The worldwide telecom industry is in a strong growth mode. In fact, telecommunications has been one of the most dynamic industries in terms of rapid technology advancement combined with deregulations. The industry’s overall revenue is estimated to be over $1.3 trillion (2007). A few well-known names in the telecom sector are Sprint, Cable & Wireless, Telstra, AT&T, China Telecom and Reliance Communications. These companies and several other similar industries are conventionally known as ‘Communication Service Providers’ (CSPs). They cater to a wide variety of cross sectional industry sectors – be it IT, Bio-technology, Health Care, Manufacturing and even a residential consumer.

SAP leverages its solutions for CRM, asset life cycle management, supply chain management and financials to address the business needs. Built-in adapters connect all SAP modules to enable users to extract the data needed to accomplish their respective processes. If necessary, SAP also offers open-ended integration tools with other systems to connect and complete the processes.

A customer life cycle process in a telecom industry can be broadly classified as – Pre-Sales, Sales, Order Administration & Provisioning, and Customer Support.

All individual sub-functions can be grouped into each of the above processes to understand the requirement of IT tools / technology to effectively carry out the process. Depending upon the business strategy and positioning, typically Pre-Sales starts with campaigns and extends up to identifying prospective customers. However, telecom products are unique and need to be bundled / configured to meet each customer requirement. Quotes will need to be worked by a technical team. Upon the customer confirming the order, the provisioning team works on order fulfillment and customer acceptance. They will give the necessary inputs to the billing team to complete the billing process.

Then the customer support team takes over and makes itself available for any support related issues / queries. Each of these processes will need robust tools to capture, share, and for timely analysis of technical / business data to effectively carry out the business functions. Multiple IT systems to meet the needs will add to the performance and maintenance issues.

While the business process of each company varies with the business strategy and product positioning, SAP captures the best business practice across the industry. SAP also recommends implementing its ERP as much out-of-the box as possible to leverage the best practice. This will enable quicker ROI to companies and easy to maintain or upgrade the application later. The business process explained above relates to the best practice approach for a CSP. Each business function, however, needs to be broken down into specific units.

The customer has a choice of accessing through the Web, email, phone, partner or field representative. During this prospecting process, SAP unifies multiple channels through which the customer can access, thereby enabling sales or marketing personnel to get a 360-degree view of the customer. This sharing of prospect or customer information is extremely important from the point of view of new client acquisition. In addition to effectively capturing the customer needs using the SAP CRM module, during proposal building stage, each service can be combined or bundled with other products and sub-services.

This is where SAP’s product configuration and bundling come in handy. Price calculation can be done faster using the pricing engine. This flexibility reduces the time to market and addresses customer needs uniquely. Following the quote stage, once the customer confirmation is received, contracts or agreements can be captured in SAP and order processing commenced. Order types could vary among New / Change / Cancel / Add-on. Each order type can be processed as per the data required and associated workflows. The order status can then be tracked and once completed, the customer, service and contract data will be sent to billing. The modules are integrated on the same SAP platform and hence reduce redundancy.

In terms of customer support function, issues can be broadly categorised into Network trouble tickets and Customer trouble tickets. The former is created by CSPs themselves when there is a network outage and multiple customers on the network get affected. Customer trouble tickets are those where there is a fault for a specific customer. In either case, SAP CRM service module can address the issues and track the complete trouble ticket cycle.

SAP also equips field service engineers with the knowledge base, based on historical resolution cases. This will enable quicker resolutions and easier adaptability for new service engineers. In case companies are looking for spare parts planning SAP has ready modules to cater to.

With its rich functionality, SAP supports end-to-end business processes for a customer-centric organisation. SAP solution maps recommend the best practice approach to meet the varying demands of the industry and help companies to stay competitive in one of the most dynamic markets.

The author is Principal Consultant of SAP practice with MindTree Consulting Limited, Bangalore.