Functionalized Workflow: Every aspect of your center, working within a streamlined process, ensuring efficiency, visibility and accountability.
Client Goal
To more efficiently utilize the talents of workers in a well-run telecom work center that was positioned to migrate from their current system to a new platform, as a result of a merger. Prior to the migration, the center was also behind in their workload. Client stated a desire to replace cradle to grave ownership of issues with functionalized workflow.
Business Challenge
This organization provides communications and data services to residential, business, governmental and wholesale customers in 36 US states. In the circuit provisioning department of this organization, a worker owned a customer order from cradle to grave. To more efficiently utilize the skills of the workers, the organization desired to distribute work in an assembly line fashion. As part of the provisioning process, phone calls were needed to coordinate access to customer premises as well as testing the circuits when the installations are completed. Customer calls and other administrative tasks needed to be rerouted, allowing highly skilled technical workers more time to test additional circuits, etc.
The organization was also facing work process non-compliance issues. For example, when a new circuit is installed, the process dictates that specific notes about the circuit must be logged into the provisioning system. Very often, the notes were incomplete or not posted at all, leaving repair technicians with little or no information to troubleshoot problems when they arise.
Solution
During our 20/20 Analysis, we uncovered benefits that could be achieved by automating some of the manual tasks, and the project team decided the solution was to be delivered in two phases. In the first phase, ServiceSPAN was able to identify and eliminate the backlog, and create a single GUI experience for the department. We enabled functionalized workflow where work is pushed to users with the right skills, at the appropriate time and enabled standardized and enforced posting of information to the provisioning system.
Automation of two specific manual tasks was delivered in the second phase, eliminating users having to copy and paste information into web forms as a means of sending emails to customers. Rules were configured in Decision Coordinator to automatically send the notifications when conditions are met. Also, users no longer had to manually kick off tests that can take as long as 50 minutes to complete and monitor for the results. Instead, they initiate tests in Decision Coordinator which now kicks off the tests and monitors the test results. When the tests are successful, Decision Coordinator auto-closes the orders; otherwise, the orders are pushed to users for manual intervention.
Results
ServiceSPAN configured Decision Coordinator to reduce work complexity and provided a user environment that allows employees to efficiently receive and perform their work and the tools to make better decisions.
- Improve manual and automated screening functions with flexible critical date work distribution capabilities that support functionalized workflow.
- Smoothly integrated existing and additional automation software into manual processes.
- Enabled functionalized service order workflow and combine multiple regions into a single, virtual work center for work, reports and dashboards.
- Increase work handling efficiency with single user interfaces, correlations of local and national orders, integration of external websites, sub-task automation and standardization of information posted to external systems.
