How a Service Provider Supports Data -Driven Decision Making by Automating IT Field Operations The Solution With Resolve!

For all Service Providers, severe weather conditions mean service interruptions in internet, video streaming, telephone and wireless networks, especially in rural areas with harsh winters.

IT Teams feel pressure not only to maintain communication services over the phone, but also to support the teams that respond to customer requests and complaints in call centers and to keep the system alive.

Successfully achieving these goals requires an intelligent automation platform that can operate on the many different devices the Service Provider maintains.

Problem:

Network Device Data Was Different and Many Critical Details were Missing

While major storms were occurring, Service Provider’s IT teams were looking at too many interfaces and struggling to match alarms to locations where services were interrupted. Power outages occur in all boroughs of the city, and the NOC team primarily needed a resource to indicate where to respond. Critical information about which locations were losing power, which were fixed generator or commercial power plants, the status of UPS capacity, or generator fuel levels was not readily available.

With a limited supply of generators providing a lifeline during these severe weather events, the Service Provider had to prioritize distribution based on a rapid assessment of the areas where it was most needed.

At the same time, after the generators were deployed, teams had to stay on site to guard against theft, but they had no way of knowing when the electricity would be back and when they could move on to the next site.

Alerts to the NOC team prior to implementing Resolve lacked severity indicators or available backup power and provided only basic information. In addition, manually checking the generator’s fuel level was a time-consuming task for the team, and they had to simultaneously respond to urgent questions from customers.

Beyond the problems that came with the storm, the Service Provider had a unique service contract. Under their contract, the Service Provider was required to provide monthly reports on a number of key performance indicators (KPIs), including frame loss, jitter, latency, and others. Creating these reports manually was very time consuming.

Goal With Resolve:

Increasing Visibility of Network Operations and Efficiency of Reports

IT teams needed to quickly gather and analyze many different data points during storms and major weather events to gain full visibility into the network operations infrastructure. In doing so, they must be able to achieve their ultimate goal of providing uninterrupted service or restoring services as soon as possible in the event of an outage, regardless of weather disruptions. In the event of an outage, it is only possible to get the service operational as soon as possible by sending technicians to the areas that require the most urgent attention.

The Service Provider needed to reduce manual efforts and automate the collection and analysis of critical information to speed up the process and enable smarter, data-driven decision making.

Challenges:

Manual Collection and Reporting of Network Data

The biggest obstacle for the Service Provider to achieve its goals was the time-consuming process of manually collecting, aggregating and analyzing data from many different sources. Staff had to log into individual pieces of equipment and different systems, take input from customer calls, and then manually attempt to connect the dots between these data points.

The process was extensive and time consuming. Ultimately, IT teams had to make predictive decisions. They knew they needed real-time data.

Solution with Resolve:

Automated Network Health Scans, Tests and Interactive Dashboards

Resolve Actions was deployed to perform proactive network testing by collecting detailed health and diagnostic information used to create dynamic reporting maps for a wide variety of equipment including power, cable modems, generators, DLC batteries and more.

How was the solution implemented?

All of these reports and maps provided a central view to the Service Provider’s network operations of exactly where and when power was cut and where weather conditions had the greatest impact. The maps included dynamic links to spreadsheets that showed the expected life of a battery and diesel generator fuel levels by volume and percentage. Thus, it was possible to determine exactly what was working in generator power and to respond accordingly.

Benefits of the Solution:

Efficient Distribution of Resources, Increasing Uptime, Automatic Reports

Now with the Automation Platform, Service Provider IT teams can make data-driven decisions about where to focus resources and effort, from the technician going to the field to provide physical service to internal diagnostics and remediation processes.
The right resources are now distributed more efficiently where they are needed most.
Resolve’s ability to automate reporting on performance, health and diagnostic data helps the Service Provider determine when personnel should be physically deployed to locations in hazardous weather conditions.
Resolve enables generator crews to get instant alerts when power returns, allowing them to return to commercial power sources and complete their work much faster and move on to the next customer who needs support.
Service Provider now automatically generates detailed reports in just minutes to meet their national SLAs.

The NOC Team Leader stated, “One of the key benefits of using Resolve is being able to efficiently manage storms to keep people out of harm’s way, noting that the cable maintenance manager is now able to do his job remotely during severe weather conditions.

“We now have a lot of device data, all centralized, so people don’t have to manually log in to individual pieces of equipment. They can look at Resolve and see everything in one place,” he added.

Conclusion

Resolve, helped Service Provider improve customer service especially in emergencies. While creating the most value for the Service Provider during severe weather conditions, the team resorted to intelligent automation to manage mission-critical resources, thus automating various processes, saving more time than their forecasts.

Now Resolve does the work they used to spend hours on every five minutes.