Clarity Case Study

Reliance Case Study
Unified OSS How Lean Operations and High Growth Have Worked for Reliance

2 |Reliance Case Study

Rajeev Singhal
Rajeev Singhal has more than 10 years experience in Operations and IT divisions in the Telecom Industry. He has traveled extensively across the globe and has worked with leading mobile operators in Europe and North America. Rajeev has been instrumental in setting up key systems and business processes for a greenfield operator. He has experience in integration across CRM, Billing, GIS and a host of network elements in voice and next generation data networks. Rajeev heads the design and development of OSS applications portfolio spanning Global, Enterprise, Broadband and 2G Wireless Services at Reliance Communications which is one of the worlds largest and fastest growing telecommunications service provider. Rajeev holds a B. Engg (Hons) in Electronics and Telecommunications from Allahabad University and an MBA from N.M.I.M.S Mumbai. Rajeev Singhal is the Head of OSS for Reliance Communications

This paper is based on a case study, presented by Rajeev Singhal, OSS Head, Reliance Communications, at the Frost and Sullivan OSS BSS Asia Pacific Summit, March 2008, Singapore.

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Introduction
“India is still basking in the glow of becoming the world's fastest-growing mobile phone market," said Kalcina. "Last year alone, the number of mobile phone subscribers in India nearly doubled from the previous year to reach almost 150 million. With the market growing at about 6 million new subscribers every month, this market is set to double again in size in the next couple of years. Needless to say, this is putting tremendous pressure on operators to implement systems that are not only extremely scalable, but also allow them to realise the profits associated with this extraordinary growth." Tony Kalcina, Executive Director, Clarity International

These pressures have led Reliance to avoid the traditional “best-of-breed” OSS approach and focus instead on “Unified OSS”. By doing so, Reliance has simplified an original OSS design based on 17 COTS products into an implementation of 1 COTS product. This has vastly simplified integration and data synchronisation, reduced deployment costs and time-scales and reduced long-term maintenance costs. Reliance selected Clarity’s Unified OSS to help them face these challenges and with the support of Clarity, Reliance now have over 30 million subscribers and are anticipating 50 million subscribers in the next 12-18 months. With growth being critical to the business, Reliance and Clarity are jointly benchmarking the OSS for 100 million subscribers.

In India, Reliance is facing challenges that are making lean operations and scalability for rapid growth an essential for their business rather than an aspiration. Most significant is an ARPU of $8 per month; this ARPU is expected to be less than 50% that of Europe’s for the foreseeable future. Second is the rapid growth of the subscriber base. Although necessary to achieve a viable business case on the low ARPU, it places stresses on the OSS which are rarely seen elsewhere in the world. Third is the geographical spread of the network. India covers over 3 million square km, and 70% of the population is in rural areas. The network build-out to provide coverage to 1 billion humans and management of the infrastructure is a major challenge. Finally, competition is continually challenging Reliance to develop new products for the increasingly technology aware and demanding Indian subscriber base.

With Tele-density of around 2% and around 70% of the population in rural areas, Reliance were quick to see the potential for rapid growth

Reliance is proof that NGOSS benefits can be achieved with Unified OSS.

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Reliance – The Largest Capacity Mobile Network in the World
While many operators grow their network with demand, the Indian market demands a different approach. Growth and capture of market share is the most important factor in supporting a business case based on low ARPU. Consequently, Reliance built a network first, benchmarked to support 135 million subscribers, and then focused on achieving high utilisation through subscriber growth.

• •

It represents an initial infrastructure investment of $9B 110,000 km of submarine assets of the Flag Global Submarine network is incorporated.

The Need for a New Approach to OSS – Unified OSS
The OSS to manage such a network, in a dynamic environment like India, has to react to unique market and technology pressures: • Low ARPU places the emphasis on high levels of operational efficiency, rapid rollout of services to achieve market share and “critical mass” for the subscriber base A network covering a huge geographical area places the focus on automation where possible, and “intelligent” and centralised management of manual activities Technology aware and discerning subscribers demand new services which Reliance must deliver to defend market share.

