Convergence of IT systems used for Telecom, Energy and Utility Industries A whitepaper

Authored by: Abhishek Mishra

Convergence of IT systems for telecom, power & utility

Contents TABLE OF FIGURES .................................................................................... 3 1. Introduction ....................................................................................... 4 2. Requirements vis--vis eTOM ............................................................. 5 3. Current Scenarios ............................................................................... 9
3.1 3.2 3.3 Smart-meters ........................................................................................10 Without the usage of SCADA and Smart-Grids .........................................11 With the usage of SCADA and Smart-Grids ..............................................12

4. Future Full Convergence ................................................................. 13 5. Proposed architecture ....................................................................... 15 7. Benefits............................................................................................ 18 8. Glossary ........................................................................................... 19 9. THE COMPANY.................................................................................. 20

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TABLE OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: KEY AREAS OF UTILITY INDUSTRY MAPPED WITH ETOM........................................................... 5 FIGURE 2: TYPICAL POWER TRANSMISSION SYSTEM ............................................................................. 9 FIGURE 3: POWER TRANSMISSION GRID LAYOUT ............................................................................... 10 FIGURE 4: SMART ELECTRICITY METER ............................................................................................ 11 FIGURE 5: SMART GAS METER ...................................................................................................... 11 FIGURE 6: PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE FOR A CONVERGED PLATFORM ...................................................... 15 FIGURE 7: THE 6 LAYER ARCHITECTURE ........................................................................................... 16 FIGURE 8: TMN MODEL FOR THE LOGICAL LAYERS BASED ARCHITECTURE ................................................. 17

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Convergence of IT systems for telecom, power & utility

1. Introduction The US Department of Energy defines smart grid as "the electricity delivery system from point of generation to point of consumption integrated with communications and information technology for enhanced grid operations, customer services, and environmental benefits." Situational awareness is the new buzzword which in reality is the requirement of power and several other utility companies. Optimal utilization of electrical energy, gas and water supply, etc. is dictating the need to deploy communication networks that would link the utility networks also, intelligently. This whitepaper is an attempt to highlight how the requirement of multiple industries will converge with the help of technology, thus benefitting the end-users, as well as how the smart grid management systems can contribute to a healthier and greener environment.

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2. Requirements vis--vis eTOM

Support customer interface management, order handling and bill payments & receivables management Resource/service problem, quality, trouble and performance management

Track & manage service & resource provisioning

Mediate service resource records Collect, process, and usage

Manage the workforce responsible for the activation & maintenance of utility services
Enterprise Management

distribute and audit all necessary management information

Security, fraud and revenue assurance management requirements

Strategic & Enterprise Planning

Enterprise Risk Management

Enterprise Effectiveness Management Stakeholder & External Relations Management

Knowledge & Research Management Human Resources Management

Financial & Asset Management

Figure 1: Key areas of utility industry mapped with eTOM

Now with respect to the eTOM model which is the well accepted standard in the telecommunications industry has a lot of relevance in the smart-grid and utility industry. Consider the Operations block of the eTOM model where we have the 4 verticals of Operational Support & Readiness, Fulfillment, Assurance & Billing and these domains will have a more urgent requirement for the inter-networking and central control of the utility applications and their usage. The other domains of the eTOM model can also be mapped with the requirements of the utility industry in future, but for now, the focus should be on these blocks as highlighted in Figure 1: Key areas of utility industry mapped with eTOM. CRM support & readiness block: This will provide the necessary interface and support to all the blocks under Fulfillment, Assurance & Billing blocks. The roles and responsibilities under the purview of this block are (with respect to utility industry): 1. Customer interface management: Take care of all prospective customers as well as all current customers. Such interfaces can even be extended to the actual customers over internet (customer portals) but it might not be very useful except for enabling

