Safaricom: Delivering diversity with CELFOCUS Order Management Case Study

Orchestrating all requests on a single platform, CELFOCUS Order Management provides Safaricom with a flexible, swift and transparent order management process that reduces time-to-market.

Technological advances and changing customer needs have dramatically changed how customers interact with companies. Today, customers use multiple sources of information from independent (and often non-integrated) channels and are motivated by personal needs and emotions.

For Telcos (and other industry players), this leads to increased offer complexity due to a broadened view of products and services, also resulting in many and different requests that have to be fulfilled within an expected timeframe which tends to be tight.

As a result, Telcos are under pressure to shorten the response time to market needs and streamline the fulfilment chain from an operational perspective because those multiple requests need to be consistently addressed and quickly go live.

The Kenyan Telecommunications Market has a mobile penetration above 130% and almost 62 million subscriptions resulting from steady quarter-on-quarter growth. Safaricom is the undisputed leader in the market, holding 65% of the mobile share. Safaricom detains the most expansive and strongest network coverage, providing a comprehensive range of innovative services under one roof: mobile, fixed-voice and data services on a variety of platforms.

The Challenge

How to improve scalability and performance?

After more than a decade of using previous versions of the product, Safaricom felt the need to call for an extended product availability offered by the latest version to cater to a large flow of requests that require highly demanding order processing.

Additionally, Safaricom aimed to improve:

process orchestration;
automation scalability;
performance.

The Kenyan Telco was looking for cutting-edge technologies based on new architectures that would allow tracking and increasing order visibility, acquire service metrics to improve customer experience, and automatically scale solutions without impacting performance.

Celfocus was challenged to implement the first version of its Order Management solution back in 2009, update it as needed and install the latest version in 2021.

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The Solution

The latest version of CELFOCUS Order Management processes more in less time and detects issues more quickly if they occur. The migration to a cloud-native ecosystem allows to scale up and down based on workload and infrastructure demand, enabling Safaricom to manage resources more efficiently due to cost optimisation and handle up to 400.000 orders per day (four times when compared to the previous version). Additionally, a migration to an open-source database has allowed for OPEX reduction.

The product’s microservices architecture is supported by cloud-agnostic (they run in any cloud infrastructure, private or public) decoupled components (containers). This allows creating offline bulk orders along with the online orders that come from assisted and non-assisted channels (self-care, CRM, shops, among others).

CELFOCUS Order Management automatically manages bulk orders and enriches them, providing a detailed and aggregated view over requests and lowering fulfilment time and operational costs.

Benefits

According to Kennedy Njoroge, Enterprise Integration, Order Management & Contact Center Systems Senior Manager at Safaricom, “with CELFOCUS Order Management, we meet our 99,95% target for order management availability and increased scalability for our consumer and enterprise customers.”

CELFOCUS Order Management allows for a flexible, swift and transparent order management process that reduces time-to-market. New product subscriptions or change requests are performed quickly and with minimal impact. For the user, this process can be run autonomously for administration, installation and product development tasks.

The solution offered:

Centralised Request Management;
Increased Order Tracking and Visibility;
Simplified Channel Catalogue;
Improved Time-to-Market;
Faster Order Design & Implementation;
No Downtime;
Reduced Operational Costs;
Fast and Proactive Recovery.

CELFOCUS Order Management gathers the conditions for adapting to new scenarios based on changes in the business environment and consumer behaviour. Safaricom’s internal teams are capable of evolving and embracing new challenges. In short, both the Telco and the product are future-ready.

Project in a nutshell

CELFOCUS Order Management implementation, management and update at Safaricom since 2009;
Upgrade to version 6 featured with microservices architecture, cloud-native, and bulk order engine revamp in 2021;
Flexibility to accommodate further services, functions and offers.