•

•

Reliance mobile services cover 97% of the urban population and 42% of the rural population. Coverage is growing through aggressive roll-out

Initial designs for the OSS, based on best practice of the time – integrating “best-ofbreed” COTS products – was seen as being too time-consuming to deploy and too cumbersome to operate in the Indian market place.

The network is large by any standards: • It provides coverage to 90% of India’s population of 1 billion through over 18,000 BTS, growing to over 23,000 BTS by March 2009, and more than 130 SDH rings Over 230,000 km of IP carrying fibre and electrical cables create a high bandwidth mesh over the Indian sub-continent Increasing coverage to over 23,000 towns and 450,000 villages

•

•

Monthly subscriber growth for Mobile in India regularly exceeds China. Every month wasted would have huge impact on Reliance market share

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SLA Management Fault Ticket Management Re-active Management of Network Alarms and Faults Pro-active Management of Network Trends Problem Identification and Troubleshooting Real-time Network and Service Monitoring (Network Performance / Service Quality) Workforce Management Self Provisioning Automated / Flow-through Provisioning

Network Planning Network Design

Service Assurance

Infrastructure
Network Installation Network Optimization

Monitor

CLARITY OSS CLARITY OSS YOUR BUSINESS CATALYST

Design
Network Capacity Management

Service Fulfillment
Deliver
Service Testing

Network and Service Inventory Management Service Configuration and Activation

Unified OSS supports the business from design, through deliver and into assurance

Reliance had the vision to define their “idealised OSS”, and then look for a single COTS solution which replaced the 17 “best-ofbreed” products. Reliance’s “idealised OSS” would: • Allow simplification and consolidation of end-to-end processes for concept to market, order to cash, and trouble to resolve Avoid the inherent restrictions of a “bestof-breed” architecture incurred through high integration and data synchronisation costs and latencies Align to NGOSS principles of single information model and integration bus and eTOM aligned functional modules Stretch the supply chain as far as possible, from warehouse and equipment supplier to the end-customer; documenting, monitoring, improving the process at each step

Exploiting the Unified OSS to Achieve NGOSS-Style Benefits
Key drivers for Reliance’s OSS are: • • • • • • Huge potential subscriber base Largely rural population Low ARPU Increasingly discerning subscriber Intense competition from incumbent regional operators Pressures to create RoI for the major network build.

•

•

•

In the short term, this drove the OSS to provide fast introduction into service, high operational efficiency, scalability and required a strong partnership with the OSS vendor. In the longer term, the OSS must also focus on reducing time-to-market, focus on customer experience, enable convergence in the network and allow Reliance to become self sufficient. While these benefits are inherent in the NGOSS architecture, Reliance achieved these through a “Unified OSS” rather than a traditional “best-of-breed” approach.

Reliance selected Clarity International’s Unified OSS as the platform for achieving these features; providing OSS support across Reliance’s Design, Deliver and Assurance process steps.

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CRM
Customer Handling Processes Business Development CUSTOMER LAYER Provisioning Surveillance / Assurance Customer QoS Management Service Quality Management Network Maintenance & Restoration

Billing

ERP

Billing

ERP

Sales

Order Handling

Problem Handling Service Problem Resolution Network Inventory Management

Invoicing

Financials

SERVICE LAYER

Service Planning / Development Network Planning / Development

Service Configuration

Rating and Discounting Network Data Management

HR

NETWORK LAYER

Network Provisioning

Asset Management

Unified OSS, based on Clarity’s OSS product, replaces 17 COTS products in Reliance’s OSS architecture

Connection Technology / Interface to Domain / Element Managers

Clarity Fulfillment

Clarity Assurance

Faster Introduction into Service
Reliance simplified their OSS design, replacing 17 COTS products by 1 - Clarity’s Unified OSS, - bringing their OSS into service only 9 months from the project start. This has lead to important business benefits: • • Saving of an estimated $200 million on integration and data synchronisation costs Reduction in OSS delivery time-scale by an estimated 2 years.
Days to Deliver Orders on Fixed Line Business Services
1000000 120.00% 100.00% 80.00%

• •

July 03 – 1 million new mobile subscribers in 10 days October 03 – Largest mobile operator within India in 7 months of launch.

