Cramer Upgrade
Cramer system upgrade and consolidation
The challenge...
Our Client is the UK’s leading entertainment and communications company, serving almost 10 million customers, offering broadband, digital TV, phone and mobile services. This telecoms provider is one of the largest residential broadband providers in the UK, the UK’s largest mobile virtual network operator, and the second largest home phone and pay TV provider.
Due to a previous company acquisition, the customer had two separate Cramer inventory systems: a Cramer4 instance containing Layer 1 TDM transmission records and a Cramer 5 instance containing Layer 2 and 3 IP and Ethernet Network and Service records, with some automation for the Ethernet service provisioning process. These systems ran on separate platforms, used different COTS versions, and had varied levels of data accuracy with little integration to the rest of the BSS/OSS stack.
The customer commenced a major transformation programme to manage and operate their network resources and systems in a more cost efficient, integrated way. One of the enabler projects was to upgrade and consolidate the two separate Amdocs Cramer inventory systems into a single platform, providing tighter data and process integration as well as usability benefits.
THE SOLUTION...
CACI assembled a project team from our highly-skilled senior Cramer consultants, each of whom had a wealth of experience in Cramer product technologies and a strong track record of previous successful Cramer upgrades.
With these resources lead by effective project management, the strong and dynamic relationship with Amdocs and the customer ensured that all project objectives were achieved:
- Upgrade and consolidate the Cramer 4 and Cramer 5 instances into a single Cramer 7.5 system, including all customisations, automation and metadata alignment;
- Validation of Business Objects reporting interfaces;
- Validation and migration of existing interfaces connecting external applications to the Cramer platforms.
Through careful project management and close co-operation with the customer, the CACI team were also able to accept and incorporate a number of additional increases to the scope, in order to support the wider transformation programme. These enablers were:
- New metadata models;
- Re-engineering and development of third-party applications and interfaces;
- Re-baseline changes for increased metadata and instance data merge;
- Scripting to fix existing metadata models and data;
- New Task Engine Templates for automation.
This all supported the customer’s aims in the delivery of their OSS transformation roadmap. Building on this success, the CACI team were then engaged in the definition of the high level design roadmaps for the customer’s future state inventory, and its integration with the rest of the OSS and BSS stack.
RESULTS AND BENEFITS...
CACI’s experience and expertise across the OSS inventory domain, coupled with extensive hands-on experience of developing and deploying amdocs Cramer COTS products and upgrades, ensured our client benefitted from:
- A single inventory platform, with enhanced metadata and more accurate network inventory data, as well as logical capacity data;
- An upgraded inventory platform able to take full advantage of the latest product features in managing inventory resources;
- A single inventory enabling users to access up-to-date, accurate information in one system, reducing operational burden and promoting operational efficiency;
- Reduction of support and maintenance costs for the data centres, and rationalisation of the amdocs software licensing requirements delivering a significant cost saving.
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