Technologies

Managed Services ◦ Now more than ever, reduce operational costs and outpace competitors

Posted on June 9, 2020October 14, 2022 by admin

This year service providers and telecom operators have experienced greater uncertainty and unpredictability than in any other. With rapidly changing demand and geographical dynamics, shortages of equipment, and increased customer enquiries, all teams across businesses have been stretched to capacity. Combined with this, staff and family health and home schooling, plus physical office and working from home issues have meant that “working” has itself been more difficult than ever before.

Working safely, to keep communities connected

The “new normal” created massive changes in demand, as both home-working and communications between friends and family impacted the networks. At Digis Squared, we ensured that all our staff are able to work safely and are equipped to work remotely. Our teams can assist yours in adapting their network strategies, adjusting operational support, and implementing new technologies to support the changes we see now, and those we can anticipate as the situation continues to change.

We are here to support your teams in ensuring that they can do their work safely and securely, and that together we can keep our communities connected.

The next phase: resilience – from respond to recover, from react to reinvent

Now, some countries are starting to remove restrictions, whilst others are anticipating lockdown being re-imposed, and businesses are switching from reacting to recovering. Addressing the initial crisis within businesses was achieved with an urgent energy, focus and determination; now there is a need to identify and implement sustainable solutions for the longer term, with resilience to handle recurrent unpredictability, plus flexible options as peaks and troughs in resources and capabilities ebb and flow.

“…the telecom operator’s journey to a full telco cloud environment, where network functions and services are orchestrated and automated across a ‘containerized’ network applications cloud landscape, will be accelerated to prepare for the next pandemic crisis and the ever growing need for telecom services.” Source: Deloitte (1)

Reducing complex costs & finding flexibility

A recent Covid-19 paper from Deloitte (2), posed 6 key questions telecom executives and boards should be asking now.

Across all of these areas, the Digis Squared team can apply their extensive experience and expertise to support your business. In addition to the specific managed services outlined below, we can identify and resolve operational service problems, and upgrade and refocus skills within dynamically changing teams.

Relentless focus on outcomes

Digis Squared’s Managed Services capabilities help our clients to flexibly address resource constraints, reduce operational costs and outpace competitors. Whether you need short term support, or longer term outsourcing flexibility, as a vendor-agnostic partner our teams can deliver innovative cloud strategies, application modernization and help desk solutions.

Our Managed Services team adapts a near-shore / off-shore model of delivery through multiple support hubs to provide 24×7 support for customers in multiple technology stacks. We seek to operate and optimize IT support functions through an ITIL aligned service delivery model managed by ITSM delivery experts and resource managers.

The Digis Squared team work on your behalf, delivering intelligence, value and experience for your business, and focusing on the outcomes you are striving to achieve.

Reduce operational costs & outpace competitors

Investments made at this time need to work doubly hard: delivering flexibility and cost reduction benefits now, and ensuring that they help your business outpace your competitors. Just some of the ways the Digis Squared team can deliver agility and competitive edge to your business include,

Revise Business Continuity Plans: review assumptions, re-plan and re-scale, improving resilience and flexibility.
Accelerate digital transformation: use AI and RPA to extend the use of robotic process automation as part of your digital transformation agenda, and automate mundane, repetitive tasks to deliver consistent customer experience, and free-up greater capacity for more complex calls and processes to be handled by your skilled staff.
Accelerate 5G deployment and integration to better handle high demand dynamically.
Implement autonomous capacity management, using AI to handle unpredictable demand with agility and efficiency.
Automated drive testing and complaints handling with INOS: eliminate the need for skilled engineers to perform drive tests; instead, a solitary-driver takes the INOS stand-alone box on a predefined route, and all data is automatically uploaded for analysis remotely. AI-led analysis generates reports for assessment and action, to deliver the optimal customer experience and aid high-value customer retention.
E2E Radio Network Services: use our vendor agnostic independent team of experts to provide technical strategy reviews, competency development, radio optimization for legacy networks, radio planning, network performance and innovation in multi-technology multi-vendor environments.

Now more than ever, reduce operational costs and outpace competitors with Managed Services.