Operational Efficiencies
Growth in Faults Managed per Account
120000 100000 350 300 250 80000 200 60000 150 40000 100 20000 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 11 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 20 21 22 23 24 0 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 50 0

N um be r of O rde rs Com ple te d

100000 10000 1 000 1 00 1 0 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 12 1 14 15 1 1 1 3 6 7 18 19 20

Total Faults Created

Faults per Account

60.00% 40.00% 20.00% 0.00%

Reliance have trebled their NOC fault management efficiency in two years

To tal Orders Closed M odify Orders Clo sed

Provisioning Orders Closed Delete Orders Closed

80% of all fixed line business orders are completed by day 1, 90% by day 3, and 99% by the end of two weeks

When ARPU is low, operational efficiency is of key importance. Reliance have achieved end-toend process automation for the order-to-cash and trouble-to-resolve processes while concept-to-market process time-scales have been significantly reduced. Clarity’s Unified OSS has played a major part in this success. A practical measurement of efficiency is the ratio of subscribers to staff with Reliance comparing well with European and Asian mobile operators.

This allowed Reliance to gain early market share through high performance provisioning on day one and led to an early generation of revenue to offset the $9 billion investment:

Faults per A ccount

Num ber of Faults

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It is no accident that Reliance has maintained such high efficiency – it is a pre-requisite for making the business successful in a low ARPU environment. The Reliance NOC contributes to operational efficiency by providing a centralised orchestration of fault, maintenance, performance, provisioning, field-force and SLA operations across the whole of India.
ARPU ($ per Month) 8 18 48 Subscriber to Staff Ratio 1750 1600 900

• •

Achieve 100% automation of the voice provisioning process Execute over 1,000 parallel provisioning processes, achieving a steady-state rate of 6 provisions per second for mobile services.
Process Execution Control Process Improvements
M th e a n a B u g in g s in es s

Monitoring and Visibility of KPIs Exception Identification

Reliance Typical Asian Typical European

Be n th e c h m B u a rk s in in g es s

Predictability of Process Performance

Reliance operates in a low ARPU environment and efficiently delivers service through a lean operation

More Competitive and Sophisticated SLAs

I th e m p ro B u v in g s in es s

This 110K square feet facility with 200 feet of video wall comprising 160 screens displays Clarity OSS network and service information to over 200 users. Reliance has used Clarity to: • Implement 110 end-to-end provisioning processes, from CRM order entry through to network action Support over 900 problem types

Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF); Mean Time to Restore Service (MTRS); Mean Time to Respond; Max Time to Restore (MTTR); Max Number of Interruptions (MNOI); Max Time To Respond; Max Unavailability Time (MUT);

Reliance not only monitors process efficiency; they use this information as a means to constantly challenge the market in India to offer more aggressive SLAs

•

Clarity’s comprehensive process monitoring and audit tools and its SLA Manager allow Reliance to continually monitor the customer experience, improve the process and commit to more aggressive SLAs, so gaining a competitive edge.

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Reduced Time to Market
The increasingly discerning Indian subscriber challenges Reliance to offer innovative services and features. The price of failure for Reliance is a loss of market share. Unified OSS provides a consolidated end-to-end view of processes and allows Reliance to be agile: • 12-15 new products or feature sets introduced into the OSS per year for provisioning, fault, performance and SLA management Average of 6-8 weeks to deploy a new product and only 2 weeks to deploy a new feature into the OSS.

Orders on Fixed Line Business Services (18 day period)
1 00000

1 0000

N um be r of O rders

1000

1 00

10

1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 0 1 1 12 1 3 1 4 15 1 6 1 7 1 8 Pro visio ning Orders Raised Delete Orders Raised M o dify Orders Raised Ro lling Average

•

12,000 fixed line orders are raised per day, with around 80% as upgrades to existing customers and 15% new customer services

The Customer Experience
The customer experience is increasingly important to Indian subscriber. Not only have Reliance been able to demonstrate efficiency of operations; they are also providing high quality services; and proving this to their customers through portals.

Reliance has not only been able to grow; it has been able to retain market share through this growth and a result of rapidly developing new products and features and supporting these in its OSS.

