Clearing Hurdles to Just-in-Time Network Lifecycle Management

Overcoming the Hurdles

Understanding the six hurdles to implementing JIT NLM, here’s how leading service providers are overcoming them, optimizing their NLM processes and moving towards JIT.

Integrating the marketing and planning organizations and processes to provide a feedback loop to marketing so their forecasts can become better over time (see, for example, September/October 2007, “Telstra Connects Its Network Plan with its Marketing Plan”).

Moving from an isolated tools approach to an integrated OSS approach to network planning to provide network plans to downstream systems that are timely, high quality and repeatable. Integration enables plans to “fit together” over myriad technologies and geographies and provide detailed equipment fitting, obviating the need for the engineering organization to re-plan. BT’s solution was to implement a network planning OSS capable of planning (and re-planning) their access network overnight, and repeating the process every two weeks.

Integrating network planning with the rest of the NLM processes by providing automated interfaces to the other ERP modules:

• Equipment ordering process in the financial module, providing rough, and later, detailed equipment orders from the vendors
• Project management process for creating the implementation projects
• Logistics process for allocating the equipment, when it arrives, to the most favorable project at that time (instead of just to the one that was planned six months ago)

A JIT Vision for NLM

With the hurdles overcome, the net result is an extremely efficient NLM process — merging the project and network creation cycles into a single process that can be run only one to three months before project implementation, shaving up to a year-and-a-half off the typical NLM process. (See “JIT NLM Processes” chart.)

In the new enhanced creation cycle, the network demands are determined for the entire network and all of the services and technologies used to create the projects. The equipment fitting and the network plans are created automatically by the integrated network planning system and fed directly into the ordering, project management and logistics process. This entire process can be done in a matter of days instead of months, enabling service providers to develop plans at the last moment in the equipment ordering process and giving them the flexibility to refresh those plans in real time as demands become better known.

The net effect is that the equipment can be ordered just before it is needed, when the best information is available on the needs, and implemented immediately in the network in support of the new services — telecommunications JIT. With this approach, the network is being augmented in an optimal way while keeping the network operations better aligned with the company’s strategy.

Dr. Casem Majd is vice president of OSS Solutions at VPIsystems Inc., the provider of the OnePlan Network Resource Planning system, for automated, flow-through network planning. Dr. Mark H. Mortensen is president of Mortensen Consulting Group, which provides product direction, marketing and strategic planning services to service providers and venture capital and private equity companies worldwide.