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the customer to do a re-load of his account (pre-paid) or check his/her un-billed usage. In the utility industry there are not so many products available for customer offering unlike the telecommunications industry, so this might not have much use for product/or service selling as such. 2. Order handling: Receiving the requests from new customers for providing the utility services at their premises and service modification/termination requests from the existing customers. All requests received will be forwarded to the system involved in service activation. 3. Problem handling: All complaints regarding services used by them will be received here with a primary level of trouble-shooting offered if possible. Complaints will be recorded in IT systems in the form of a Fault Ticket and forwarded to the team/system responsible for the issue resolution under the Assurance vertical. 4. Bill invoice management: This block will be responsible for the management of all invoices. The source of the service usage data and the actual generation of the invoice is available under the service guiding & mediation block under the Billing vertical. 5. Bill payments & receivables management: The responsibility for the tracking the payments from all payment gateways, providing rebates or discounts, dunning etc. With the advent of real-time communication between the smart meters and the central operations managements systems, accurate and most up-to-date billing can be done. In addition the customers can be provided the facility of forecasting their usage and expenses based on the current usage patterns and tariff plans. Such interfacing can be provided of customer-portals available over Internet. 6. Retention & loyalty: This block has the responsibility of ensuring that customers can be retained as long as possible by understanding their requirements, problems, risks, etc and developing retention schemes to ensure loyalty. 7. Marketing fulfillment: Issuance and distribution of requested services. 8. Selling: Management of all prospects, qualifying an opportunity, cross/up selling, acquisition of customer data, negotiate with potential customers Sales/Contract 9. Bill inquiry handling: Responding to queries from customers for finding their outstanding payments and other dues and discounts is the responsibility of this block. The response that will be sent back to the customer can be more accurate with the availability of smart-meters and their management systems. Such inquiries and their respective responses can be done through the customer portals or even through SMS if the CRM systems can be integrated with SMS gateways of all incumbent telecom service providers. Upon analyzing the business processes involved in the functionality blocks of eTOM, we can appreciate that the Telco, Utility and Energy industries have somewhat similar functional requirements. The similar functionalities can be grouped and classified as below. Workforce management: All the field-force involved in the installation, activation and maintenance of the utility services and their smart-meters need to be managed under this block. This would help in scheduling of the visit of the technicians, forecasting the

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requirements of technician visits or truck-roll, dynamic management of the field technician as per the changing real-time requirements and their operational support. Service configuration & activation: In the absence of centralized management systems (analogous to the Network Management Systems) all configurations, activations have to be done at the customers premises always. Nevertheless the responsibility of Service configuration & activation is under this block. Resource provisioning: The deployment and setup of the resources required for fulfilling all customer requirements have to be dealt with in this block. Laying out of electrical infrastructure like power cables, transformers, sub-stations, connecting all infrastructure nodes and preparing them to be used for providing service to the customers over this infrastructure. Service problem management: This process block is responsible for handling all problems arising in the infrastructure (for each utility industry the type of infrastructure will vary) which is directly related with the services being availed of, by the customers. Such customer-effecting problems need to be immediately resolved. This needs elaborate plans and processes (can be described up to Level 3 or Level 4 for the utility industry) for diagnosing and resolving the problems. Service quality management: This process block is responsible for regular (preferably in real-time) monitoring of the services being used by the customers. The parameters or the KPIs of the delivered services need to be monitored in order to ensure continuous and uninterrupted service can be provided to the customers. Resource problem management: The problems in the resources/infrastructure that are observed and reported by the internal operations and maintenance teams are recorded in some system in the form of Resource Trouble Ticket. Such tickets will contain all details and descriptions of the problem. The processes under this block will take care of how the resolutions of such problems are undertaken and by whom. Resource quality management: This process block is responsible for handling all problems arising in the infrastructure of the utility provider. Regular monitoring of the resources health by means of keeping a constant check on the KPIs of the infrastructure can help in resource problem management. This would enable the utility service providers to proactively do resource as well as service problem management. Prediction of potential problems in the infrastructure/resource can be a very powerful tool for managing the services also. Service guiding and mediation: The process involves collection, filtration, validation, sorting, re-conciliation and collation of usage data records (UDR) for the services used/consumed. This information can be for retail/domestic consumers or industrial users also. Resource guiding and mediation: The process involves collection of all data which can indicate how much the infrastructure has used. This information can be for retail/domestic consumers or industrial users also. Resource data collection and distribution: All the information regarding the resource and service usage, resource and service problem management, resource and service performance/quality management needs to be shared and utilized in other processes like for the CRM systems need the billing and mediation information along with service data.

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Enterprise Risk Management: All the customer and infrastructure information contained in the various IT applications has to be protected. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, communications in the face of a serious incidents, from security threats/violations and fraud attempts.

