So far the 21st century has been very tough for service providers. Most of the services that they offer, long distance, Internet access, wireless voice and web-hosting, have become commodities and left little profit for them. According to a recent report from McKinsey & Co., carriers need to raise revenue or cut costs by at least 25% every year through 2005 to remain profitable. To cut costs, carriers are integrating and automating the intercompany processes with their enterprise customers. Many service providers call such integrations “electronic bonding”, or e-bonding, with customers.

Integrating with an enterprise customer is not a simple matter. In fact, it is usually more difficult than integrating with another service provider because most customers are not service providers themselves and do not really understand the service provider’s terminologies and business. The integration also needs to be more than merely allowing one system to send/receive messages from another system. It needs not only to support complete business scenarios such as ordering, problem reporting and resolution, as well as invoicing, disputing and payment, as illustrated in the diagram below, but also to handle exceptions and reconcile any discrepancies caused by such exceptions.

In the diagram above, each row represents the processes making up a business scenario. Some of the process steps are in the customer company and others are in the service provider shop. Neither side really understands what the processes are on the other side. These disjointed processes are connected together by the inter-company processes (in shaded boxes). Today, most of these inter-company processes are handled manually through phone calls, emails, faxes and web portals. Even with web portals which are considered a more advanced approach, customers still have to take the data out of their own systems and re-key them into the service provider’s web page, as illustrated in the diagram below. These manual processes are errorprone and expensive. To reduce the operation costs and improve customer satisfaction and retention, service providers (especially large tier-1 service providers) must streamline, integrate and automate these inter-company processes.

For large tier-1 service providers, e-bonding with customers can lead to huge savings. Many tier-1 telecommunication carriers have dedicated account teams working with their large enterprise customers. Members of these account teams are supposed to identify and match the customers’ needs with the carrier’s solutions. But in reality, they spend most of their time entering and keeping track of orders and trouble tickets, and helping to resolve billing disputes. If these people can be freed from filling the gaps of the customer care process and do what they are supposed to do, they can generate a lot more revenue for the carrier and position the carrier much more strategically with the customers. Furthermore, streamlined and automated e-bonding processes can improve order accuracy, shorten order provisioning and trouble resolution cycle, improve customer satisfaction and retention, and reduce the penalties that carriers have to pay for violating contracts and SLAs. Such savings can easily reach millions of dollars for a large service provider.

Such e-bonding not only benefits the service provider; it can also save hundreds of thousands of dollars for an enterprise customer by 1) reducing the number of employees dedicated to dealing with the service provider, 2) shortening service activation and trouble resolution cycles, and 3) improving invoice accuracy and service equipment utilization. Because it benefits both service providers and customers, both parties may want the other side to pay for the integration. Usually it comes down to the service provider paying for the software/hardware and special system integration resource required for the solution, and the customer contributing its own resources for supporting the integration and committing to certain service contracts.

This whitepaper will focus on two major challenges for customer e-bonding: 1) deploying an e-bonding solution to a large number of customers with diverse IT environments and capabilities, and 2) managing and maintaining a large number of such integrations on an ongoing basis. Other requirements and challenges for such e-bonding solutions are similar to those faced by service providers who are automating their inter-company processes among themselves, which are discussed in great detail in the companion whitepaper “Managing Service Provider Value Chains – Requirements, challenges and solutions for managing partners among service providers”.

INTEGRATING WITH A LARGE NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS
With enough time and money, a service provider can integrate with any one of its customers. Usually such an integration process includes the following steps:

1. Customer qualification – make sure the customer has an adequate
internal IT infrastructure to be integrated with

2. Customer education about the e-bonding solution – make sure the
customer understands

• the benefits of the e-bonding,
• the impacts it will have on the customer’s existing processes
and operations,
• the interfaces the customer needs to use to communicate
electronically with the service provider,
• the process for ongoing maintenance, and
• the overall cost and resource requirement

3. Requirement analysis, architecture and design – Analyze customer’s processes, workflow, IT architecture, internal systems’ API, security, performance and availability requirements, and define scenarios to be enabled and supported by the integration. Modify the existing architecture to incorporate the new systems, applications, data and interactions required for the integration. Evaluate and select hardware, software systems and components, and define data models and
communication protocols that are required to implement the integration.

4. Implementation – procure, install and configure any required hardware/software systems, make necessary changes to existing systems, and develop any new software required

5. Testing – make sure all the scenarios work as designed. This usually requires joint efforts by the customer and service provider.

6. Training – make sure all people involved know what they need to do in the new, integrated environment and how to handle and recover from exceptions.

7. Migration to production – promote the tested implementation to the production environment and transition from the old way of doing business to the new way.

