Fiber optic companies operate in a constantly changing market and often face the major challenge of outdated systems and inefficient processes, which reduce corporate flexibility. Organizational silos further hinder collaboration, and infrastructure is usually not scalable.
On the other hand, customer expectations have grown significantly in recent years, and for a holistic customer experience, seamless collaboration between business, development, and operations is essential (BizDevOps). From capturing the incoming fiber optic home connection and service contract to activation and incident management, workflows must be automated and aligned. Delays and errors in processes can cost companies time, money, and potentially customers.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – an obstacle in digital transformation?
Many companies currently rely on robotic process automation (RPA) to automate highly repetitive tasks and relieve their employees. For example, data entry via the frontend, performing transactions, or manual queries can be automated.
RPA tools are relatively easy to implement, but they have very low flexibility, scalability, and high maintenance, because even the smallest software change (GUI, field name, etc.) requires significant adjustments. Across all bots, this can eventually become unmanageable.
RPA can be a serious distraction from the necessary long-term work to digitalize and streamline processes and administrative tasks. Just because an RPA bot accesses an Excel sheet and processes data in an application, it does not automatically constitute process automation.
By simply introducing RPA bots, companies risk focusing on quick solutions rather than doing things correctly and sustainably from the start. A suitable orchestrating process engine across the entire system landscape is recommended, providing standardized process transparency, modeling, and execution.
Digital Process Automation (DPA) as a complement to traditional Business Process Management (BPM)
Companies in the fiber optic sector rely heavily on Business Process Management (BPM) due to the complexity of their processes, to streamline workflows, improve customer-centric quality, and reduce overall costs. While traditional BPM tools mainly focus on cost savings through efficiency, digital process automation (DPA) emphasizes real-time process transparency, improved customer experience, easier handling for employees, and a well-managed customer journey.
DPA extends the efficiency of BPM solutions to external users such as customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, leading to a better user experience. This means that all your processes are digitalized and consolidated into a single, up-to-date system. Unlike BPM, DPA assumes all processes are already digitalized and ready to be automated and optimized. The current status and monitoring of processes as actually implemented allow employees to access all relevant information, enabling continuous efficiency and effectiveness improvements.
With DPA, you can respond faster to customer requirements and remain adaptable in the long term to drive digital transformation. Cross-process automation lays the foundation for future innovations. For example, new products can be directly simulated and tested for customer feedback.
The main purpose of DPA is to enhance the customer experience, including answering customer inquiries and complaints, fast deliveries, or simple ordering processes.
Furthermore, the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning allows long-lasting human tasks and complex decisions to be executed much faster and more cost-effectively. This enables your systems to perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence. In this way, an AI-driven system can verify hundreds of submitted invoices for completeness within seconds.
Why achieving automation goals is challenging for companies
There are certainly many reasons why companies may fail to achieve their automation goals. A survey of 600 IT professionals in North America and Europe identified three main reasons:
1. Companies do not know where to start.
Often, the complex interplay of people, processes, and technology within a company hinders progress. It is advisable to check whether departments already exist with similar problems and solutions to learn from their experience. If not, a proof of concept for a specific automation use case can usually be developed and presented within days or weeks. This allows risks to be identified early and costs and effort to be properly estimated. The result shows whether your automation project will work in your scenario.
2. Legacy systems are overwhelming.
Legacy systems often offer limited ability to adapt and extend functionality, restricting innovation and growth. Many IT leaders believe that an automation project requires a complete system replacement, a new developer team, or incurs high costs due to downtime. RPA can serve as a short-term solution to handle legacy applications without APIs. Using RPA, existing processes (via the UI) can be automated while simultaneously transitioning to a microservice-based architecture. This gradual migration allows legacy systems to be replaced “step-by-step” with a modern DPA system.
3. Business and IT leadership are not aligned.
This scenario is familiar to most companies. About 99% of problems arise due to poor communication or collaboration. Business requirements are handed to IT and remain in the backlog for a long time. This may be due to a lack of trust or misjudged requirements. To ensure business and IT speak the same language at the process level, it is recommended to use a graphical specification language such as BPMN 2.0. Especially for start-ups, it makes sense to start with clean process modeling to avoid future problems. Established companies can also adopt BPMN 2.0; it is never too late for both business and IT to speak the same language, enabling agile process development and BPMN modeling. With the right mindset and a good collaboration culture, progress is faster, solutions are better, and employees are more satisfied. Process automation and especially visual process models, ideally executed in a real-time process engine, will help with digitalization.
Potential use cases for digital process automation
The telecommunications sector is highly competitive and capital-intensive with expensive infrastructure. It is therefore crucial to use process automation to secure benefits, increase profits, and improve customer experience.
Customer service: In customer service, employees can be relieved by automating responses to incoming inquiries. By integrating relevant systems, cases can be automatically created, and the next best action and suggested knowledge content offered automatically. Process understanding is critical here, allowing rules and workflows, including the GUI, to be digitalized and standardized.
Network management: This area is one of the most complex challenges in fiber deployment due to factors such as high operating costs, manual processes, and maintenance to sustain volume and speed changes. With DPA, repetitive processes like incident, event, and diagnostics management can be automated while employees focus on complex processes. Visualized transaction-level process execution in an engine provides transparency into how and where incidents occur and are prioritized and resolved.
Back-office tasks: Customer orders are often processed manually with outdated protocols. Human intervention and labor-intensive processes lead to errors, delays, and inefficiencies. Standardizing workflows with DPA can automate order processing and increase ROI.
Sustainably automate business processes – LionGate supports you
For successful and sustainable automation and digital transformation, different automation approaches should be integrated and combined. This enables not only cost-efficient and effective work but also a customer-oriented approach.
We support and guide you in developing a process organization so that your business and IT teams collaboratively work on existing and new processes, implement them, and anchor process thinking in the core of the company using agile methods and BPMN. This ensures fast and flexible responses to change.
With our approach, we create awareness within your team for agility, process management, process ownership, and the right mindset.
