MSI for Mobility: co-innovation for mobile request management

Orange Business, with our Multisourcing Service Integration (MSI) for Mobility solution, is working with customers to resolve the multitude of issues related to managing the complexity of their enterprise mobile workforces. One example is through co-innovation initiatives, including a recent project around Mobile Request Management , which we undertook with a customer that had a specific set of challenges. Let’s take a closer look.

Managing the complexity of workforce mobility

The mobile workforce is expected to reach 1.87 billion workers or 42.5 percent of the global workforce by 2022 (source: IBM). While workforce mobility has had undeniable benefits for business growth, customer satisfaction and even employee retention, it also has meant that large enterprises are now faced with managing complex, multi-country telco environments that involve a multitude of mobile network operators and vendors involved in delivering global mobility solutions.

Managing day-to-day interactions with mobile service providers can be a challenging and time-consuming activity for fleet managers. In addition, large, multinational enterprises often have multiple tools and applications that vary in each country. This impacts operational efficiency at every level.

Out-tasking the management of this complex environment is a value proposition that Orange Business delivers for global enterprises through our Multisourcing Service Integration (MSI) for Mobility solutions. With its modular approach, MSI for Mobility can be adapted to each customer’s needs in order to provide global governance and a seamless experience in managing mobile assets.

Reduce complexity and inefficiencies through request management

Request management is a core aspect of an enterprise’s global mobile fleet management activities and, along with incident management, is a key activity for the service desk.

While each enterprise has unique business processes and internal tools, the daily tasks related to order fulfillment of new device and service requests, along with incident management, are typically quite similar. For a large enterprise with thousands of internal customers accessing services from mobile network operators across several countries, request management can be a real challenge in addition to being very costly. This complexity is compounded by the need to ensure that local contract terms, including negotiated rates, are respected in addition to managing different device catalogs. This is where MSI for Mobility comes into play.

Co-innovation to redefine global request management

In the spirit of customer co-innovation, we recently worked with one of our enterprise customers on a proof-of-concept initiative to provide critical insights into how out-tasking request management could improve operational efficiencies.

The company, a major multinational operating in sixty-eight countries worldwide, identified significant inefficiencies in their manual request management processes and, with the imminent retirement of key fleet management staff, wanted to assess the possibility of out-tasking and automating the request management workflow.

To address this, the company’s central fleet manager worked closely with the International Mobile Services (IMS) team at Orange Business during an intensive, three-month period to test the out-tasking and automation of request management through a proof of concept.

During the initial set-up phase of the project, the IMS team analyzed the customer’s business processes in order to develop a functional framework. Within four weeks from the start of the project, an operational model was in place, handling daily requests and managing incidents, which enabled the fleet manager to focus on higher-value tasks.

During the three-month run of the proof of concept, the customer’s end users were able to access the company’s IT service management platform as per usual in order to place requests and signal incidents on certain mobility services, such as device SIM orders, tariff change requests, modify options and line cancellations.

Through the interfacing of our IT service management platform with that of the customer’s, request fulfillment was performed and tracked by the Orange Global Service Desk, a dedicated 24/7 team of mobility experts responsible for resolving and managing the entire lifecycle of all of the customer’s service requests, all while delivering the highest level of service support quality to the customer.

eBonding: bringing IT service management platforms together

The IT service management (ITSM) platform is the heart and soul of an organization’s IT service delivery to its internal and external clients. A natural extension of our proof of concept would have been to go beyond a single country and link ITSM platforms, via APIs, across mobile network operators to provide the central fleet manager with a global view of all of their mobile investments and assets.

In the case of a service integration and management (SIAM) approach for mobile connectivity, customers choose mobile network operators according to their specific procurement policies and local needs. Orange, mandated by the customer, ensures the daily monitoring of the mobile network operators, which enables central reporting across all of the services engaged. Orange, as an operator-agnostic partner, provides the customer with a global dashboard of the performance of the network operators with whom the customer has contracted. When and if KPIs are not met, we can propose service improvement strategies to the customer.

Next steps for MSI for Mobility

Linking, or eBonding, a customer’s IT service management platforms with the ITSM platform of an external service provider, such as Orange Business, is an important next phase in rolling out a more mature MSI type service. ITSM eBonding enables a seamless integration between the customer’s IT environment and the Orange Business IT service management platform and, in the case of multi-country MSI for Mobility, the various mobile operators that are sourced and contracted by the customer.

The above proof of concept successfully demonstrated how Orange Business is able to comprehend and capture our customer’s specific business processes and ensure daily management of service and device requests.

While the scope of the proof of concept was limited to a single country, the service is operator agnostic, meaning that Orange Business can interface with any mobile network operator in any country and oversee services on behalf of the customer on a national, regional or international basis.

Request and incident management, along with the Orange Business Global Service Desk, are key cornerstones of the Multisourcing Service Integration for Mobility solutions that Orange Business proposes. By leveraging existing ITSM solutions, Orange Business helps enterprise customers optimize the ROI of their investments through time savings and productivity gains.

Read how Orange Business is working with enterprise customers to simplify global mobility management with Multisourcing Service Integration for Mobility.