To discuss how our managed services expertise can help your business, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange a convenient time for an informal conversation.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

“5G will play a critical role in the digital economy for decades to come. This new era of intelligent connectivity offers the chance to recast customer value propositions, accelerate industrial transformation, and reinvigorate the digital society.”
Source: EY (3)

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Image credit: Lachlan Gowen

E2E radio services ◦ Now more than ever, use independent expertise to manage your multi-technology, multi-vendor networks

Posted on June 1, 2020October 14, 2022 by admin

Ensuring telecom network infrastructure is managed efficiently is complex – highly interconnected globally, expensive infrastructure with a large base of legacy systems and technologies, combined with multiple vendors and interoperability concerns, plus demanding customers expectations.

Managing the complex commercial and technical issues of E2E Radio Services should not be under-estimated.

With the rollout of 5G, and growth in IoT deployments, additional stress is added to the operational teams as they grapple to gain the knowledge needed to successfully optimise and manage the new capabilities, and evolving commercial expectations.

This growth in operational demands, in combination with the extra strain on communications systems created by COVID-19 globally, means that even more efficient methods of delivering end to end radio services are needed.

“Operators will need to consider new ways of generating capex efficiency as they strive to meet growing demand for high-speed and low-latency data services.”
Source: EY (1)

Competency development

With so much change occurring simultaneously, as well as high operational demands, finding the time to invest and deliver training is difficult but vital. At Digis Squared our teams understand this, and have developed training solutions which can be delivered remotely, or on-site when social distancing and travel permits.

We ensure MNO staff-readiness for the future, and emergencies, as well as developing their capabilities to robustly address today’s demands.

“Missing skills, poor data quality and a lack of long-range planning are holding back the transformation agenda.”
Source: EY (2)

Independent expertise

As a flexible and experienced independent partner, we help service providers fill in the gaps in their end to end radio services capabilities – whether that’s through providing resources to address short-term skills gaps, strategy advice, new analysis tools, innovative solutions, or bespoke competency development, we are there when we are needed, providing expertise across the entire network lifecycle: R&D, strategy, planning, integration, in-field, optimisation & benchmarking, operations & support, customer care.

Relentlessly focussed consulting

In a multi-vendor, multi-technology field, ensuring interoperability and identifying areas of improvement is complex – our team is independent, business-aligned and relentlessly focused on realizing the value of your network. Digis Squared consulting services steer you towards the networks of tomorrow, anticipating changing commercial, technical, regulatory and customer demands, and developing detailed strategies and plans to ensure your business can address them.

“5G will play a critical role in the digital economy for decades to come. This new era of intelligent connectivity offers the chance to recast customer value propositions, accelerate industrial transformation, and reinvigorate the digital society.”
Source: EY (2)

RAN solutions

Our services scale to help our customers manage increases in network complexity, and growth of network traffic effectively and efficiently. We provide the expertise necessary to support your network transformation goals, with our multi-vendor and multi-technology capabilities, our services adapt to meet the emerging needs of your network.

Innovation

We leverage state-of-the-art techniques to help service providers to design, deploy and operate the latest network technologies, so that they can provide the new services subscribers want, while ensuring network quality remains high, E2E radio services are optimised and operating margins respectable.

5G: our teams accelerate the transformation of mobile networks, enabling new services, new applications & even new industries. Digis Squared provides end to end support for service providers to deploy their 5G networks, starting with planning support, and extending to 5G network optimization
Automation & software solutions: Automation is key to ensuring operational efficiency as network complexity increases. The Digis Squared RAI solution delivers powerful integrated capabilities, using AI & ML, providing network insights, configuration management and performance monitoring processes, and energy saving. We build tailored automation solutions for MNOs, to help them address any challenge.
IoT: The driving force of digital transformation, IoT has complex technology requirements, including a cascade network architecture consisting of massive number of devices, and each design has a different design objective. Optimizing the network and delivering the required capacity and coverage for each IoT use case are challenging tasks for IoT implementations, and our solutions address them.
Drive-less tuning: Minimizing drive test (DT) efforts, our INOS solution automates all reporting types i.e. SSV, customer complaints and cluster benchmarking. Robotic post-processing capabilities help MNOs to speed up logfiles analysis, as well as resolving field problems.

In a world of technical and commercial complexity, seeking an independent experienced voice to guide your teams, and extra resources when you need them, will help ensure that your E2E Radio Services are fully optimised and able to handle new technology from new vendors.

Now more than ever, use independent E2E radio expertise to manage your multi-technology, multi-vendor networks.

