Comarch, the official vendor for the Next Generation Service Assurance and Service Quality Management platform for Vodafone Germany, has completed the latest release of the project with its Comarch GIS Platform Suite.

The fifth release of the project, first launched in 2009, brings major changes in the project scope and enables further improvements to the experience of Vodafone’s customers. The new extensions to the system provide the communications service provider (CSP) with tangible business benefits – they will increase user experience significantly and have a major impact on internal Network Operations Centre processes, Comarch claims. The vendor says the latest system developments will allow the root cause of a problem to be identified faster, and analysis to be improved. This will translate directly into better resolution times of all detected failures, and therefore to greater customer satisfaction.

In 2009, Vodafone decided to follow a strategy aimed at increasing its business customer market share and better meeting the demands of enterprise customers, by launching a Next Generation Service Assurance OSS consolidation and transition program with Comarch. Comarch Next Generation Service Assurance has since allowed Vodafone to transform traditional network-centric fault management into a solution focused on customer service assurance. The system enhanced the pro-activeness of customer service by enabling early detection of network failures, shortening problem resolution times, and allowing customer service impact to be thoroughly predicted and calculated. The project, initially addressed to Vodafone Germany, has been extended and now also embraces Vodafone structures in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands.

By replacing its legacy Fault and Service Management system, Vodafone Germany has reduced capital expenditure (capex) by 47% and operational expenditure (opex) by 68%, reports Comarch. The transformation also guarantees to lower the cost of future OSS integrations by at least 30%. Monitoring the network in the context of Comarch Service Quality Management provides capabilities to focus on customer satisfaction. The solution has now been completed, with the inclusion of an interface-rich Comarch GIS Platform suite allowing spatial data to be collected, processed, edited and deleted according to the INSPIRE directive, and enabling network services to be shared in the SOA model.

Marcin Dąbrowski, the vice president of Comarch Telecommunications, said: “The last release of Comarch NGSA & SQM products delivered to Vodafone Germany was a great success. Thanks to the brilliant cooperation between Comarch and Vodafone Germany, we were able to deliver our systems with several new, sophisticated feature extensions.”

“It helped Vodafone Germany to achieve the strategic goals of a big OSS Transformation Programme,” added Dąbrowski. “As the Comarch NGSA and SQM solution is one of the crucial systems for network management and operations, we have, this year, started another project with Vodafone Germany. The main objective of this is a new, high performance NGSA and SQM platform, which will deliver the services with superb availability and responsiveness.”

Markus Böhler, the group manager for Vodafone, said: “We are very satisfied with the delivery and functionalities of release 5. Maintenance downtime was realistic and well prepared. The GeoView is a real benefit for our monitoring teams, especially for our service and customer monitoring teams. We expect to further enhance our customer experience with the use of those new features.”