Tata Teleservices Employs SOA-based BRM to Tackle Data Errors
A case study on Infrastructure in ServicesReader ROI
Executive Summary
What is it that you, as a giant organization like to avoid in a 100 million-customer base? Data discrepancy. Tata Teleservices, in their quest to grow realized that they faced the monster of data discrepancies and process inconsistencies in their core IT systems. The solution was straightforward: enterprise-wide IT and business process reengineering.
"Over a period of time, as our subscriber base and complexities of business grew, we observed hundreds of our systems and multiple business functions performing numerous business processes, we witnessed a lot of data discrepancies creeping in the systems," recalls Navin Chadha, CIO of Tata Teleservices (TTSL). Earlier, these data discrepancies were solved with manual workarounds. On realizing a mismatch of data fields in, say, system A and system B, the process was to take a printout and forcefully make the changes in system B because A happened to be the master of data. A need was identified to have an effective business process management layer that enables not only automation of operations, but also improves efficiency and performance. Instead of hard-coding things, a Tibco middleware was deployed to define business rules irrespective of the business processes and translate information while talking to different systems above or below it.
Case Study Highlights
- Data discrepancy has been reduced by over 97 percent since implementation, with more than 300 data integration issues since addressed
- Currently an average of 50,000 service requests are raised daily. With the projected subscriber base, this would raise to 2,50,000
- Post the BPM implementation, the process has an average turn-around cycle time of mere 27 seconds
- The system’s performance has been greatly impacted as 87 percent of the service requests are processed end to- end within one minute
The programme to deploy an effective Business Process Management (BPM) solution based on SOA principles was started in late 2005. Each process was migrated onto the BPM platform allowing end-to end visibility, reusability across channels and robust exception management. The solution deployed had to cater to the explosive growth in transaction volumes without impacting customer experience.
Post the BPM implementation, the process has an average turn-around cycle time of mere 27 seconds. "In fact, I deliberately barred my telephone services to experience the efficiency of the processes and involved myself as a customer," smiles Chadha. The system's performance has been greatly impacted as 87 percent of the service requests are processed endto- end within one minute, where almost 40 percent of the requests are processed within 15 seconds itself. This is despite the interaction required with around seven legacy heterogeneous applications on an average. Data discrepancy has been reduced by over 97 percent since implementation, with more than 300 data integration issues since addressed.
Dial 'C' For Caution BPM and SOA is a good 
concept to implement. But the moment one starts to interlink system-to-system and system-to-human processes, the number of open human-to-system processes a BPM deployment can handle is always a technical limitation. Chadha and his team identified 10 critical business processes to test the BPM implementation architecture and integration framework upon, to begin with. "BPM is good in top-down approach; SOA is good in bottom-top approach.
The biggest challenge we faced was how to marry both?" adds Viswanthan. However, Chadha and his team felt that the trickiest part was exception management. Despite being born of the intrinsic data issue, the business can very likely attribute problems arising from exception management to the BPM-SOA implementation. "Rather than solving a pain point, we focused on building a framework to automatically address various problems. Otherwise it becomes an operational implementation rather than a strategic implementation," points out Chadha. "There is a remarkable reduction in the number of complaints that we get from our business users. There is consistency in the customer experience across the country, says Chadha. Now, TTSL's customers would not be on the other side of the line, listening to a pre-recorded message that goes 'This number is temporarliy disconnected.'
The Person Behind It
I deliberately barred my telephone services to experience the efficiency and involved myself as a customer.
The systems had become very bulky and any changes that were introduced into the system proved highly expensive to the organization.
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