March 27, 2006

This article, by CellVision's Njål Vikdal, appears in the April 2006 issue of VanilaPlus Magazine; Europe's leading Billing, OSS, Revenue & Service Management magazine.

Looking beyond the many expert tools within OSS and fault management, CellVision wanted to see if there were other areas within typical fault management processes that could be significantly improved with limited investment. Together with some of our key customers we tried to identify which tasks within daily fault handling scenarios that take most time and effort. We found some interesting results:
- Customer Care consultants have often little or no information about the actual customer impact of current network outage. When a customer calls the Customer Care Centre complaining of problems, the queries very often have to be forwarded to technical support staff. This puts unnecessary load on the network departments and more importantly it reduces the responsiveness and service level experienced by customers.
- At the Network Management Centre (NMC) it is often difficult to get a good view of how to prioritise all alarms and problems during routine monitoring – particularly if there are situations such as extreme weather causing a lot of network problems or periods with reduced staffing.
- When handling alarms and network faults, we found that the operator staff very often repeat tedious tasks of searching for information in addition to the alarm cause. Frequently the cause is known, but equipment or other administrative information is needed – often quickly. This can be information on transmission links, power supply, map and site access information, planned work activities, registered trouble tickets etc.
- We saw that the lack of visual navigation capabilities often resulted in longer time spent to access or enter information. We saw a strong relation between the number of mouse clicks, tab-shifts and input text operations needed and the total time spent in handling a fault situation.

The analysis also indicated that there is potential for helping mobile operators becoming even more efficient within the field of fault management. Our offering is CellVision mBOSS – a solution that targets a broader group of users across the mobile operator organisation and enables them to access critical information without the need for training in advanced support systems.

Here are some brief examples on how CellVision mBOSS makes a difference within Customer Care, Technical Support Centres and NMC/Operations:
- mBOSS brings the viewing alarms and faults a step further from the traditional list-based presentations. Faults are visualised geographically. Information is provided on remaining coverage/service in the fault affected area and intuitive color coding is used to show levels such as "no service", "reduced capacity", "potential quality degradation" or "full service availability".
- NMC staff use mBOSS to rapidly get an overview of fault situations. Since mBOSS is connected to many sources of information the system provides additional information that helps the operator to assess severity of a fault situation. Information on the network element’s traffic level, accumulated lost traffic, fault history in the area, number of customers affected, key corporate customers affected, level of overlapping service/coverage in area etc. are critical input for task prioritisation.
- mBOSS helps speeding up the time spent on retrieving information needed for further handling of a fault. Quick access to transmission link information, other inventory databases and integration to trouble ticketing systems are made directly available to the user, so that time consuming look ups in other tools or databases are avoided.

What is the key differentiator of mBOSS compared to mainstream fault management solutions? Firstly, it is not a FM system, secondly, the difference lies in the "philosophy" behind the solution. The CellVision mBOSS idea is to give the user the possibility of doing the analysis of a fault situation themselves. No software can replace the human capability of analysing parallel information in a rational way – if the information is presented in a perceivable way. Then the impact analysis is made efficiently by the operator staff. Visual correlation and fast information access is a powerful and cost-efficient way for mobile operators to reduce their operational cost level.