Case Study

Wireless Sales Wizard & Framework Project

nTelos
Service:
Business Process Management, Enterprise Integration Services, Portal Development
Industry:
Telecom, Retail
Engagement:
Full Lifecycle Implementation
Download PDF

Improved ROI by Streamlining Sales and Provisioning Process

Before Amentra

NTELOS is an Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC), telecommunications firm, that provides telephone and data communication services. With the divestiture of the telecommunications industry in the 1980's coupled with the tremendous growth experienced in the industry with the advent of cellular service; NTELOS found itself in an extremely competitive and increasingly saturated wireless communications market. NTELOS experienced many barriers to entry into CLEC wireless markets, namely:

Rigid, Disparate, And Antiquated Systems
NTELOS maintained its customer base by using a slightly customized COTS billing system and several small home-grown applications to handle one-off tasks (i.e. maintenance of customer information, contract generation, and phone activations). The billing and inventory systems were "Green Screen" (mainframe interface) applications built on AS400s. Each system operated independently with shared data being entered in manually between systems. Tasks that were not handled by these systems were handled manually utilizing Excel based spreadsheets and hardcopy forms.
Lack of in-house methodologies and technical know-how for custom application development
The internal technical staff consisted mostly of AS400 programmers and Database Administrators (DBA). The time that they spent supporting antiquated systems, cleaning up data integrity issues and reworking failed orders, allowed NTELOS' staff no time to learn newer technologies that would be required to help solve the company's business problems. Due to a lack of structured application development practices, the few attempts that were made to implement new business solutions were stove-pipe initiatives that barely solved the business need, further complicated the process, or failed altogether.
Lack of structured business practices and High turnover in retail areas
Many organizations are in the process of, or have recently completed, instituting structured business methodologies for conducting business in wireless markets. Business domain knowledge was conveyed through informal training and word-of-mouth and due to customary turnover, employees departed along with all acquired business domain knowledge leaving remaining staff to re-cultivate themselves.
Aggressive market conditions
Overall the wireless market in Virginia proved to be very competitive and telecommunication firms were forced to constantly add and/or change products and services in order to compete. As newer product offerings launched, NTELOS' business models and practices were forced to continually adapt. A lack of overall structure in business practices coupled with the manual effort necessary to process orders amplified the pressures of competing in an aggressive market.

After Amentra

  • A framework that centralized core application functionally (i.e. security)
  • Reusable system components that reduce costs across all development initiatives
  • Centralized business application encompassing business rules, data constraints, and a common look-and- feel
  • Reduced training time and costs
  • Increased revenue margins through product up-sale and successful provisioning of orders
  • Ability to reorganize internal resources to more customer- impacting work
  • Vast reduction of manual labor
  • Better skilled in- house development staff

Evolution of Business Process

After analyzing NTELOS' long and short term business needs, Amentra determined NTELOS needed an application that would guide sales representatives in retail stores through the process of ordering and activating a wireless phone while employing business rules and data constraints. It needed to be so intuitive that a sales representative could turn the screen around and have customers walk through the process themselves as well as providing the added value of boosting sales by prompting sales representatives to solicit customer interest in products, promotions and/or features. It was necessary that the solution automate the process of cellular phone activation to avoid the inherent flaws in the manual process. Besides the internal NTELOS retail stores, the new sales process also needed to facilitate varies other sales channels, such as Indirects and independent dealers. The process also needed to be flexible enough to handle future sales channels such as the internet and any others that the business deemed necessary.

Applied Technologies and Expertise

Through Amentra's mentoring and project team development initiatives, NTELOS has been able to cultivate its IT employees by increasing their technical knowledge while instilling structured Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) processes. With increased technical acumen and project process, NTELOS' employees were able to work closely with Amentra to deliver an application that utilized a simplistic user interface while enforcing complex organizational defined business rules, thereby reducing the high costs associated with training and loss of incumbent knowledge and productivity due to turnover. The Wireless SalesWizard application was able to link several disparate legacy and "Stovepipe" applications in to a single cohesive system, making the wireless phone activation a seamless process. The new and efficient phone activation process supplied by the SalesWizard allowed NTELOS to effectively handle increased sales volume due to marketing promotions with dramatically less errors. The actual implementation of the application far exceeded expectations, resulting in a reduction of over 30% of errors during its first week of operation. NTELOS management estimates that this year over 9000 errors in provisioning orders will be prevented due to the controls that were implemented, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of ROI benefits per year. Through a solid partnership with Amentra, NTELOS has been able to become a true competitor in the wireless market by overcoming overwhelming barriers to entry.

Technologies Used

  • ASP.NET
  • ADO.NET
  • XML
  • Web Services
  • Nant
  • Nunit
  • WebSphere MQ
  • log4net
  • Oracle
  • MS SQL Server
  • C#
  • Visio
  • .NET Framework