Cloud-Based Order-to-Activation Solution for Fiber Optic Startup

As is typical for a startup, the initial focus was on acquiring staff and customers as well as validating the assumed market conditions. To achieve this as quickly as possible, work initially relied on paper and Excel before an attempt was made to switch to process tools.

As the project progressed, it became clear that this approach led to significant challenges at a later stage. At that point, there was already a large number of stakeholders, external sales partners, internet service providers, internal processes and departments within the fiber company itself, as well as connected construction companies, many of which had already implemented their own solutions.

The result was a landscape of numerous silos, a lack of end-to-end processes, inconsistent data, and missing business rules. In parallel, the products were still under development due to the startup’s limited market experience, further increasing overall complexity.

In the first step, we defined the business rules together with all involved departments. These rules enable data validation and plausibility checks and form the basis for subsequently refining the product parameters.

Building on this, a standardized API design was introduced for all partners and business processes, including Lead to Order, Order to Activation, and Order to Construction. This was based on an open API concept following the OpenAPI standard.

For implementation, we developed a cloud-based and scalable software solution with an agile development team. After just six weeks of development, the solution was successfully launched as a managed service in July 2022.

By introducing the solution, the level of automation across all relevant processes was significantly increased. This led to more efficient workflows and noticeable relief for the involved teams.

The automation, combined with clearly defined business rules and refined product parameters, made a substantial contribution to the sustainable improvement of data quality.

As a result, both the number of customer complaints and cancellations were significantly reduced, having a positive impact on overall customer satisfaction.

The simple and standardized integration of all partners and stakeholders via open APIs also created the foundation for further company growth and a scalable system landscape.

In addition, the solution makes an important contribution to supporting the expansion of fiber-optic infrastructure in Germany and thus to strengthening the country’s digital infrastructure.