A major telecommunications company automates its internal processes using RPA.
SITUATION
Our client has a set of reports which are run regularly within their management and reporting centers. Pulling reports and tickets when triaging internal alarms and outages within both Regional Network Management Center (RNMC) and Enterprise Reporting Center (ERC) organizations is a very cumbersome and time-intensive activity. They requested assistance in improving their internal reporting efficiency by automating some of these processes. The client already had a backlog of 12 projects before the start of the engagement that they wanted to automate or improve the reporting process. The overall objective of the engagement was to save time and money for the RNMC and ERC teams by automating manual processes.
“I love seeing this work. A lot of folks have been doing their work in the same way for a while now. A lot of this work is now put in place, and now there can be dreams of other opportunities for these teams. We have to continue this type of work. We have the same amount of work today, but not enough people to get it all done.”
– Director of Network Operations
Apex deployed a team consisting of one Python developer, one UiPath developer, and one Business Analyst. The team developed, tested, and demonstrated each of their proposed automation projects for client stakeholders. The client team had never managed either Agile or application development before, so our Business Analyst provided the necessary support and documentation for each development project to get each sprint started. Apex provided technical support and software development primarily for UiPath and Python, but the team also worked with APIs and other coding languages. The Apex team, in cooperation with client management, leveraged Agile methodology to organize the project into two-week sprints to quickly and efficiently deliver the automation work. A progress meeting was held every week to review and provide feedback on what had been developed. Meetings were regularly held throughout the week with the client stakeholders to document process flows and update the functional use cases.
RESULTS
The automation work was extremely successful with some of the scripts increasing resource efficiency by over 85% on average. The "RNMC Fiber Cut Outage" macro, for example, reduced a process to 2-5 minutes which used to take two employees over 45 minutes to complete. The "RNMC Local Spare Correlation" automation project reduced the time spent on triaging tickets by 60-70%. The "E911 Daily Alert Comparison" project has a daily file that is generated, and the client team would have to analyze the day-to-day changes in this file every two days, a 2-4 hour process, but with the automation, it now only takes them around five minutes to complete the comparison.
