A new Sales Information System for Maroc Telecom’s fixed-line voice and data services

Maroc Telecom is Morocco’s leading operator, with eight million mobile subscribers and a rapidly expanding fixed-line customer base of 1.35 million. Its highly proactive approach to growing these fixed-line services is focused on the El Manzil brand.

As the national market leader, Maroc Telecom (Itissalat Al-Maghrib) has strongly moulded the landscape of telecommunications in Morocco. Furthermore, its own story is inseparable from that of the modernization of the country’s infrastructures. Maroc Telecom continues to increase its customer base almost daily and by the end of 2005 it could boast 8.8 million mobile customers (67% of market share), 1.3 million fixed-line customers and 242,000 ADSL lines (96% of market share).

Business Challenges
In 2003, keen to offer greater customer satisfaction and prepare itself for the potential deregulation of fixed-line services, Maroc Telecom decided to modernize its IT infrastructure. It also wanted to take advantage of the BSCS system already in use for the Mobile service IT infrastructure and choose a Front Office system with the flexibility to interface with the Back-End systems and which was based on Web technology (thin customer).

Solution
Following an international competitive bidding process, Atos Origin was selected to integrate and implement this new sales information system called "WIAM". WIAM is based on a state-of-the-art and innovative software solution which incorporates features used on the market’s leading packages:

• Front Office: MyNetonomy by Netonomy and used by close to 3,000  users daily on over 350 sites throughout Morocco (Maroc Telecom sales agencies, call centers and technical sites). The Front Office screens were customized by Atos Origin to support the business processes of a fixed-line telecoms operator and to take into account Maroc Telecom’s requirements.
• Billing System: BSCS by LHS, one of the leading Customer Care & Billing Systems (CCBS) on the market. The BSCS billing system is the master database for the sales offers data warehouse and includes replication (in real time via the integration services) of customer sales data necessary to ensure costing / billing: Customers / Contracts / Products and Services. The system deals with more than 250 million calls per month.
• Application Bus: The backbone of the system. Integration Services: Websphere Application Server / MyNetonomy ISF / MQ Series. This program manages the Business Processes between the different specialist applications. More than 200,000 XML messages are thus exchanged each day and are processed by the integration services, which direct them towards the correct systems, analyze the responses and make process monitoring decisions.
• Database: Oracle
• Platforms: Sun - Solaris

The project lasted 22 months. There was close cooperation with Maroc Telecom and some 30 people from the Information Services Department and 60 people from various other departments, i.e. Customer Services, Marketing, Accounts, etc. were involved. The project reaches some 1.3 million fixed-line customers and has around 3,000  potential daily users. Some 170 different price plans have been defined and more than 200,000 Messages and 250 million calls are costed each month.

Benefits
WIAM went live throughout Morocco at the beginning of July 2005. The constraints of the old system have been removed, thus enabling an unlimited number of connections (3,000  potential users can connect simultaneously at Maroc Telecom). Billing times have been improved (from 7 to 3 days on average) and billing every two weeks has been introduced. Collection times have been reduced and new sales offers can be introduced with a faster Time to Market. 

Furthermore, a user-friendly web interface has been implemented, which requires no software deployment, thus enabling application updates to be made simultaneously at all work stations. Each system is independent of the others (asynchronous communication between systems) and each sub-system operates in its area of specialization: MyNetonomy – Front Office, BSCS – sales offers, billing, etc.

The Next Steps
Following the implementation of the WIAM integration project, Atos Origin now provides application maintenance (Tierce Maintenance Applicative (TMA)) for the global system, which includes fixed and scalable maintenance. In addition, in October 2005, Atos Origin won the Maroc Telecom competitive bidding process to automate the activation of ADSL and voice services.

“The WIAM project has been very ambitious. Maroc Telecom and Atos Origin have succeeded in implementing a solution which is original and unique in the world of telecommunications generally and amongst the global operators in particular. The success of the project is the result of a lot of hard work by all the teams and the full support of Maroc Telecom management.”
Fadhel Kraiem, Information Systems Manager, Maroc Telecom