Back Office - Getting What You Wish For

Posted 10/2000

Back Office

Getting What You Wish For
NEW OSS KEEPS NORTHPOINT ON TOP OF DSL DEMAND
By Rashesh Jethi

After a successful public offering last year, NorthPoint Communications Group Inc. (www.northpoint.net) was faced with a problem. Demand for the company's products was very high and continued to grow beyond projections, but the company was falling behind in fulfilling the orders. Partly due to the complexity involved in provisioning DSL and partly due to the combination of manual processes and systems in place, more and more orders were waiting for longer periods of time before going into service.

With aggressive DSL network deployments in 99 metropolitan areas, new service offerings in Canada and Europe through joint ventures, and plans announced in mid-August to merge its DSL business with that of Verizon Communications (www.verizon.com, the former Bell Atlantic), NorthPoint needed to reverse its fulfillment lag, and fast. To enable it to keep up with the rapid growth and increasing demand for its broadband services and improve the service provided to its wholesale customers, NorthPoint earlier this year implemented a new back-office support system dubbed OSS 2000.

Wanted:
Whole New Environment

Apart from the obvious technical complexity of quickly implementing a whole new set of back office systems, there were several other challenges to enable a successful transition to the new operating environment.

The provisioning of DSL services is an intricate procedure that involves cooperation among a chain of vendors, partners, suppliers and ILECs. An order is typically placed with an ISP partner and transmitted to NorthPoint, at which point a copper loop is ordered from the ILEC serving that region. Upon installation and acceptance of a valid loop, NorthPoint provisions the DSL service. In this entire process, order data needs to go back and forth between all the parties to check for availability, schedule installation visits and close orders. Because many of the ILECs that NorthPoint ordered loops from were operating on legacy systems and processes, NorthPoint's systems for communicating with partners, vendors and the ILECs were loosely integrated and manually intensive. The ILECs commonly relied on e-mail handoffs, phone and fax to communicate, so orders often had to be rekeyed during several steps of the process, leaving room for human error. The order rejection rate from ILECs was high, prolonging average cycle time for service installation and frustrating subscribers eager to obtain DSL. Finally, the stability of the old system was of major concern since the system was designed in the early stages of the company and was increasingly unable to keep up with the growing needs of an expanding business.

"The provisioning of DSL services is one of the most complex supply chains in the communications industry," says Adam Guglielmo, DSL analyst at TeleChoice Inc. (www.telechoice.com). "This industry is exploding, and broadband companies are being forced to meet the phenomenal demand for services. The winners in the DSL business are going to be the companies that can implement automated services that enable flow-through of orders and a minimal amount of manual intervention."

Essentially, what NorthPoint was facing was a supply chain challenge. Demand for DSL services was larger than the company--or the industry--had ever anticipated. The U.S. DSL market is expected to grow more than 150 percent this year alone, according to TeleChoice. The company needed flexible systems that could communicate between the disparate systems of all the trading partners and scalable systems so it could keep up with the ever-increasing demand for broadband.

Recognizing the need to quickly revamp and upgrade its backoffice systems, NorthPoint carefully analyzed the existing methods and processes used for provisioning, customer support, order processing and billing, and started evaluating solutions to streamline these processes. Partnering with a leading systems integrator, the company settled on an integrated architecture using best-of-breed solutions to implement the new service delivery and support infrastructure. The resulting multivendor OSS automates service delivery, enables flow-through provisioning and allows NorthPoint to scale its business to meet demand.

Less 'Custom,' More Quickness

There are several possible approaches in undertaking IT efforts of this magnitude. The traditional approach has been to define business and system requirements and build the systems using in-house or outsourced IT staff. While this approach enables a high degree of customization for the business environment, it entails long development cycles and slower time to market. The current shortage of qualified IT resources adds to the difficulties of this approach.

Instead, NorthPoint partnered with best-in-class vendors and integrated their offerings using a robust middleware platform. This enabled the IT group to integrate the systems and focus on leveraging existing functionality and business expertise that the industry-leading products had to offer. The system construction/integration took less than six months, about a third of the time it would have taken to custom program this functionality.

In conjunction with OSS 2000, NorthPoint enhanced its web-based Partner Resource Center and introduced eConnect, an electronic bonding tool to link these back office systems to its partners for seamless order entry and order management from the partners' own back-office systems. Partners can now transmit orders through NorthPoint's website. The system allows for real-time network inventory lookup and reservation of appropriate network inventory, and electronically places the loop order with the ILECs all within minutes of order submission. In addition, a sophisticated workflow engine automates order processing activities and notification processes per predefined business rules. The amount of manual intervention has been reduced significantly and will continue to decline as more partners and ILECs are electronically bonded.

Repercussions of Change

A systems initiative of this magnitude is significant not just because of the new technology it brings to a company, but also because of the change introduced in the company's business processes and operating environment. While technology helps automate and streamline business processes, the resulting change has to be communicated clearly to everyone involved and organizational readiness is crucial to any new system's success. With "Internet time" schedules and expectations for the implementation, some important nontechnical lessons were learned.

Even though the change that NorthPoint was making was critical to its business and would ultimately provide better customer convenience, the company was aware of the importance of putting customer needs first. Throughout the implementation process the first priority was to minimize disruptions to partners and customers. It was critical to NorthPoint that its partners could continue to operate as "normal" while the company prepared for this major event, and that the implementation proceed without any negative impacts to any partner. That guiding principle was the filter that was applied to any decision made during the project, technology or otherwise. Partners were consulted during various stages of the implementation to ensure that their requirements and suggestions were being taken into account with the new systems. During the week of implementation, NorthPoint had account managers work with partners on site and help with training on the new system.

The company also did multiple dry runs to ensure that the implementation was a nonevent from a customer perspective. After each dry run, before and after data was carefully analyzed to ensure accuracy and completeness during cutover. This attention to detail and careful planning enabled NorthPoint to convert millions of records successfully without dropping or compromising a single customer order.

In addition, training--augmented with on-the-job support, through an intranet-based solution or refresher sessions--was a critical success factor for ensuring that the functionality of the new system was well understood and that business objectives behind the system were met.

Factors of Three

With standardized systems and consistent processes, the business now operates more effectively. Access to centralized, up-to-date and reliable information has improved customer service and responsiveness. Since the implementation of OSS 2000, NorthPoint has seen order cycle time reduced, in certain cases from over 30 days to less than 10 days, bringing the benefits of broadband to more people more quickly. The capacity to order local loops from ILECs has more than tripled, climbing from 400 per day before OSS 2000 to nearly 1,300 per day today.

The robust network and technical infrastructure will support NorthPoint's growth and expansion in the years ahead. The next step is to integrate NorthPoint's OSS 2000 with the back-office systems behind Verizon's DSL service. That deal is expected to close by mid-2001.

Says NorthPoint spokeswoman Caroline Howell, "We will be evaluating the systems of both companies, and our goal is to have one provisioning and customer care environment that will blend the best of both environments."

Rashesh Jethi is vice president of internal consulting for NorthPoint Communications. He can be reached at rjethi@northpoint.net.

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