Infosys implements smart incident management system at Openreach
End-to-end network management
Openreach, a subsidiary of the BT Group, operates the BT network, serving more than 30 million retail and business customers in the United Kingdom. The company has four divisions - service delivery, fiber and network delivery, strategic infrastructure development, and headquarters - supporting 650+ communications providers of phone, broadband, and Ethernet services to retail customers.
Openreach builds, monitors, and manages its component parts to ensure smooth network operations. It dispatches a technical field force to install and maintain heterogeneous network equipment supporting legacy copper as well as ultra-fast fiber optic networks.
One team, diverse technical skills
The Openreach technical team is staffed by personnel with diverse skill sets. Consequently, its response to customer service issues was disjointed with a lack of alignment between personnel allocation and the nature of network failure which resulted in wasteful truck rolls with the wrong technicians being dispatched to resolve issues when faults were reported.
Lack of root cause analysis and correlation with appropriately skilled technicians caused dozens of avoidable truck rolls to resolve issues.
Technology that senses and responds
Openreach partnered with Infosys to develop a solution for identifying the nature of customer complaints, optimizing the workforce, and streamlining the logistics of the field force.
The Infosys solution adopted robust business rules/processes: – raise ticket - manage allocation - monitor progress - notify resolution. The underlying business logic navigated fault reporting and planned engineering work on copper and fiber access network equipment. Our solution incorporates an intelligent approach that will group the faults based on the commonly affected passive equipments which don’t raise alarms. This would help the desk agents to rightly intervene and raise incidents. Nevertheless, the solution comprises of an automatic incident creation feature supported by network alarms for active devices The customized solution provides the Openreach technical team with actionable insights into potential network outages of passive devices (legacy copper network) by smart faults aggregation, enabling the back office to proactively manage and manually raise incidents. Significantly, this predictive maintenance feature identifies affected services and notifies customers about the outage and the expected time that the issue will be resolved. The technical team, empowered with a blueprint for incident response across various products and networks, drives proactive fault identification.
Outcomes Delivered
The Infosys incident management and engineering works solution helps Openreach maximize network uptime, optimize its field force, and significantly reduce the number of truck rolls for network fault resolution.
Proactive network fault identification dramatically reduced the number of customer calls to the Openreach contact center. Our solution delighted customers with communications providers informing customers about proactive incident / planned engineering work with expected resolution time.