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3. Current Scenarios

Figure 2: Typical power transmission system

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Figure 3: Power transmission grid layout

3.1

Smart-meters

Smart meters which measure the usage of electricity, gas or water are connected with central servers which can receive the usage data from the customers premises in real time. Apart from the usage data, the smart meters can also send faults or alarms indicating a problem in the service being delivered at the customers premises. These smart meters connect with the operations control center using some interconnection technology or protocol which is reliable and secure. With the increasing need for standardizing the above mentioned communications requirement, TCP/IP protocol is being adopted as the standard. Usage of IP would allow a more flexible and easily expandable communications network.

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Figure 4: Smart electricity meter

Figure 5: Smart gas meter

3.2

Without the usage of SCADA and Smart-Grids

The traditional method of power distribution, management of different component of a power grid and usage data collection from customer premises involved a lot of manual work requiring a lot of human interventions. This had 2 major shortcomings first is that monitoring and troubleshooting had to be done by visually checking the actual source of the problem and that too, after the problem had already occurred and caused some inconvenience to the customers; the second short coming was that customers often would not be aware of their usage patterns and their current outstanding payments, etc. The collection of the service usage data had to be done by sending a technician to the customers premise to note down the meter readin gs and have the data sent to a billing department. This approach (all these years) obviously involved more time and efforts. Also, the other problem was that only when a customer would report a problem in his services, then a technician would be dispatched to investigate the problem. The technician would have to start his investigations manually, one by one checking the possibility of the problem in the customers premises, then at the cabling leading outside, then the nearby transformers, and so on. In short this was a completely reactive kind of Service Assurance (Service Problem Management as per the eTOM model).

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3.3

With the usage of SCADA and Smart-Grids

SCADA systems are used to monitor and control a plant or equipment in industries such as telecommunications, water and waste control, energy, oil and gas refining and transportation. A SCADA system gathers information, such as where a leak on a pipeline has occurred, transfers the information back to a central site, alerting the home station that the leak has occurred, carrying out necessary analysis and control, such as determining if the leak is critical, and displaying the information in a logical and organized fashion. SCADA systems can be relatively simple, such as one that monitors environmental conditions of a small office building, or incredibly complex, such as a system that monitors all the activity in a nuclear power plant or the activity of a municipal water system.

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4. Future Full Convergence In the current scenario, there are similar functionalities being delivered by various COTS products in the Utility (energy & water) and in Telco industries. If similar functional requirements can be catered to by one or at least fewer systems/tools, it would provide a high level of benefits to the end customers eventually. Some of the easily identifiable functionalities are: 1. Service activation: After the customer (retail or corporate) has applied for a given service or a set of bundled services, and the payments (or credit verification processes) have been completed and the service provider has also internally completed a feasibility assessment, then the service needs to be provisioned and activated. The service will be actually activated in 2 places at the customer premise and at the infrastructure side (in the network, etc). This process can be manual or automated. If automation is required, some IT System will be required. Such a requirement (at least at a high level) will exist for Utility (energy & water) and in Telco industries. 2. SLA, SLG and OLA management: Service level agreements and related guarantees, Operational Level Agreements are fundamentally business level or contractual level concepts. At a high level they are not tied down to any industry as such. 3. Fault management: Any type of a problem, whether it occurs at a Service level, which is reported by a customer, or its a problem occurring in the infrastructure of the Service Provider, needs to be put on record and has to be put through a predefined business process for ensuring a timely rectification. 4. Work-force management: Management of the workforce (especially the field-force) requires a few fundamental things: Work assignment Field-force scheduling Work-progress tracking Dispatching of field-force Skill-set management Above mentioned work-force management requirements exist for both Utility (energy & water) and in Telco industries. 5. Line testing: Service assurance scenarios wherever any kind of testing and verification of the infrastructure (either at customer premise or at service providers side), field technicians has to be sent to identify and resolve problems. Owing to the advancement of IT technologies, several management systems now exist which can do a certain level of testing and verification remotely from a regional or a local office. Integration and consolidation of such management systems is a need of Utility (energy & water) and in Telco industries. 6. Performance monitoring: the health of the service providers infrastructure (telecom, utility or energy networks) need to be regularly monitored to ensure that proactive service assurance can be employed and offered to the customers.

