The Customer

The Customer is a reputable provider of integrated communications services in Northern California, providing digital cable TV, fiber optics, PCS wireless, DSL, high-speed Internet access, data transport, and local and long distance telephone service.

The Customer’s current, semi-automated provisioning system is an amalgam of different technologies that were originally intended for different business purposes. The system evolved over a period of time into a series of provisioning silos where orders from different systems could not interact with each other. Because of this, the system has very low throughput and is unable to process over 2,000 orders a day. Many activities are carried out manually, causing the current system to be inefficient and unable to handle future business needs.

The Challenge

The Customer engaged AgreeYa to architect, design, and develop a new, unified provisioning system that would support future service diversification, provisioning flexibility, and higher throughput.

The project posed some challenges:

Developing the business rules to handle complex business workflows and order routing rules
Designing the system based on SOA architecture
Coordinating virtual teams and managing project team communication
Integrating with hardware switches and the CRM system
Developing the application to meet stringent performance and scalability requirements

The Solution

Leveraging our O³ (onsite-offsite-offshore) delivery model, AgreeYa deployed a combination of onsite and offshore resources. The onsite resources handled project management, Customer meetings, timely responses to Customer queries, project documents, and review activities.

The offsite and offshore resources handled system design, development, and testing activities. The use of offshore resources facilitated faster completion of project deliverables.

AgreeYa utilized customized Agile Project Management methodology and SCRUM techniques for this project. AgreeYa conducted focus group meetings with Customer subject matter experts (SME) during the requirements gathering and user interface (UI) design phases. AgreeYa developed the UI design prototype and worked iteratively with the Customer SMEs in getting an approved design finalized.

The new provisioning system architecture comprised of expert systems and data stores. The expert systems were designed to perform specific functions and work as service components. Data stores were designed to store information particular to a specific expert system. The system was designed with a modular service-oriented architecture which enabled the development of individual components simultaneously.

The Results

AgreeYa successfully completed this long-term engagement and provided the Customer with a new, efficient provisioning system.

The key benefits for the Customer this project delivered include:

Ability to process a larger number of orders more quickly
Significant reduction in the manual intervention required to process an order
Elimination of the need for legacy systems which greatly reduced licensing costs