Telco Uses Web-Enabled Solution to Make SLA Management a Market Differentiator

Stonebridge created a browser-based solution that enables a telecommunications carrier to prove its superior service quality — and enhance customer relationships — by allowing commercial customers to monitor network performance against their service level agreements (SLAs).

As a standard industry practice, SLAs traditionally define quality of service in terms of circuit availability and mean time to repair. Our client had a better idea, one that would transform SLAs into a major competitive differentiator. The vision: create a business intelligence system that would exceed customer expectations by providing service guarantees in far greater detail than other providers and offering customers a means to self-diagnose problems and get resolutions more quickly. The system would also be used internally by operations and customer care to proactively discover and get ahead of issues before customer SLA thresholds were exceeded.

Stonebridge collaborated with the client to create SLATE, for Service Level Agreement Technical Environment. SLATE is a Web-enabled system for capturing, managing, and delivering network performance data. The joint Stonebridge/client team produced the SLATE production environment in less than 150 days. The solution, which utilizes an Oracle database engine, mid-tier architecture based on Enterprise Java Bean technology, and Cognos analytical reporting tools, comprises a data warehouse consolidating performance and correlation information from seven source systems, including OSS sources such as billing, trouble ticketing, and provisioning.