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Monitoring of pre-defined KPIs or KQIs will be the basis of performance monitoring. Based on the statistical data collected SLAs can also be associated and managed. 7. Customer relationship management: Acquisition and retention of a customer and encouraging customer loyalty is the prime responsibility of a CRM system (or a similar business process). CAF or the customer application forms are submitted to the sales kiosks or similar points-of-sales. Then the customers request is keyed into or recorded into an IT System which allows the flow of the data into downstream systems. Also CRM systems need to fetch infrastructure related and billing related information, as per customer and operational requirements. 8. Billing operations and revenue management: All services used or consumed by the customers need to be accounted for and accordingly invoiced. Very efficient and accurate systems are required for this, in order to ensure minimum or no revenue leakages. 9. Workflow management / Project management: In order to execute any business or operational process, certain pre-definable set of tasks need to be executed in a given sequential order, maintaining the ownership of the task and having a managerial control on the overall time-bound progress. Such a requirement can be fulfilled using a tool which can manage the entire business process and this system should also allow system level integrations with other systems and tools. 10. Data-warehousing and business intelligence: Decision making requires availability of information in understandable formats, coming in from all IT Systems employed by the Service Provider. Analysis of data gives an insight to the management teams about various factors like service usage patterns, customer preferences, revenue accrual patterns, assessment of efficiency of partners and suppliers, inventory availability, etc. All the above mentioned IT Systems will churn out a huge amount of data which can help in building a lot of information bases. A system which can dig into this database and extract and represent this data in an intelligent format, will be a common requirement of Utility (energy & water) and in Telco industries. 11. E-Security: Security of all IT applications deployed by the service provider needs to be completely secure and protected from intrusions, thefts and frauds. This is a very important requirement of Utility (energy & water) and in Telco industries, for protecting their IT assets and being prepared for all contingencies as a part of a business continuity management process. Protection of data is of utmost importance in these IT applications.

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5. Proposed architecture The proposed architecture for a converged platform having Operations, Billing and CRM functionalities of Telecom, Energy and Utility industries has a common set of IT applications.

Figure 6: Proposed architecture for a converged platform

The detailed system architecture can be simplified consolidated and represented using the layered architecture. The 6 layer architecture will have the following principle components: Business Intelligence OSS, BSS, GIS and CRM EAI Management systems Infrastructure Consumer device layer

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

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BI
OSS, BSS, GIS and CRM layer EAI layer

Management Systems

Infrastructure layer

Consumer device layer

Figure 7: The 6 layer architecture

1. Business Intelligence (BI) layer: All the IT systems used for OSS, BSS, CRM, GIS will churn a huge amount of data. This massive data-pool needs to be aggregated, sorted in a way that it helps in analyzing information related with trends, patterns, inventories, etc. Data will have to be adjusted or re-modeled in a data warehouse on the basis of time-based, geography-based or infrastructure-based dimensions. Basically all the databases will feed the data to a data warehouse which will be used for generating standardized reports. 2. OSS/BSS, GIS and CRM layer: The systems which will be a part of this layer will be the ones that will implement the functionalities of service activation, service assurance, resource assurance, work-force management, line-testing, billing, crediting, rating, charging, invoicing, dunning, etc. Also the GIS systems which will have geo-spatial information database, which can be used to represent the infrastructure entities on the geographical maps. 3. EAI layer: Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), aka middleware, provides the infrastructure to connect information sources, acting as a go-between for applications and their business processes. By implementing EAI solutions, the Telco, Utility and Energy companies will be able to realize various benefits, 4. Management layer: Systems or devices which can manage or have any kind of supervisory control on the Infrastructure layer are a part of the management layer.

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5. Infrastructure layer: The components of each of the groups of Telecom, Utility, Energy which carry the information or energy or utility service to the customers premises are a part of the Infrastructure layer. Setup, deployment and maintenance of this layer is vital to the entire business and its operations. Telecom: network equipments like routers, switches, multiplexers, cables, etc Utility devices: Gas supply pipelines, pumping centers, purifiers, etc Electricity: Transmission towers, cables and wires, transformers, sub-station units, etc 6. Consumer device layer: The end user of all services offered by Telcos, Utility and Energy companies. The consumer will have following possible sets of devices: Telecom devices: POTS/EPABX, Broadband internet, IPLC, IPTV, WiMax, etc Utility devices: Gas supply for heating and cooking, water supply, and its metering systems, etc Electricity: all fans, heaters, air-conditioners, incandescent and CFL lamps, etc. and its metering systems This 6 Layer architecture is similar to the TMN model for the logical layers based architecture, which describes and recommends the alignment of IT systems and concepts with the Enterprise and the Business.

