The Service Factory at your Service!
Companies in other global industries have undergone a process of industrialization to become more agile, efficient, productive and innovative when they became unable to compete efficiently and address growing demands. The communications, media and entertainment industry, like all other industries, needs to progress in terms of its operations and fully adopt this industrialized approach in order to speed time to market.
Car manufacturers, for example, face similar challenges to service providers in terms of trying to differentiate themselves in a very competitive and price-sensitive market. One automobile success story is the MINI Cooper – each car is built precisely according to customer specifications, based on an extensive set of configuration and customization options. Out of every 1,000,000 MINIs, only 10 will be absolutely identical!
The Mini: personalized and unique
This is made possible by combining re-usable components and flexible assembly processes into a single production line, thereby allowing the factory to manufacture virtually any number of car variants out of a finite set of parts and components.
Service providers, too, can adopt an industrialized approach to service creation and execution, building a wide range of services out of standardized components. For service providers, operations is the “factory” where products need to be put together in order to provision and fulfill them when customers place orders. A factory approach means that each product component already has standard processes for fulfillment associated with it.
When a factory approach is adopted, operations knows that for each product component there is a standard fulfillment process and system that is tested and ready-to-go. This means new products and services can be created by combining existing product components, secure in the knowledge that fulfillment systems are already in place to provision them. In this way, systems become an enabler for speedy time to market, rather than a barrier.
Standardization minimizes the complexity of the fulfillment process and its impact on underlying technology, as well as avoiding misalignment between the business and operational groups. It also reduces B/OSS integration challenges or endless changes in processes and systems for new projects.
In fact, this service factory approach creates a lean, effective, ready-to-go and automated operation, allowing customers to receive the services they want quickly, and enabling service providers to thrive and foster innovation in a competitive and dynamic environment. My next blog will provide you with the four main steps for utilizing a service factory approach.
Please note: this is part four of a five-part series:
You can also read more about it in our free eBook: What’s Stopping You From Improving Your Time To Market
[...] These four tips on improving time to market for service providers resulted from interviews and careful statistical analysis of Amdocs 2011 survey of 125 senior executives at wireless, wireline and cable providers from every region in the world. Service providers can create a lean, effective, ready-to-go and automated operation by using the following four steps to implement a “service factory approach”: [...]