To discuss how our E2E Radio Services experts can help your business, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange an informal conversation.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

Sources

Image credit: James Padolsey

Capacity management ◦ Now more than ever, handle unpredictable demand with agility

Posted on May 14, 2020October 14, 2022 by admin

Across the globe Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and Mobile Network Operators have faced enormous, dynamic changes in capacity and demand this year.

“In this “new normal,” CSPs are leading the effort for remote working, online learning and social distancing.”
Source: Forbes (1)

Home working, with its heavy use of video conferencing and collaboration, combined with a surge in demand for digital entertainment, home studying and intensive use of multiple devices simultaneously, has led to a previously unimaginable surge in demand for capacity on both fixed and mobile networks. The changes in mobile network demand have highlighted difficult to predict anomalies – in many cities, as people stayed at home, significant demand was off-loaded to home wifi networks (Deloitte (2): “some telcos say they have seen a 300% increase in the use of these voice-over-WiFi services.”), in contrast with rural areas and other poorly served broadband-black-spots, mobile data demand has soared.

“The five largest operators in Spain reported a 40% increase in overall IP traffic, a 25% increase in mobile traffic and a 50% increase in mobile voice traffic since the start of the outbreak.”
Analysys Mason (3)

Now that the initial rush to support business employees working from home has passed, more countries are starting to consider slowly re-opening business premises – with staggered start times, and changes in working practice, this will bring with it a new set of behaviours and capacity requirements. But the need to maintain agility in capacity is vital, as countries anticipate lockdowns will be enforced dynamically over the months and years ahead.

Planning ahead

In the short term, service providers are addressing four key challenges,

With dynamic changes in customer behaviour, and the lack of revenue from roaming charges, many are experiencing significant pressure on operating expenses, and taking quick business decisions to remove costs
Capital expenditure plans are being rapidly re-assessed to ensure they are re-prioritised to meet the new revenue and business continuity needs
Re-assessing supply chains, in terms of equipment procurement issues, safe social distancing in the workplace, and staff absence levels
Rapidly addressing revenue and cash management, as economies global experience a massive downturn

In the longer term, plans need to be made to manage the “next new normal”, as changes in society and working patterns continue to evolve. At Digis Squared we believe this next phase is even harder, as “Business As Usual” will mean a constant need for agility and flexing to meet demand,

Accelerate digital transformation: use AI and RPA to manage higher customer service call volumes to support remote working, and handle mundane repetitive tasks and digital self-service via automation
Revise Business Continuity Plans: review assumptions, re-plan and re-scale
Accelerate 5G deployment and integration to better handle high demand dynamically
Implement autonomous capacity management, to ensure that your mobile networks work efficiently.

“…the way to consider a crisis of this magnitude is to identify three phases: Respond, Recover and Thrive.”
Deloitte (2)

Whilst many short terms solutions have been rapidly implemented, now is the time to ensure they are robust and resilient enough to continue to handle the longer term, and to re-assess Business Continuity Plans.

Autonomous capacity management

We can help communications services providers and mobile network operators to achieve more with your network resources: absorb new traffic demands, and optimize the expansions you need by using Digis Squared’s vendor-agnostic, off-the-shelf solutions.

Use our expertise to dynamically assist your teams

Our areas of focus are,

Vendor agnostic capacity modeling for all network technologies (2G/3G/4G/5G)
Machine learning algorithms on network data enriched with multiple data feeds from radio access network, Customer Experience Management (CEM), geolocation systems and crowdsourced data
Predictive traffic growth based on AI-power algorithms followed by degradation preventive actions and expansions prediction
Action-Centric BM reports including KPIs, KQIs and Customers QOEs
ROI calculations for network investments

Many of our clients use modular capacity management modules developed by Digis Squared team, with bespoke adaptations if needed, to,

Balance the traffic between cells & technologies
Recommend soft actions needed
Activate & reshuffle sites licenses
Capacity enhancement feature recommendations
Physical changes
Network expansions and reshuffling required

Our teams can use these capabilities to deliver value to service providers and mobile network operators,

Start the smart CAPEX journey, and identify pathways to OPEX saving
Maximize network investment ROI and help operators make well-informed, data-centred investment decisions
Speed-up network capacity plans through our automated-predictive solution

We can assist you right now with our ready-to-go, adaptive-modular capacity management modules, developed by the Digis Squared team to,

Balance the traffic between cells & technologies
Recommend soft actions needed
Activate & reshuffle sites licenses
Capacity enhancement feature recommendations
Physical changes
Network expansions and reshuffling required

Discover more about our Digis-Capacity, AI & ML capabilities.