Contract Customer Service Network

A d he ren ce to S L As

P ro ac tiv e N ot ific at ion o f Cu st o m er Im p act s

P ro ac tiv e N ot ific at ion o f S erv ice Q ual ity

Cu st o m er E q u ip me nt F a ult s

T h e U n i fie d O S S Vi e w o f th e C u s to m e r E x p e rie n c e

E x p o s e d to C us tom e r i n R e a l-t im e th ro ug h P ort a l

Clarity’s OSS provides Network, Service, Customer, and Contract views of data into a customer portal

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Clarity’s Unified OSS is a key enabler in managing the customer experience. It provides a pre-integrated end-to-end solution from gathering alarms and performance data, managing the resolution of problems and handling of customer queries through troubletickets, SLA management through to presentation to a portal.
Closed Fault Reports
100000

Convergent Network Management
Reliance has been successful in managing both their fixed and mobile businesses from the Unified OSS. This has allowed Reliance to further improve their efficiency through: • Multiple skilling of operations staff, with 30% of the staff implementing both fixed and mobile processes Reduction in the number of management platforms to be administrated and maintained Consolidated management of the core network; used to support both mobile and fixed service traffic.

10000

•

Faults C lo se d

1000

100

•

10

1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 Closed Fault Reports

Reliance use Clarity’s unified OSS to: • Deliver 30 product bundles including both fixed and mobile service elements and exploit OSS convergence further in NGN services over WiMAX and IMS Centrally manage the core network; which supports both mobile and fixed network data Manage the 5 wireless and 15 wireline network interface types from one OSS.

Reliance can resolve 75% of faults in 1 day, 90% by day 2. 99% of faults are resolved within 2 weeks

Unified OSS contributes in maintaining this view of the customer, and improving the customer’s experience: • Pre-integrated SLA management, incorporating mean-time-to-restore, -resolve, -response, -provide, max-number-of-faults and maximumservice-interruption in the assessment of the customer’s experience Automated actions resulting from SLA threshold breaches, helping to prioritise problems that will cause SLA violations if left unchecked Integration of planned event, SLA and customer facing trouble-ticket management to intelligently handle planned outages.

•

•

Scalability
At Reliance, the Unified OSS has had to scale massively, rapidly and smoothly in order to achieve “critical mass” for the subscriber base.
Subscriber Growth, 2006 - 2007
25

•

Subscribers (millions)

20 1 5 1 0 5 0 2QFY06 3QFY06 4QFY06 1 QFY07

•

The Unified OSS exposes this information to a portal using a set of open APIs.

Reliance regularly achieves more than 1 million new subscribers per month; March and December 06 topping 1.4 million each

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Current Loading • 30m subscribers • 100m network ports • 1.4m circuits • 8,000 Points of Presence • 65,000 sites • 18,500 BTS • 1,500 concurrent users • 1.5m events per day • 14,500 activations per hour • Subscriber growth at 1.5 to 2m subscribers per month

Benchmarked Loading • • • • 18 months of smooth transition minimising: • Customer impact • IT costs • Management interruptions • • • • • • 100m subscribers 200m network ports 3m circuits 10,000 Points of Presence 100,000 sites 30,000 BTS 2,000 concurrent users 3m events per day 40,000 activations per hour Subscriber growth at 3.5 to 4m subscribers per month

Growth to 100M subscribers dramatically increases the load on the OSS to handle orders and alarms

Over half a decade, Reliance has grown to over 30 million subscribers from a standing start. This has tested the OSSs ability to provision, upgrade and assurance subscriber services. Reliance is looking to the future and with support from Clarity is benchmarking to prepare the OSS for the 100 million subscriber mark. The intention is to smoothly transition to this next stage in the OSS architecture over an 18 month period whilst maintaining provisioning at an increasingly aggressive rate.
Number of Faults
12000 10000

User Empowerment and Vendor Partnership
Self-sufficiency has been important for Reliance as they grow. While Clarity has supported Reliance through their growth, sometimes, change needs to be affected by those who are closest to the challenge. Reliance are now completely self-sufficient in their OSS, relying on Clarity only for technical back-office support and upgrades. For example, Reliance has implemented over 900 reports to support their MIS (Management Information Systems). Clarity has supported this move towards independence and has even made use of Reliance innovation on collaborative projects. In all respects, the relationship between Reliance and Clarity is all that an operator/OSS-vendor should be.

