Operations Support System (OSS) Data Migration

The Client

Large Australian Telecommunication company, one of the oldest landline and wireless operator in Australia.

The Challenge

In 2007 the operator launched a massive $5B AUD IT Transformation program aimed at replacing its old legacy systems with next-generation OSS systems and solutions.

Our responsibility was Network Inventory part. Operator used Amdocs Cramer suite and several other dispersed sources to store information about its network equipment and configuration. This led to the following hurdles:

• dispersed network information environment made network planning and maintenance very difficult and expensive
• network engineers was not able to quickly find required network information
• increased amount of network faults

To overcome this situation and resolve these issues operator decided to migrate to a newer version of network inventory subsystem and make it a single storage for all network data.

The Scope

• Analyze telecom service provider’s business processes, study specifications, and architecture of the existing OSS for further integration
• Install and customize Amdocs Cramer 6
• Perform data migration from previous network inventory environment to updated Cramer 6

The Solution

To make it possible to use all the advantages of Cramer system, the following separate phases were singled out:

I. Network Inventory OSS Data Migration development. The new business needs of quickly developing industry made operator move from currently used Cramer 5 to Cramer 6. As every Cramer system is a tailor made and fine-tuning-demanding system, there is no standard migration tool to make things work just pressing a few buttons.

The process of system customization and tuning is a time consuming and costly procedure, however, an easier and much less solution was introduced by our engineers. As the information about customer’s network structure and its inventory was scattered in various operator’s own custom applications as well as in mostly all possible file formats (Excel, Visio, text files, etc), a decision was made to separate the data migration process into several phases.

First, all the data from all sources was collected and stored into one virtual database. Next, a team of analytics was responsible for the correct data mapping between this database and Cramer. The main workload on this stage was assigned to analysts and testers, and took the wealth of time.

II. Our team developed a real-time inventory management system based on use of GPS-enabled mobile devices. The Mobile Inventory application is installed on a mobile phone or a pocket PC of operator’s network engineers in order to fix incorrect data in the Cramer system. Thus, the solution armed operator’s network specialists with a powerful tool allowing on-go solving of problems connected with incorrect network port use or malfunction.

III. Currently, our team performs data migration for National Broadband Network.

The Outcome

Transformation has been running for 2 years. During its course 10 our B/OSS engineers worked at operator’s site in Melbourne, backed up by 32 specialists in Russian R&D. In final data migration we achieved 99.995% data accuracy.

Upgrade to a newer network inventory subsystem and consolidation of network data allowed operator significantly improve its network planning and maintenance cycles. The automation approach we recommended allowed the operator to save 1M AUD annually on manual testing activities.