Digital BES: Why?
The digital economy has shaken up customer consumption, usage habits, and business models in the telecom industry. Customer consumption and usage habits have become internetized, increasing demand for personalization, online use, sharing, and engagement in service design and product development by carriers.
Business models are more complex and diverse. Partner ecosystems are evolving from linear value chains into value fabrics where many parties interact and collaborate, and where the line between supply side and demand side is blurred. In a value fabric, pan-customers emerge for operators. These can be partners, partners' customers, normal consumers, or normal consumers that become operators' partners.
Huawei's BES responds to these changes by helping operators to digitize and become customer-centric. These changes are pushing operators away from a focus on network assets towards a dual-centric model where customer and network assets are equally important.
Dual-centric operations enable more precise customer marketing, a greater variety of goods, and more diverse and coordinated customer channels. Customer experience is faster and more consistent, and services like purchasing and transactions are more convenient. Dual-centric operations make it easier to give telecom capabilities to partners.
These are all critical success factors for customer-centric operations.
What does the BES enable?
The BES includes totally reconstructed and redesigned solutions in areas such as customer and experience, products and offerings, marketing and promotions, services and transactions, and cooperation and openness.
Customer and experience: anticipates customer needs based on customer insights, and offers products and services that can quickly meet customer needs. The BES recommends personalized products and services to meet potential needs and create a shopping experience that’s real-time, online, and on-demand.
Products and offerings: separates products, which are part of the production process, and offerings, which are part of the sales process. For instance, if the product was a Huawei Mate 7 Extreme Edition, the offering might be as follows:
- A Mate 7 handset for 4,188 yuan
- A 5,000-yuan package plus 2,400 yuan worth of free talk time spread over 24 months, with a monthly minimum usage stipulation of 218 yuan.
This gives rise to telecommunications offerings, digital offerings, physical offerings, and packages containing all three – as well as accompanying pricing, distribution, and availability.
Marketing and promotions: provides customer profiling based on big data analysis and customer segmentation for customized marketing; delivers real-time event awareness to capture customer next best actions (NBA) and next best offer (NBO) for scenario-based customer behavior analysis and prediction; and strengthens social features to leverage social sharing for word-of-mouth marketing.
Services and transactions: supports full-channel coordination and collaboration to enable customer information to be shared across channels, which creates consistent customer experiences and services. The BES also supports high-concurrency, high-capacity transactions such as flash sales, panic buying, and coupon promotion events.
Cooperation and openness: rapidly brings in and activates partners; quickly puts products on sale; and opens up marketing, payment, billing, and other capabilities to partners to monetize telecom capabilities.
BES: Not just a business enabler
As operators transform digitally, it’s imperative that they provide more digital business and digital services to compensate for dwindling revenue from traditional services; however, it’s tough to do this. Future operator business models and business needs will change, requiring their enterprise architecture and business processes to quickly adapt. Flexibility of this kind will help operators deal with uncertainties.
Increasing the flexibility and adaptability of enterprise architecture requires certain adjustments. Business logic needs to move away from fragmented, back-end decentralized IT systems.
Enterprise Operational Function Entities can be created by decoupling current BSS, OSS, and MSS systems, integrating decentralized back-end capabilities, and making these capabilities service-oriented.
To maximize flexibility, the solution also requires multi-level orchestration centers that cover business and services.
Agile technical architecture
Designed to be agile and adaptable, BES adopts a loosely coupled structure comprising front-end, middle, and back-end layers. The front-end layer mainly includes customer interaction channels. The middle layer chiefly handles automated, intelligent business process orchestration. The back-end layer deals with telecommunications business operations, including customer management, product management, order management, and partner management.
BES also utilizes service-oriented architecture (SOA) for modularized capabilities and module servicization. Modules with different functions can be flexibly assembled like building blocks to form the specific business solutions operators need to respond to changing business scenarios.
Lastly, BES has a virtualized, distributed architecture that can be deployed on a cloud platform. Depending on the business volume, this architecture allows for elastic scaling, smooth capacity expansion, and auto-collapse. The system can then deal with possible large-capacity, concurrent transactions like flash sales or group buying.
BES: A powerful range of solutions
The BES is akin to a production and assembly plant for creating standardized, reusable modules that can be flexibly assembled to make solutions for different business scenarios. It features:
- An end-to-end BES solution and a next-gen BSS that supports operators' digital operations.
- A new-generation marketing, sales and customer service solution that supports operator internetization and digital transformation.
- A front-end solution for customer engagement, interaction, and e-commerce-style experiences.
- Product and offering definitions, packages, and pricing that accelerate the launch of products and offerings.
- Full-channel order coordination, and integrated ordering for telecommunications and non-telecommunications businesses.
How to go from BSS to BES
There are four main pathways to evolve from traditional BSS to BES:
Co-existence of old and new systems: The new system is built and works in parallel to the old system; for example, a management system for new services and the ecosystem.
Overlay: The new system is built directly over the existing system; for instance, a front-end digital store and e-commerce platform.
Progressive reform: Some modules in existing systems such as the back-end order management system and product management system are gradually replaced.
End-to-end replacement: end-to-end front-end and back-end system replacement; for instance, the replacement of systems for customer management and revenue management.
As a huge part of Telco OS, Huawei’s next-gen operations system for digital transformation, BES helps carriers transform from supporters into enablers to quickly adapt to the changes in the digital era.