Q&A: Info Directions Replaces Penn Telecom’s Back Office

Penn Telecom, Inc. (PTI), the competitive arm of North Pittsburgh Systems, Inc, and its ILEC sister, North Pittsburgh Telephone, combine to form one of the 20 largest telephone companies in the United States. Like any other landline provider, PTI is under pressure to remake itself into an advanced multi-service broadband operator. The company ran into a common challenge: its data was trapped in a hosted legacy solution, and its solution could not adapt quickly enough to support new lines of business. Ed Gillett, information technology manager for PTI, led a risk-laden program to replace the company’s legacy back office outright. In doing so, he engaged Victor, N.Y.–based Info Directions, Inc. (IDI) to provide its CostGuard.NET solution.

But there was a catch. To earn the business, Info Directions had to develop six new product modules to meet all of PTI’s more than 3,000 requirements. These new modules included equipment inventory, E-911 support, custom work plans for workflow design, significant product catalog automation, access line reporting and number assignment. PTI and IDI spent most of 2006 managing this program to a successful completion.

Gillett and Rich Kushner, head of PTI’s marketing operations, as well as Greg Heimburg, director of business development at Info Directions, gave Billing World and OSS Today an overview of their work together, what benefits they’ve started to see, and how they pulled it all off.

Billing World: Who’s a typical Penn Telecom customer, and what’s changing about what you’re offering them?

Kushner: Penn Telecom is a business-to-business competitive carrier. We have two sister companies, one of which is a 100-year-old telephone company called North Pittsburgh Telephone. The other is an ISP called Nauticom.

Penn Telecom has been in the competitive services business in its current form since about 1997 and has about a 68,000-access-line equivalent. When combined with our ILEC operation, that puts us in the 150,000-line range, which makes us one of the top 20 largest phone companies in the country. We are an edge-out carrier, meaning we offer competitive services from the edge of our ILEC footprint outwards, so we serve beyond the immediate North Pittsburgh Telephone service area, covering most of Western Pennsylvania, the 21st largest metro area in the United States.

We are a facilities-based operator, with 330 miles of fiber from downtown Pittsburgh and out in all four directions. We are located in 28 central offices, number some 7,000 customers, including some notables like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Pirates and Penguins, and the City of Pittsburgh Public Schools, which is itself some 4,000 lines. We were the communications provider for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game last year.

As far as our typical customer goes, we are migrating from a company who could sell products that are as good as the big guys but less expensive. We have to move in the direction the market is taking us, which is to be a broadband packet solution and application business. So we are moving into VoIP, hosted software applications in our network, and access to our customers through an Ethernet access server and metro-Ethernet services. Our average customer would be a small to medium business with eight to 10 access lines and 10 to 20 employees.

Billing World: What hurdle did you either hit or envision you would hit that spurred you to seek a new back-office solution?

Gillett: We needed systems that were flexible enough to go at the speed we needed to move, to introduce change. We didn’t have that in-house with our legacy system. We felt we didn’t have a core to our OSS that either allowed us to enhance that core or build around it with any components or flexibility we had to introduce. As we looked forward, we felt we had an immovable object in front of us.

Billing World: What did your legacy platform lack that made you look in another direction?

Gillett: It was basically a closed system. There was no opportunity to integrate with any other third-party application. When we went through our product evaluation, we spent a considerable amount of time to find out what it would take to work with the vendor and build some hooks in, to compensate. The proposition was so expensive and the scope was so large it made more sense to put those dollars into a new system that would get us further, even if it could be more stressful.

Billing World: Why did you ultimately choose Costguard.NET, but also to have Info Directions develop so many new modules for you?

Gillett: I came from a telecom consulting background and from working with software vendors the majority of my career. This is one of the first times I’d been on the customer side of the fence. I’d had some experience with Info Directions before Penn Telecom.

Before I came to Penn Telecom, Info Directions was not on the list for vendor selection. But one thing we did well here was we went through the lifecycle and all the requirements—in excess of 3,000 requirements. As we went through all the vendors, we did a gap analysis against our complex requirements, and no one met all of our needs. How could they? But Info Directions was one of those vendors that met a significant amount of our requirements.

