Bell Canada: Next Generation Services

Accenture helped Bell Canada implement a network solution to reduce the costs associated with order management and service, shorten order provisioning cycle times, improve customer satisfaction and derive increased service revenues.

Bell Canada (a subsidiary of Bell Canada Enterprises) is Canada's national leader for communications in the Internet world and provides connectivity to residential and business customers through wired and wireless voice and data communications, high-speed and wireless Internet access, Internet protocol (IP) and broadband services, eBusiness solutions, satellite TV and local and long distance phone services.

Today, Bell's 44,000 employees serve more than 1.5 million high-speed and dial-up Internet subscribers and carry in excess of 25 million customer connections across all product lines. Bell Canada is also the leading Canadian provider of global services for large private and public sector organizations, delivering network-based, fully managed, end-to-end solutions through their industry-leading product and service lines.

Recognizing that today's corporate world is extending mission-critical, Intranet-based applications to customers, suppliers and business partners, Bell Canada foresaw an opportunity to offer competitive IP-based multi-service network solutions using Cisco's multi-protocol label switching services (MPLS).

This network solution eliminates the need for and cost of dedicated private lines when preferential throughput and redundant routing is required. MPLS intelligently manages backup points of presence, redundant transport and switching capabilities and provides optical network failure protection enabling the network to prioritize critical data dynamically and ensure responsive delivery.

These IP virtual private network (VPN) services have to deliver cost-effective, secure, scalable, reliable, well-managed and configurable access to information at any time and from anywhere. To achieve that objective, Bell Canada needed to transform its labor-intensive order management processes and supporting infrastructure into an integrated environment that would:

• Reduce service intervals and costs
• Adapt the capability to scale its operations for future growth
• Generate reliable and timely reports and analyses
• Release employees to assume more strategic
• Customer responsibilities
• Provide a high level of data quality and efficiency
• Facilitate a workflow-intensive infrastructure

Bell Canada turned to the Accenture team for guidance and assistance in developing and implementing its visionary Integrated Order Management (IOM) Program, which has thus far been a sixteen-month joint process with seven major releases.

Together, they agreed on a holistic approach—executed in manageable phases—that would initially support IP and broadband services and eventually be extended to other service areas. The IP VPN Enterprise was chosen as one of the first services to be launched on the new IOM platform due to the complexity of the system requirements and the immediate need to respond to the market demand for diverse eCmmerce capabilities.

Existing, strong relationships with Accenture around OSS implementation and with Cisco in the core IP network made the team collaboration a win-win. The Bell Canada/Accenture team developed the overall vision for the Program, defined the business requirements and then structured a business case that addressed the company's most immediate objectives:

• Reduce the costs associated with order management and service
• Shorten order provisioning cycle times
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Derive increased service revenues

Drawing on their experience with Enterprise Application Integration technology and using assets such as the Integration Hub, Accenture was able to help Bell develop a component-based architecture using Vitria as the workflow engine.

This architecture had the benefit of being able to use many of Bell's existing applications while pursuing a pragmatic transformation of the order management infrastructure. At later dates in the Program, and as capital allows, these legacy applications will be replaced as emerging applications are integrated into the new infrastructure.

A notable "first" resulting from the IOM project was the creative technology that Accenture brought to the design and execution of Bell Canada's proprietary Bandwidth On Demand and Class of Service On Demand customer self-activation services.

By utilizing the Syndesis Network Activation and Provisioning Solution, Bell Canada VPN Enterprise customers can tailor and make instantaneous changes to their services. This "first-in-the-world" capability gives customers real-time feature configuration for their IP VPN Enterprise Service and allows Bell to manage provisioning costs.

Throughout the project, Accenture remained sensitive to the need for knowledge transfer. An important goal was to ensure that Bell Canada would be able to maintain and grow the IOM platform using in-house resources and skills acquired through working side-by-side with the Accenture team.

In transitioning to this new integrated business architecture, Accenture helped Bell Canada realize numerous improvements in its order management processes, including:

Operational Efficiency—End-to-end order processing cycle times and costs have been reduced by more than 40% while at the same time increasing the volume of orders and improving its ability to resolve problems.

Order Accuracy—The amount of time devoted to re-working orders and the costs associated with fulfilling product and service demands have been significantly reduced.

Customer Satisfaction—With new self-service capabilities and more accurate and timely responses to customer inquiries, customers' satisfaction levels have dramatically improved. Additionally, enhanced trouble resolution has decreased the cost of developing and managing customer relations.

Speed-to-Market—The more efficient management of service orders has resulted in a reduction in the amount of time required to get new products to market.

Timely Billing—Integrated order management capabilities through workflow have resulted in a reduction in the amount of time it takes to bill customers after an order is completed.

"With Accenture's help, Bell Canada is better able to meet its customers' growing service demands in an increasingly sophisticated network environment. Equally important, its partnership with Accenture allows Bell Canada to effectively and efficiently manage the growing complexity of order management interactions across its extended enterprise," said Mike Cole, Bell Canada's vice president for solutions delivery.