Cable & Wireless
"We're transforming our business to focus on providing the largest users of telecoms services in the UK and internationally with IP services. At the heart of this is a focus on providing excellent levels of service to our customers. BusinessObjects XI Release 2 is one of the elements that underpins this transformation."
Mark Dearnley
Chief Information Officer
Cable & Wireless
Challenge
Cable & Wireless is one of the world's leading international telecommunications companies with customers in 80 countries. The company provides integrated conventional and Internet Protocol (IP) voice and data services to business and residential customers, and services to telecoms carriers, mobile operators, and providers of content, applications, and Internet services. In November 2005, Cable and Wireless acquired Energis, the third largest fixed-line telecommunications operator in the United Kingdom.
The telecommunications market is changing. Lower prices mean margin pressures, prompting companies to undertake significant business transformation to remain competitive. Following its merger with Energis, Cable & Wireless has focused on reinventing its business and delivering new levels of superior customer service to its top corporate customers.
The company plans to reduce its customer base from around 30,000 to focus on 3,000 large corporate customers and public institutions. By concentrating on fewer, larger customers and reducing complexity in its products, systems, and processes, Cable & Wireless expects to set new standards for customer service experience while at the same time reducing costs.
John Dennis, head of business intelligence at Cable & Wireless, explains, "Multiple applications, data sources, and business intelligence (BI) solutions can't provide us with the single view of information we need to deliver the superior levels of customer service demanded by our customers. Having a single comprehensive BI platform for visibility across the entire infrastructure was imperative."
Approach
To support its customer service strategy, Cable & Wireless embarked on a system consolidation and standardization project to create one unified organization based upon a standard set of core processes and, critically, data. The company currently has 400 core systems, which will be rationalized down to 100 core applications. As part of this initiative, Cable & Wireless selected BusinessObjects™ XI Release 2 from Business Objects, an SAP company, as its standard enterprise BI platform for all future projects. Cable & Wireless decided to migrate several versions of BusinessObjects, BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®, and third-party reporting tools to this latest edition of Business Objects software.
BusinessObjects XI Release 2 offers Cable & Wireless a range of features including data integration, performance management, Web-based query and analysis, reporting, unmatched end-user functionality, and ease of use—all on one integrated platform.
The company decided to undertake integration of the Cable & Wireless and Energis application portfolios in tandem with its migration to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 to ensure consistent processes across the business. Now, it's benefiting from a single, highly available and fault-tolerant BI deployment across multiple, disparate applications and data centers.
Cable & Wireless uses BusinessObjects Data Integrator to extract information from its diverse data sources and move it in a single data warehouse. It operates a federated warehouse model with SAP and Oracle. From the BusinessObjects perspective, the Web portal provides a single repository to host, manage, and access all BI content for both internal and external users. In the first phase of the project, the portal will provide users with access to all operational and customer information for analysis and reporting in the BusinessObjects XI Release 2 environment. The next phase will extend the portal to provide customers with online access to account information.
In just three months, the company migrated over 1,000 users of BusinessObjects 5x to the BusinessObjects XI Release 2 platform. Key to the speed of this process was an innovative approach to report migration. Only documents and universes specifically requested by users were migrated. As a result, of the 100 universes and 1,500 documents previously used by this group, only 40 universes and 300 documents were migrated to the new environment. Cable & Wireless is migrating an additional 3,500 users to BusinessObjects XI Release 2.
The company set aggressive timescales for the project and worked closely with Business Objects Global Services to ensure best practice implementation and timely delivery. "The success of the migration and integration process is down to the relationship that we have with Business Objects," said Jon Nevin, business intelligence technical architect at Cable & Wireless. "The team's knowledge and expertise, as well as the willingness to 'go the extra mile' to get the job done, meant that the project came in on time and on budget." Also key to the success of the project is continuous proactive communication with the business, including regular emails and demonstration sessions to showcase the breadth of end-user functionality within BusinessObjects XI Release 2.
Results
The migration to BusinessObjects XI Release 2 is helping to underpin the company's transformation. The migration is already delivering quantifiable business benefits including:
- Business integration: Rapid integration of key processes and business information across Energis and Cable & Wireless, including sales, fault management, service provisioning, and network reporting.
- Flexible customer service: Customers will have a choice as to how they receive information—via a portal, email, or scheduled report. Traditionally customers have received separate reports for each area of their account including faults, orders, and network status. Now customers receive single reports providing a consolidated view of key performance indicators. In the future, Cable & Wireless will use its BusinessObjects portal integration to transform its customer service model. By embedding portlets within its Web portal, Cable & Wireless can provide customers with self-service, with online access to all relevant information in one place, whether to provision orders or review faults.
- Superior customer service: Milestone reporting within the provisioning process has improved engineer management and deadline delivery. Early warning of deadlines that could potentially be missed due to non-completion of interim tasks enables early reallocation of work to ensure deadlines are achieved. As a result, customer service is proactive and consistent, leading to greater levels of customer satisfaction.
- Superior customer service: Milestone reporting within the provisioning process has improved engineer management and deadline delivery. Early warning of deadlines that could potentially be missed due to non-completion of interim tasks enables early reallocation of work to ensure deadlines are achieved. As a result, customer service is proactive and consistent, leading to greater levels of customer satisfaction.
- Improved network performance: Real-time fault reporting means greater visibility of network performance, enabling improved fault prioritization and reducing by 90% the number of false alarms, which could previously occur due to out-of date or inaccurate data.
- Financial Management: New reports provide up-to-date information on all orders due to be billed, improving the timeliness and accuracy of the billing process.
- Reduced cost of ownership: By standardizing on one end-to-end BI solution, the company expects to significantly reduce levels of user maintenance, training, and administration costs. This frees up time and budget for BI experts to focus on new developments.
"Everything we do is geared towards improving our service for our customers," says Dennis... "Moving to this latest version of the software means we can build on our existing investment in BusinessObjects and benefit from an integrated platform that is flexible enough to support our BI needs today—and to evolve as we evolve. The combination of scalability, performance, and ground-breaking technology made it the right choice for us and for our customers."
Mark Dearnley, CIO at Cable & Wireless, summarizes, "We're transforming our business to focus on providing the largest users of telecoms services in the UK and internationally with IP services. At the heart of this is a focus on providing excellent levels of service to our customers. BusinessObjects XI Release 2 is one of the elements that underpins this transformation. It provides us with new levels of visibility into our performance and has enabled rapid business process integration with Energis, which was acquired by Cable & Wireless last year. We now have a single source of reliable performance data that we can easily analyze and report on internally and also make available outside the organization to provide a value-added service for our customers."
Quick Facts
- Industry:
Telecom - Challenge:
Wanted to merge business processes for Cable & Wireless and Energis to enable a single view of information across the entire company and improve operational performance with an end game of reaching new levels of customer service excellence. - Why Business Objects?
Provides the industry's most advanced and complete solution for performance management, planning, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management. - Business Objects software and services:
BusinessObjects XI Release 2, Business Objects Global Services, BusinessObjects Data Integrator