We looked at other factors, like cost. We also wanted a hosted outsourced solution, which we’d had with our previous solution. So when we looked at the vendors, Info Directions rose quickly above the rest as a company that met our requirements. What they also did, to their credit, was to take our requirements and build a conceptual bridge for us to understand how we could get there. They built some prototypes for us, and delivered us the vision of how to get there.

Billing World: Projects like this that involve a lot of development and system replacement usually fail miserably. What are you doing different?

Gillett: The single greatest factor to making this work was corporate commitment. Some of these projects are launched in a sense that, once you admit you have a problem, you launch a project and give the vendor the money, but there is not the commitment to pull the people out of the organization to see things through to success.

To the credit of our management, they never wavered. We pulled people out of their full-time jobs that had to be involved—the SMEs, the mid-level managers, the people who knew how things were done in this company—and those people helped write the requirements, did the gap analysis and worked on the prototypes with IDI.

Another big factor is the process itself. We didn’t just want to repeat what we did in a new system—we wanted to get better. So there was a lot of process reengineering and thus analysis and negotiation across the company to set those new requirements. We then took those 3,000 requirements and threw them up against a group of vendors, and the results were significant, but it really made our vendor selection process accurate.

Also, working on prototypes really gave our non-technical folks who would have to rely on this system a chance to communicate with IDI openly so we could get that feedback.

And finally, we took the time to rehearse our launch. So even though we were under tight time constraints, we maintained enough discipline on the project to make sure we [were thorough] and then rehearsed our launch. So when we flipped the system on—we did it from a Friday night to a Sunday morning—on Monday everyone came in and started working.

Sticking to that process is a lot harder in reality than in theory. You have people who want to cut short the QA [quality assurance processes] or don’t want to spend money on testing. We were disciplined about sticking to the process. But again, that’s because management stuck with it the whole time and wanted to do it right and not let it die on the vine.

Billing World: How did you deal with the inventory upload? That’s typically a difficult step.

Gillett: We have an Intergraph outside plant solution. We already had a data upload process in place with our legacy vendor, so we had a way to take that inventory and network information and export it in a form we could get into our previous system. We were able to re-map and utilize that with IDI. But once we got that into CostGuard, the visibility and control over that data was ten-fold. In the process of just migrating to CostGuard and going through QA cycles, we saw in our inventory things that could be reutilized, we saw cost savings and benefit using the new modules before they were even ready.

Billing World: Greg, IDI practically bet its business on this project and all the development involved. Tell us a bit about the process and how it affected your company.

Heimburg: First, the RFP phase was probably the most intricate we’ve been involved in. But as far as being a priority project within our company, it was No. 1. In terms of overall corporate direction, we had a few initiatives and still do. A lot of the functionality was focused on CLEC and ILEC capability—our other major initiative being wireless—and we were just looking to do what Penn needed us to do to get up and running. We were doing more than just introducing and implementing a new customer, we were creating a whole new product area in inventory, 911, MSAG and others.

Billing World: How is this all driving better business intelligence? What results can Penn Telecom point to that demonstrate positive returns?

Gillett: We are working to gather up more of hard statistics, but if I pulled one thing out immediately it’s that we feel we have better control over our business. We need to be fast and flexible, and now we have poured a foundation that we can build up, out and around. Before we didn’t have the ability to collect many of the data points we are now. Adding some custom field or data point—we had no ability to do that before. We can capture information about our customers that we could not before.

Kushner: I used to ask for reports and would get a glassy-eyed stare back. Now when I ask for reports about new service offerings, how they sold, who they sold to, I can get them. This has tangibly improved my ability to get market information very rapidly.

Gillett: We are finally empowered to own our own data, mine it and build some intelligence around it. Folks are pouring into my group and asking me what we can do with it. It justifies my team’s existence, but the requests keep coming and it’s all positive.

Kushner: We responded to an RFP from a school district in Western Pennsylvania. Six weeks ago it would have taken us a month to get all the information together. The other day I was able to get all the information I needed in 20 minutes.

Gillett: A number of senior-level managers have said that in our legacy system they could log in, but that was about it. Trying to look at customer bills or histories, for the managers who weren’t continually using the system, it was impossible. But now they can get all the information and follow-up that they expect, and they already wonder how they got along before without it. Nothing’s perfect and we have some stability issues we are working through, but nothing like we dealt with on our previous solution.