Figure 8: TMN model for the logical layers based architecture

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7. Benefits Potential benefits of having a common set of IT Systems managing and monitoring Telco, Utility and Energy infrastructure and their consumers usage data records: 1. Common GIS: An enterprise level GIS application, which can have the geo-spatial information of all infrastructural elements of electrical supply system, water and gas supply systems, including telecom infrastructure elements. Within a specified geography, presence of the infrastructure elements of one or more consumer services systems (energy, telecom, etc.) is always a very strong likelihood. Also the chances are always very high that within a common conduit or a shaft or a manhole, power cables, water pipes and telecom optical fiber cables will be passing. All these elements can be represented on a geo-spatial map as all of them will share the same co-ordinates, etc. As an example, consider the incident management perspective of these service industries; if during a planned-event in one area where an excavation around a man-hole is being done for the repair of leaking water pipe, damage is done to a nearby optical fiber cable, the ability to do a root cause analysis and the time taken to repair the damaged fiber will be minimal if their inventory and GIS systems are common. 2. Common customer database: The OSS/BSS and CRM systems hold a huge database containing details of a customer (name, address, services, billing account and subaccounts, etc). If the proposed converged system can successfully consolidate the records of all customers into one common system it will potentially lead to higher level of efficiency. 3. Reduced MTTP & MTTR: Consolidated inventory, GIS systems, and customer databases will provide a high level of visibility of all infrastructures in an area, its interdependencies, etc. This will allow the operators or controllers in a common control center to activate, monitor and repair the services. 4. Greater visibility of usage patterns: The end-customers will have complete visibility of how much of services are being consumed, the patterns and trends of usage, monthly bills, etc. At the same time service providers will get an insight about the preferences of a given set of their customers, accordingly the marketing campaigns can be modeled and a higher ROI on any sales campaign can be achieved. 5. Single portal to access multiple service providers: Self-help portals offered by multiple service providers often lead to a myriad of information for a consumer. This can be simplified to a great extent after the convergence of the management systems of all utility, energy and telecom service providers. Using such portals, the consumers can monitor their usage of all services, service selection, activation, problem reporting etc of multiple services can be done through one single portal after the convergence of platforms.

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8. Glossary

Acronym
API BI BSS CAF CRM EAI GIS IT KPI KQI OLA OSS SCADA SLA SLG SMS TMN UDR

Full Form
Application Programming Interface Business Intelligence Business Support System Customer Application Form Customer Relationship Management Enterprise Application Integration Geographic Information System Information Technology Key Performance Indicator Key Quality Indicator Operational Level Agreement Operations Support System Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Service Level Agreement Service Level Guarantee Short Messaging Service Telecommunications Management Network Usage Data Records

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9. THE COMPANY INCA INFORMATICS is a privately held company specializing in solutions and services for the telecom and utility industry. With over 40 customers including tier 1 telecom operators across the globe, INCA is one of the few companies offering a suite of solution integration services and customized operational support systems, based on the power of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Operations Support System (OSS) for the telecom and utility sector. INCA executes projects - from conceptualization to realization, from software design to system integration. INCA is a world class Systems Integration House for Telecom service providers and a niche player in Information Management for the Utilities sector. At INCA innovation is combined with a deep-rooted commitment to bring value-added service to the clients and helps them enable enterprise wide business transformation. This is achieved by using state-ofthe-art technology to create cost effective solutions to solve real-world problems. INCA provides service providers and vendors with unique software tools to simplify complex network management issues vastly reducing operating costs and improving profitability. The service delivery model of INCA comprises of an optimum combination of onsite and offshore services designed to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness. In order to provide clients with a complete pre-integrated management solution, INCA has forged strategic alliances with global partners to deliver powerful end-to-end solutions.

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