benefit of reducing total project time as a function of reducing fallout rework by streamlining workflow processes by drawing relevant and accurate data points.

The end result of more efficient internal business process management is cost savings to the organization gained by getting rid of wasted time and creating new revenues by avoiding rollout delays.

ANRS technical overview and architecture

ANRS brings a telecom-specific operations support systems (OSS) that has the built-in ability to integrate with business support systems (BSS).It incorporates Amdocs Master Enterprise Catalog (MEC), which uniquely combines automated technical design with dynamic project plan generation using network technology-specific building blocks. The system determines demand and resource loads, then generates plan optimization and execution, all the while providing on-demand status reports through a management dashboard.

Automated project management and workflow functions integrate multiple back-office systems and, using APIs, ties into demand systems, network planning tools, workforce management, reporting, inventory and BPM platforms. So for the Service Provider it represents a complete end-end catalog driven, planning, design and rollout solution for broadband, cable, mobile and fixed networks.

ANRS supports industry-standard systems including TM Forum SID, eTOM, TIP and service-oriented architecture and is based on Amdocs’ OSS core architecture, an open, modular approach that is easily integrated with third-party systems.

The solution, taken as a whole, significantly cuts down project risk and minimizes human error by employing guided tasks and pervasive team and system orchestration.

Telco IT know how

Amdocs is the industry leader in enabling customers to quickly integrate information from BSS and OSS resulting in faster project delivery and lower capital cost. ANRS leverages this experience with built-in APIs for Planning, Inventory, BSS and other OSS systems. These APIs enable integration with Smart Cell Placement (ActixOne) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Resource Management (RM), third party inventory systems, and Work Force Management (WFM) tools.

In the case of small cells, as carriers race to deploy networks with an eye on maximizing both capacity and return on investment, it’s key to quickly find the optimal location in terms of available resources and revenue generation opportunity. Our Smart Cell Placement solution uses key business data to identify the best location for a small cell, maximize ROI and prioritize positioning based on customer value.

On the OSS side, the solution provides pre-integration with Amdocs network inventory solution, Resource Manager, for network planning and design automation. Resource Manager is a future-proof inventory tracking platform that manages date across technologies, devices and services be they physical or logical.

To add customer value, ANRS is designed to integrate with existing BPM systems so organizations can continue to see utility and return on legacy investments. A common information base for projects, network resources and site inventory, use of these APIs can significantly improve project efficiency and, ultimately, quality of service (QoS).

Clearly Amdocs’ 30 years of experience working with service providers gives the company a clear edge against other vendors.

Amdocs provides key to efficiency, success

Whatever the network, Amdocs can provide turnkey, future proof service orchestration solutions that run the gamut from planning and network design to project management and network rollout. With these capabilities Amdocs Network Rollout Solution allows for automated project plan generation and dynamic change management needed to control costs while reducing time to market.

While capable of managing any network roll out or change the rapid network expansion, fuelled by massive growth in data traffic and build–out of small cells is ideal for ANRS since scale, speed and organizational efficiency is imperative in this case.

Ultimately with ANRS Service Providers are able to quickly rollout and change networks in a highly adaptable manner, increase efficiency by cutting down on design fallouts and limiting risk and human error by drawing on Amdocs’ extensive telco IT experience.