In the case of the European wireline carrier, the carrier originally planned for a parallel transition for three months but finally decided against it. Around cutover time, the carrier did not have CRM support for one week. Even a month later, there was some unplanned downtime. Because of the initial downtime problems, the carrier allowed users to continue using the legacy applications, which perpetuated data inconsistencies. It is believed that these problems will continue to occur until the system is stabilized. In the case of the Asia/Pacific wireless subsidiaries, the first phase of the billing and care platform was released 18 months after project start-up. Some reliability problems were discovered in production, which were resolved during a three-month period. The second phase of the project was due to start deployment 12 months later and be completed for all three subsidiaries after 18 months. It actually took another 2.5 years for the first subsidiary and three years to finally complete the project. Part of the delay resulted from a decision to change the deployment approach and to upgrade the hardware and software technology in a separate deployment, thus lowering the risk in the business migration cutover. During the final cutover, the system also did not have CRM support for one week. This meant customers could not check their account balances, set up their phones to roam overseas, add new connections, change plans or pay bills3. The business impact on all the cases studied was hypothesized along three dimensions: customer acquisition, churn and new service revenue (see figure 2 below). Figure 2. Type of outcome of five case studies
| Case Study | Status | Customer Acquisition | Customer Churn | New Services | | Wireless Carrier (Asia/Pacific) | Implemented | The subsidiaries continued to perform at similar rates of growth during the project although the introduction of new services restricted growth over and above what previously had been achieved4 | Churn remained stable | Unclear | | Wireless/Wireline Carrier (Latin America) | Implemented in wireless; canceled in wireline | Carrier is worst performer in terms of share of net adds | Carrier remained worst performer in the industry | Unclear | | Wireless Carrier (North America) | Decommissioned | Carrier dropped to distant third in terms of share of net adds | Carrier remained worst performer in the industry | Carrier's data share of ARPU stayed below industry average | | Satellite Distribution (North America) | Decommissioned | Unclear | Unclear | Unclear | | Wireline Carrier (Europe) | Implemented | Unclear | Unclear | Unclear |
While it would be wrong to exclusively attribute these shortfalls in performance to the decommissioning or implementation delay of a billing and/or CRM application, it would be reasonable to assume that this factor played a contributing role in not allowing each of the carriers to improve their business metrics significantly on time.
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