O2

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Outsourced KPI analysis and design

The challenge

For many years O2 has sought to differentiate itself from other UK mobile networks through Quality of Service (QoS), particularly in the corporate sector. This has required a sustained commitment to improving the resilience of O2's bearer and core networks, and for satisfying the burden of proof on its QoS claims.

In the corporate sector, QoS is made tangible with Service Level Agreements. These commit the mobile operator to provide minimum levels of service and to offer service credits for falling outside defined thresholds. Simultaneously, corporate customers are demanding greater visibility of statistics on network and service quality.

This has resulted in demand for O2's Technology Services Operations (TSO) to measure and report on performance at network, service and customer levels.

The solution

IPL was selected by O2's TSO to address the need for performance data on its 3G bearer services. The work involved a small team of IPL staff for several months and was part of a larger service management initiative.

The IPL team began with the analysis of business-level requirements for a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), for example network-attach times, data rates, latency, packet loss, etc.

We then examined existing data sources, such as customer experience databases, “drive-around” data, network statistics, etc. and analysed their data structures.

Next the team developed a functional specification for a system that would create views on this data and automate its extraction and presentation to O2's corporate service-level management system. Finally we implemented the functional specification.

The highlights

O2 has been delighted with the professional rigour that IPL has brought to the analysis process and with the quality of the resulting documentation.

The result of IPL's work is a system that automatically generates a range of graphical reports on KPIs measured over any user-defined time period. O2 now benefits from a rich source of high quality, service-level information, delivered quickly and at little or no cost.