Now more than ever, capacity management ensures you can handle unpredictable demand with agility.

To discuss how our capacity management expertise can help your business, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange an informal conversation.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

“In the words of one the telecom operator we spoke to: ‘ideally we never go back to the way we operated before this crisis’.”
Source: Deloitte (2)

Sources

Image credit: Mike Kononov

RPA ◦ Now more than ever, automate to manage rapidly changing demands

Posted on May 7, 2020October 14, 2022 by admin

Organizations around the globe are turning to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to become faster and more agile in the face of increased demand and rapidly changing environments.

From managing the high changes in network traffic, supporting the increased demand in customer call centers, to preparing and enabling a remote workforce, organizations are realizing the benefits of automating right now.

“RPA: one of the 7 biggest technology trends that will transform telecoms in 2020”
Source: Forbes (1)

What is RPA?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a type of software productivity tool that enables users to configure bots, which manage specific dedicated tasks within software applications – no actual physical robots are involved!

The bots can be programmed to mimic key strokes enabling actions to be concatenated, delivering complex macro-like functionality. They can work across multiple systems in a session (different applications, spreadsheets on different operating systems and so on), for example, extracting data from one system, merging it with another data set, and then importing it into a different application.

Working together, bots can handle complex and sophisticated processes, not just removing the risk of human error, but driving down costs and speeding up time taken to complete tasks.

“To increase business agility, IT leaders need to maximize the breadth of RPA use cases and stay ahead of market trends.”
Source: Gartner (2)

RPA in businesses today

Today, RPA is being used across businesses to optimise repetitive and time-consuming tasks, and eliminate errors.

RPA can speed up analysis of demand fluctuations and sales intelligence, streamline revenue assurance, accelerate order activations and assist with call centre queries.

There remain many opportunities to introduce it in more departments, and use it more widely across functions.

Boost your automation level

The “new normal” has created massive changes in demand, as both home-working and communications between friends and family impact the networks. We can help your teams adapt their network strategies, adjust operational support, and implement new technologies to support the changes we see now, and those we can anticipate as the situation continues to change.

Digis Squared can provide remote resources to automate many of your processes, and facilitate your teams’ working-from-home tasks. The Digis Squared team have extensive experience of implementing and optimizing RPA.

“Process automation will define the telco of the future”
Source: EY (4)

We can help your teams to,

Design and implement RPA solutions and methodologies to automate any repetitive process
Review and optimize existing RPA processes and infra-structure, and identify additional opportunities
Processes assessment reflecting the business value of any implemented automation
Complete optimization on UiPath license utilization

We can also help you identify and target potential areas of improvement,

Creating base level of RPA awareness
Deep dive with all teams to identify business challenges
Propose new ideas of automation
Posting RPA-related updates
Monitoring and analytics of all automated processes

Using project-proven methodologies, and RPA process-driven workflow, together with your team we work to understand and discover your issues, identify efficiencies, design solutions and then develop and implement automated solutions. But that is only part of the process, ongoing assessment of the implementation to identify further enhancements and optimisations is a key part of the work we do.

Off the peg, and bespoke RPA solutions

We have more than 50 ready-to-use RPA process developments, varying between complex, medium and simple scope,

Site halt and activation
Down sites repetition handling
Network fluctuations monitoring and reporting
Alarm monitoring and reporting
Services testing
Outages handling
Configuration management execution
Configurations audit
Trouble Tickets handling
Customer complaints handling
Special events monitoring
International traffic optimisation
Warehouse management
Inventory management
Field expenses monitoring
Disaster recovery audits
Consistency checks
Data synchronisation and integrity
Licenses renewal handling
Network elements backup system
OSS/BSS accounts management
Managed services KPIs monitoring
Operations KPIs monitoring and reporting

Our teams have the skill to precisely address your business demands: we can adapt these ready-to-use RPA developments to rapidly meet your needs, or create a bespoke solution from scratch.

Now more than ever, RPA can increase your agility to manage rapidly changing demands.

To discuss how our RPA expertise can help your business, please use this link or email sales@DigisSquared.com to arrange a convenient time for an informal conversation.

Keep up to speed with company updates, product launches and our quarterly newsletter, sign up here.

“By 2024, organizations will lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyperautomation technologies with redesigned operational processes.”
Source: Gartner Predicts 2020 (2)

Sources,

Image credit: Philipp Katzenberger