Have you ever had that experience where you have an annoying little stone in your shoe, but you keep on walking because it's more of a pain to stop and remove it? But it keeps on niggling you regardless?
Have you had a similar experience with your OSS and/or BSS? Have there been little things about your OSS / BSS that annoy you, but not enough for you to do anything about it? Not enough to initiate a change or worse, a transformation project?
In the case of OSS / BSS, the situation can be much more painful than a little stone. But we also know that initiating a change is much more challenging than just stopping to take off our shoe and shake out the stone!
What have been the stones in your OSS / BSS shoe?
Are they little things like the design of the user interface, the colours, the layout, the unnecessary steps along the workflow?
Are they medium-sized things like having to do workarounds, major manipulations of data outside the tools, swivel-chairs between systems that require duplicated data entry, processes that cope brilliantly with single instances but don’t have bulk handling scenarios and so many more situations?
Are they actually large-sized things that are a major impediment on your day-to-day activities, but you have no ability to change (eg no control, no budget)? You’re just the person at the coal-face that has to put up with the big stone in your shoe, but is forced to keep on walking because you’re not allowed to stop to remove it. Or perhaps you are the person with the budget, but also have a fear of the resource-hungry, time-hungry, complex transformation that needs to happen whilst still having a mountain of business-as-usual (BAU) activities to complete every day for the foreseeable future? Or perhaps your vendor has you so tightly locked in, either technically or contractually, that you simply can’t move.
Unfortunately, these occurrences are all too common. In fact, chances are that every single OSS / BSS solution you’ve ever worked with has had at least one “stone in the shoe” situation that you’ve needed to cope with or respond to.
But the question is, what can your vendor, integrator or development team do about it?
A few things actually.
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Firstly, they can provide you with a high level of personal configurability. I’m sure your OSS / BSS already has a unique user account and role-based access to recognise you individually and log your actions. Therefore that individual access, theoretically, provides the launch-pad to store your own unique preferences like colours, layouts, languages, bookmarks, filters, etc. It’s human nature that whilst you may prefer a pink colour-scheme, the person next to you prefers a blue scheme. That’s just a tiny stone that no all OSS / BSS can resolve.
Next, onto the medium-sized stones. Did you notice that most of the examples cited above are actually flow-related? To do a task repeatedly, which commonly occurs in day-to-day operations using OSS / BSS tools, requires flow. But workflows are often more like work-stop-starts than workflows. That’s a major annoyance. Developers tend to tackle code change as a functional challenge, to solve one piece of the workflow, not to consider how it fits within the end-to-end experience. Solutions that have built-in flow workflow engines can help to resolve that. So can having solutions that are pre-integrated and don’t require swivel-chairing. So can building solutions that all reside on a common data set so that data flows are seamless rather than requiring duplicated data entry. If your existing solution doesn’t have that built-in, then there are process automation tools to assist with making your workflows more seamless.
The SunVizion OSS tools have been developed with all of those factors in mind. They’re modular, but also pre-integrated and use common data sources. They’ve been designed knowing that end-to-end workflows are what helps bring efficiency to your operations. This includes tools such as:
- Network / Resource Inventory to manage asset life-cycles from procurement to scrapping
- Network Planning – to streamline and automate design activities
- Network Configuration – to streamline the management of consistent network configurations
- Network Roll-out Management – to ensure data and workforces are coordinated seamlessly across projects that grow your network and subscriber-base
We haven’t discussed the really big rocks yet though have we? Those can be harder to solve, but we’ve assisted clients with plenty of these situations in the past too. Reach out to us to see how we can help remove the big stones in your shoe, or even initiate a chat with us to share ideas for removing the small and medium-sized ones too.
