Best Practice

Lifecycle management booster

Telco & Media companies need to improve their market readiness to gain competitive advantage by streamlining the entire lifecycle management offer to launch new products and services and manage existing ones.

The need for re-shaping business processes

With a growing demand for traditional and digital products and services, offering customers the right one at the right time remains a challenge for Telco & Media companies. They can find difficulties in staying ahead of the competition by creating, managing, and monetizing efficiently targeted offers. 

To gain a competitive market advantage and ensure the timely launch of new products, Telco & Media companies need to optimize their operations to quickly design, create, price, bundle, collaborate and launch offers based on customer expectations and preferences. Making the product portfolio instantly available to marketing and product teams as well as reduce complexities represent crucial elements to respond quickly and efficiently to market changes. The reduced TTM and the ability to respond quickly to customers’ needs reshapes the customer experience, ensures their satisfaction, increase both ARPU and ROI, and lowers operating costs.

How could clients achieve these results?

Telco & Media companies could exploit a twofold strategy to stay ahead of the competition and to embrace emerging opportunities in a timely and effective manner.
Firstly, they could centralize the commercial offer configuration activities by leveraging on an incremental approach and several technological enablers. This is a pragmatic approach aimed at solving pain points through targeted interventions in the short term (i.e., configuration service, dedicated technological enablers, configuration layer, etc.).

In addition, they could prioritize a transformation initiative aimed at providing a centralized commercial catalogue system, seamlessly integrated in the BSS landscape, that represents the single source of truth.  This is a strategic approach, offering the companies the most suitable and effective path to achieve the long-term benefits previously mentioned.

These approaches could co-exist because they have different objectives and time horizons.

Centralized offers configuration

Leveraging on a common platform for the configuration activities serving the whole BSS landscape, Telco & Media companies can ensure speed and agility, despite the disparate and heterogeneous product catalogs with solutions from multiple vendors.

In detail:

1 . Configuration service: with a single team responsible for the whole configuration process.
2. Technological enablers: to streamline the configuration activities.
3. Configuration layer: to serve as a centralized "catalogue" in a federated manner.
4. Self-configuration: to allow business departments to make changes "on the fly".

Each stage provides consistent outcomes and tangible benefits.

Centralized commercial catalogue

By centralizing and evolving the commercial catalogue with a modular and archetypal approach, you get the flexibility to respond with agility in a continuously evolving market, avoiding redundant configuration activities

More in details:

1 . Discovery: by analyzing the current IT application landscape with regards the catalogues configuration process.
2. Define: to determine the GAP between AS IS and TO BE scenario in order to provide a centralized and unified commercial catalogue.
3. Design: to evolve the application landscape and the catalogue structure.
4. Transformation program: based on the outcomes of the previous stages.

The goal is evaluating and defining a detailed plan to undertake the Transformation Program.


Benefits for Telcos

Telco & Media companies could achieve the following benefits by leveraging on these complementary and incremental approaches:

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Significant costs savings exploiting a centralized approach to manage multiple product catalogues scattered across BSS landscape.

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Shorter Time to Market in launching an innovative offer due to the fact that the activities are configuration-driven.

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Higher flexibility in offers configuration thanks to a modular and reusable approach that led to a rationalization and consolidation of products and services.

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Quality improvement in terms of billing errors reduction and rejected claims without the need for the configuration testing phase.

Why Reply?

Based on a deep expertise of managing the commercial catalogue and whole offer lifecycle management for tier-1 Telco & Media companies, Reply is able to support its clients in achieving the expected benefits by leveraging on the approaches explored.