Work Order Management (WOM) for Fixed Line Telecommunications Systems

Abstract

The telecommunication business has been progressing rapidly over the years and services to the end users had been improving with the available technology. Most prominent has been the provision of the landline service where a fixed wire or fiber was running all the way to the customer premises. The amount of data or voice transmitted was far beyond the current GSM broadband and thus provide huge revenue to the organization supplying the service where speed and cost was an essence. However, in order for the organization to maintain initial service and customer satisfaction, it was necessary to be able to meet the requirement of providing the service at the earliest. This would be achieved by streamlining the process of the customer request up to the installation and provision of the service.

Work order management was part of that process in which it took the service order form the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system which was being held for some technical reasons. The work order analyzed the problem and got a planner/engineer to rectify and provision the service to the customer. This process was in place but does not provide the efficient and effective process to track and manage the tasks end to end.

What has been propose in the project was to enhance the current system by reprogramming the application to a more stable, reliable and scalable environment. But because of the limitation on the initial budget, the project had to be divided into phases. The initial phase was to make sure the existing data and process were intact, and data migrated into the new ensure continuous service of the organization and minimize downtime. The second phase of the project which was not part of this submission would cater for the creation of the Security Modules and the rest of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the remaining components which would eliminate direct updates on the database object.

The approach taken was to introduce .NET and oracle database into the solution. The web pages and object control were managing within a web server and the data objects were manages with a database server while taking into account all the functionalities of the existing system and the addition of the standard frameworks of the eTOM and other enhancements required by the client.

The end result was a successful implementation and delivery of the proposed solution. Although the delivery was prolonged due to the prioritization of the client on other projects.

The delivered product was installed in a Virtual Machine which was configured as a web, database and client machine all in one. The VM has been configured to only 1GB in case the running PC doesn’t have enough memory on it.