8. Support – resolve any problems in the implementation.

Even if the customer or a third party integrator performs the integration, many of these steps (e.g. steps 2 and 5) can be very time-consuming for the service provider, especially if the customer is not familiar with Internet integration technologies, such as XML, PKI, SOAP and web services. Hence, to integrate with thousands, even if only hundreds, of customers using the traditional integration methods, the time and money required would be prohibitive to the service provider. The integration solution itself must be scalable. One way for the service provider to make the integration solution scalable is to make as much of it as possible consistent across all the integrations with its customers. Some service providers simply publish integration interfaces (usually some XML based interfaces deployed on their web servers) and ask their customers and partners to reach for them. This seems to minimize what the service provider has to do, but in reality it
creates a lot of problems for the service provider as explained below.

Because of the nature of the relationship, when a customer, especially a large customer, runs into problems with the integration regardless of the culprit, the service provider has to help. Depending on the level of experience that the customer has with integration over Internet, the customer may need help from the service provider in order to

• understand what XML, SOAP and web services are and how to
  use them
• interpret the service provider’s terminologies, interfaces and
  protocols
• acquire, install and configure public key certificates
• acquire, install and configure Internet B2B integration software
• configure security firewall and internal network to open up only
  the necessary communication channels
• debug errors in the integration solution, and
• interpret and handle exceptions and error codes from the service
  provider

If any of these supports are not provided when needed, a lot more effort will be required from the service provider later to help the customer correct its implementation during testing and even production, make internal changes to accommodate the customer’s implementation, and/or find ways to please the frustrated and unhappy customer.

The correct approach for the service provider is to go beyond the wall in Figure 1. The service provider should understand thoroughly the basic processes that most of its customers use to interact with it for ordering, problem reporting, invoicing, payment, and inventory management. Based on such understanding, it should come up with a software/hardware integration component(s) or toolkit that encapsulates as much of its interfaces, protocols, data formats, and security requirements as possible. When such a component is deployed at the customer site, it can communicate correctly and securely with the service provider’s systems without any effort from the customer. Furthermore, this component should include integrationenabling functions such as data transformation, rule validation, reliability enhancement, web service interfaces and APIs so that it can be easily integrated with the customer’s internal systems and processes. The data translation capability allows both parties of the integration to continue to use its own terminology, data formats and protocols respectively without having to learn and accommodate the other’s. This will maximize the consistency among different integrations, significantly reduce the time and resources required for steps 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8, and thus the total cost of the integration by up to 75%. As we will see in the section below, if this integration component is packaged properly, it can help to address the second key challenge of customer e-bonding: how to manage and maintain a large number of such integrations over time.

MANAGING AND MAINTAINING E-BONDING SOLUTIONS
Maintaining integration between two autonomous companies – each can make changes to its data, processes, applications, systems, network, organization and personnel independently – is often much harder than doing the initial integration. Such changes usually cause a profound and often unpredictable impact to the integrated solution. Changes to data and processes can cause two sides get out of synchronization. Changes to applications, systems and network can lead to loss of connectivity and breakdown of workflow. Changes to organization and personnel may result in permanent loss of knowledge about the integration and the processes required to support the integration. Such challenges will grow rapidly out of hand as the number of customers who are integrated increases, if each customer is integrated differently than the others. To address such challenges, two steps must be taken. First, the integration solution must be made manageable, and secondly, the integration must be made as consistent as possible across different integrations.

A manageable integration solution should have the following features and characteristics:

• simplicity by encapsulating as much of the specifics and
automating as much of the tasks as possible
• remote manageability including monitoring, starting/stopping,
and configuring the integration solution remotely, backing up
data, and generating alerts automatically
• management interfaces to leading enterprise system
management applications to allow the integration solution to be
managed by an enterprise system management application used
by a customer and/or service provider
• remote maintainability including updating the integration
software, managing version control for such software, and
performing tests and regression tests.

Besides having a manageable integration solution, a service provider must also strive to maximize the consistency among the integrations with different customers. A huge portion of the costs of managing a large number of different integrations is in training and maintaining the necessary expertise about each of the integrations. Even increasing the consistency slightly can make a huge difference as it is multiplied by a large number of integrations. To help service providers achieve this goal, PartnerCommunity developed an integration appliance that is both manageable and reusable. The appliance can be completely monitored, managed and upgraded remotely, and can be treated like a plug-and-play black-box. By pre-installing and pre-configuring the appliance with the Internet integration software and the service provider’s data formats, protocols and processes, the appliance captures between 50 – 75% of the integration in a highly reusable form. When the service provider needs to change its data formats or protocols, they can be pushed to the appliances remotely and automatically. Any changes made on the customer side can be validated and regression tested against the appliance without impacting the service provider. As seen in the following diagram, the appliances significantly reduce the otherwise unmanageable complexity at the service provider’s gateway in the event the gateway has to deal with many different integrations directly.

PARTNERCOMMUNITY HAS THE RIGHT SOLUTION
The integration appliance is an innovative solution that PartnerCommunity developed specifically for large service providers to address these e-bonding challenges. It slashes both the integration and maintenance costs and makes it possible for a tier-1 service provider to deploy its e-bonding solution to a large number of customers. The integration appliance has been certified and proven by leading telecommunication carriers. For more information about this solution, please contact:

John Yin, PartnerCommunity, Inc.

561-886-1210
jyin@partnercommunity.com.