N u m b e r o f Fau lts

8000 6000 4000 2000 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Number of Fault Repo rts

Ro lling Average

OSS, More than an Engineering Necessity
The traditional view of OSS is that of an engineering necessity – a tool which is required to keep the network operational. Like a spanner.

Reliance manage 8,500 service and network faults to resolution a day for their fixed network

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Reliance have shown how a Unified OSS add business value in its own right contributing directly to the resolution of challenges faced by the business, not technology issues.

can by the just

Massively scalable. In many respects, this shows a possible future for many operators working in lower ARPU environments, and will become applicable world-wide as the effects of ARPU reduction start to bite.
Benefit Faster Introduction to Service Improved Operational Efficiency Faster Timeto-Market for New Products Focus on Customer Experience Convergent Scalability Empowerment of User Opex Capex Yes Customer Experience Market Position

These are the types of benefits that the TMF NGOSS promises. But, thanks to their initial vision, Reliance has achieved this without the cost and time-scale implications of integrated “Best-of-Breed” and have, instead, implemented a Unified OSS. In fact, Unified OSS has been significant in helping Reliance achieve its business needs: • • • Rapid start-up of service and capture of market share Highly efficient operations Able to rapidly introduce new products and features

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes Yes

Yes

Yes Yes

Yes

Unified OSS, by Clarity, has contributed to Reliance’s business

“Many operators are re-architecting their “best-of-breed” OSS to achieve growth at the levels that Reliance has maintained using a single OSS product running on readily available platforms. Clarity has enabled Reliance to automate major elements of the end-to-end processes without the crippling integration overhead. Data synchronization issues which would start to dominate over performance as the subscriber base grows is simply not a problem with Clarity’s single information model” Sumit Chowdry, Chief Information Officer, Reliance Communications

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About Reliance Communications Reliance Communications Limited founded by the late Shri. Dhirubhai H Ambani (1932-2002) is the flagship company of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group currently has a market capitalization of over Rs. 3,00,000 crore, net worth in excess of Rs. 40,000 crore, cash flows of Rs. 9,000 crore, net profit of Rs. 5,000 crore and zero net debt. Rated among "Asia's Top 5 Most Valuable Telecom Companies", Reliance Communications is India's foremost and truly integrated telecommunications service provider. The company, with a customer base of over 40 million including over 1.3 million individual overseas retail customers, ranks among the Top 10 Asian Telecom companies by number of customers. Reliance Communications' corporate clientele includes 600 Indian and 250 multinational corporations, and over 200 global carriers. Reliance Communications has established a pan-India, next generation, integrated (wireless and wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that is capable of supporting best-of-class services spanning the entire infocomm value chain, covering over 13,000 towns and 500,000 villages. Reliance Communications owns and operates the world's largest next generation IP enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 165,000 kilometers of fibre optic cable systems in India, USA, Europe, Middle East and the Asia Pacific region. For further information on Reliance Communications, visit www.rcom.co.in.

About Clarity Clarity enables its customers to simplify their operations with a unified operational management solution. Clarity provides an integrated, modular solution to optimise and automate core operational processes to manage network build and movements, develop and sell next generation products, and deliver and assure the quality of customer services. Clarity solutions provide the lowest total cost of ownership using embedded best practices and process-driven workflow to reduce the complexity, risk and cost of operations. Clarity empowers its customers to generate and protect revenue and enhance the complete customer experience. With over 35 Telecom Tier 1, 2 and 3 customers worldwide, Clarity solutions currently help utilities around the world manage over 250 million subscribers. Established in 1994, Clarity has offices worldwide. For more information, please visit us at www.clarity.com.

CLARITY INTERNATIONAL LIMITED
15 BLUE STREET NORTH SYDNEY NSW 2060
AUSTRALIA

TEL: +61 2 9925 5000 FAX: +61 2 9955 9999 WWW.CLARITY.COM