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Read about stc's complete digital transformation of its wholesale business unit leveraging TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs, as well as Agile, DevOps, a design thinking approach, and continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous testing.
Ed Finegold
stc transformation delivers first-in-region B2B2X solutions
Who: stc
What: A complete digital transformation of the wholesale business unit to expand offerings, accelerate launches, increase sales, integrate channels, automate key processes and deliver a more responsive customer experience.
How: A new microservices-based digital experience layer leveraging TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs, as well as Agile, DevOps, a design thinking approach, and continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous testing.
Results:
Digitally transformed wholesale business unit improves speed, efficiency and revenue growth while adding new B2B2X capabilities, such as:
stc was ready to transform its wholesale business and be the first in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to deliver zero-touch B2B2X solutions to market. In 2018, the operator embarked on a large-scale digital transformation to overcome legacy inflexibility and inertia by shifting to an open, single platform IT architecture with the goal to automate processes, improve key business metrics, and expand its wholesale businesses’ addressable markets.
According to Forbes, stc is among the 44 best digital companies in the world and the MENA region’s top communications service provider (CSP), but its wholesale business unit faced common problems. Each of its systems, such as CRM, billing and rating, operated as a standalone, running its own processes. Built on outmoded technologies, these systems made process automation and modernization difficult. Any integration to drive process automation proved slow to implement yet would be outdated quickly. Vendor dependence was high, yet their support was slow. The team’s ability to keep up with an accelerating market was at risk.
The team identified capabilities that had to be part of a new solution. For example, stc aimed to gain instant visibility into operations and finances from a single view. The team also intended to overcome inventory system issues, such as integration limitations; an inability to support new commercial models; limited configure-price-quote capabilities; lengthy time-to-market for new product rollouts due to software customization; and an inability to retrieve relevant customer and product data. They also needed to address the rising costs of constant interface redevelopment and heavy IT infrastructure.
stc’s wholesale operations team transformation resulted in delivering a lean, agile, open and automated platform for expanding its wholesale and B2B2X businesses. The team created a new multiparty B2B2X platform to set itself apart from the competition and rationalized of its IT portfolio.
stc’s first major steps in this digital transformation included:
stc’s wholesale department was also the first in the organization to adopt, recognize and intensively practice Agile delivery. They formed an industry-expert delivery team and used a DevOps and design thinking mindset, to focus on understanding users, challenging assumptions, and redefining problems to conceive, prototype, test and deliver modern business solutions in the wholesale telecom market.
stc’s wholesale unit also implemented a single platform solution, leveraging a consolidated user interface as well as an open architecture to enable and simplify future expansion. This single platform serves all lines of the wholesale business and provides a unified product catalog for all wholesale services. It enables end-to-end automation for new multiparty B2B2X solutions, incorporates more sophisticated product bundling to that end, and provides an industry standard configure, price, quote framework.
Zero-touch provisioning is a critical competitive capability. For example, stc’s wholesale customers can secure inventory reservations in less than a minute, execute the indefeasible right of use/lease contractual agreement systematically, and auto-activate services because of Open API integration with real-time network assets.
The platform provides deep financial and operational visibility with end-to-end process management across all revenue paths. Process automation and control are enabled and complemented with advanced reporting, including the ability to define and monitor specific or custom KPIs.
New pricing models are also supported, such as value-based, pay-per-use, or pay-per-time as well as new charging criteria including flat, usage and burstable. Discounting for triple-play and other new bundled products are enabled as are expense management and credit control.
TM Forum Frameworx suite of best practices and standards, specifications and other assets play pivotal roles in stc’s success. For example, the team used the Business Process Framework (eTOM) for analysis, design and development of a commercial and service order management solution and business processes. This simplified the effort to consolidate processes and provided guidelines to position new modules and define organizational responsibility and legacy systems restructuring.
stc also implemented its new product catalog based on TM Forum’s Applications Framework (TAM) and Information Framework (SID), notes Yazeed Alfaris, Vice President for Applications at stc. “Our product catalog was extended to the architecture so that our internal applications could begin decoupling components from each other, removing the cumbersome integration between operational and business support systems. Due to this, our architecture supports further decoupling of functional layers,” he says.
stc is also using a variety of TM Forum’s Open APIs to enable the integration that powers its zero-touch environment. The Catalog Management API is used to enable publishing across product catalogs. The Order Management API is used to enable automated order management flows. The Customer Management API exchanges the customer related details that feed stc’s new 360-degree customer view.
The wholesale unit was the first of stc’s business units to be digitally transformed. As a result of this leap forward in automation, flexibility, functionality, and agile delivery skills, stc realized substantial, measurable business benefits. For example:
After this successful transformation, which achieved a variety of market firsts, stc’s wholesale team learned a number of key lessons.
One lesson the team learned was that retiring legacy IT stacks was a key challenge in this transformation, however the discovered that many technical and business process challenges faced can be mitigated effectively by adopting modernized IT processes. Relatedly, by integrating operations, responsiveness to customer and business requirements will improve and increase.
Similarly, while migrating data from old legacy systems to new systems is part of any transformation, it is important to counter complexity with common solutions, enable data sharing across organizations, and to identify known authoritative data sources.
Silos must be consolidated as well, according to Mohammed A. Alabbadi, Vice President for Wholesale at stc.
“Demand for agile operations and technology shifts have created unnecessary barriers between teams and organizational departments,” he says. “In many ways, this trend has also contributed to the silo mentality within organizations where individuals, groups and departments hesitate from sharing information and tasks with others across the organization. This has been addressed with cross-functional roles, tools and processes along with Agile strategy, a design thinking mindset and by implementing a DevOps organizational approach.”
Finally, it is important to accept that the increasing demand to synchronize and unify integration between systems may result in many APIs being scrapped so that new Open APIs can be adopted, but this cost of transformation is a healthy, iterative, and informative part of the process.
