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Use Case: Automation of creating an Order for a request of New installation of Internet Service for a MDU(Multi Dwelling Unit) or HOA (House Owner Association)

By Gayatri Ganesan posted Mon September 27, 2021 12:33 AM

  

#ibmautomation #UseCase#ibmcloudpakforbusinessautomation#ibmodm

In this article, I would be writing about an Order Management Use case within the Telecom domain for a leading client where the process of creating a new Installation service order for a particular MDU or HOA was automated. I will also specify how the decision of creating a product for a particular Billing Account within a HOA was created in ODM.

Multi Dwelling Units frequently need to add or remove tenants from their bill.

Currently, the following processes are done manually by the Customer Representative agents: -

  1. Multi dwelling unit (MDU) sends a new installation request through an email. The email requests are tracked by Agents in a web portal knows as DOCS.
  2. The Agent validates the Business Name/Phone from the requested email in the DOCS and verifies if the Billing Account is present in the AMDOCS ENSEMBLE system. The ENSEMBLE is a leading customer care, billing and Order management system used for convergent telecom operations.
  3. After the Agent verifies that the Billing Account is present in the ENSEMBLE system, they verify if it is an MDU account, and then the address of the account is verified again in the ENSEMBLE and Martens system.
  4. For every HOA, there is a Bulk Ops document which has the list of steps and details of some values for three kind of products named as “Fictitious”, “Wireline” and “Web Access”, which the Agent needs to follow when submitting the request to create an order into the ENSEMBLE System.

All the above-mentioned processes involve a lot of manual work of about an average of 16 minutes per request. These processes were automated by using Cloud Pak for Business Automation reducing the labour costs for these tasks and making the work of agents little easier.  

For the first task of reading the emails from DOCS, IBM RPA was used to schedule to read the email content every 15 minutes.

For the second task of extraction of information from email content, a BAW process with a task to call a microservice for extraction of data was created.

For the third task of verifying the Billing account, another BAW task was created which will call the ENSEMBLE system to validate the extracted fields and address.

For the fourth step of creating a Product object based on Bulk Ops document ODM Rules were used. Finally, Order was created by submitting the product to the Ensemble system from BAW.

Let’s see in detail how the ODM rule for forming a Product based on the Bulk Ops Document was implemented.

The input request JSON for the ODM will be a “billingAccount” object and the response returned will be a list of “products” and “remarks”. Remarks are the remarks extracted from the Bulk Ops document which is needed for the order creation.  

The rule flow first initializes the Wireline Product and then executes the Bulk Ops document rules associated for wirelines product for the particular HOA identified based on the account number from the input, in a decision table. Similarly, the rule flow initializes “Web Access” and “ Fictitious” products.

This is how the decision table is designed according to the Bulk Ops Document for the respective HOAs. Bulk Ops Document has the Billing Account number and a sequence of steps which is converted into an action in decision table. According to the steps the Product object will be formed and then the BAW will complete the action for creating an order for new installation for a Billing Account.

The codes mentioned in the above screenshot “DSL100MD”, “PP1525MDU” etc are Price Plan codes which is uploaded in an excel sheet and loaded in the ODM to be selected in the ODM’s decision table.




So, overall, we saw how RPA, BAW and ODM was used to automate the process of creating a new installation service request for an MDU/HOA. This provided a huge cost benefit to the customer by reducing the labour cost by approximately $2150 per month.



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