The reaction to the new automation from our staff carrying out this work, is great. Since rollout, it’s working well, without any issues. Change requests are responded to quickly by the Conscia Ireland team (formerly Agile Networks) and they’re very professional to work with.<\/p>\n\n\n\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/conscia.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/agile-case-study-enet-150x150.jpg\")
\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tJean Toomey\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\tHead of Customer Operations, Enet\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/section>\n\n\n
Business Challenge<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Enet recently opened its state-of-the-art Network Operations Centre (NOC), which is part of the new \u20ac1M headquarters facility in Limerick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The NOC operates on a 24\/7\/365 basis, monitoring 5,400km of fibre infrastructure, including the Irish State\u2019s Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), proprietary metro networks, a unique dark fibre backhaul infrastructure, as well as one of the largest licensed wireless networks in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And with that investment comes an unwavering commitment to innovate and provide world-class service levels to its customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The operations team at Enet recognised early on that automation has a key role to play in improving its business processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They engaged the Conscia Ireland team (formerly Agile Networks) to review some of those processes and implement selected automation to help achieve its operational goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Automation Starts with Discovery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The engagement began with a discovery exercise to explore key NOC processes and understand the feasibility and operational impact of automating them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Enet recognised that network and business process automation could play an important role in operations performance improvement, but were unsure of where to start. Through Conscia’s consulting process, led by Michal Krzysztofowicz (Network Automation Team Lead) and Michael Kinsella (Sector Director for Service Provider), a series of discovery workshops were conducted to identify Enet\u2019s unique needs, use cases and challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Conscia Ireland team (formerly Agile Networks) advised on the establishment of certain foundational requirements for automation. In other words, what is required to make Enet\u2019s network environment automatable?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Areas such as a solid and repeatable naming, numbering and addressing convention as well as the strict adherence to same was encouraged. Conscia Ireland (formerly Agile Networks) also implemented a dedicated server environment upon which both test and production applications reside and function. This allowed for demarcation and a disciplined approach to automation development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Productivity Improvements for Engineering Staff<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Working together with Enet, several processes, which represented automation \u2018quick wins\u2019 were identified. These processes primarily focused on planned works or fault notifications, critical and time-sensitive communications for the organisation\u2019s 80 carrier customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The success of the automation project lay in the accurate retrieval of customer records from Enet\u2019s CRM system. With 80 carrier customers, some contracting one service from Enet and others contracting hundreds, the key lay in the ability to automatically spin up a dataset that met the requirements for a particular notification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, with planned work notifications, NOC staff can now quickly pull customer information from affected circuit IDs and send out an appropriate notification in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously. Similarly, in the case of a service impacting event, the process of communicating the effects to customers is timely and precise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The automation of these processes yields many benefits for Enet including productivity improvements for engineering staff, allowing more time to be spent on fault resolution or faster completion of planned works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Increased responsiveness to Enet\u2019s customers has not gone unnoticed and the reliability and consistency of accurate outbound communication builds trust and confidence in Enet\u2019s service. In a market where competition is intense and price is not always the deciding factor, positive customer experience becomes more important as a distinct competitive advantage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Automation Helps to Reach Long-Term Operational Goals<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The success of the project has prompted Jim Molony and his team to look at other initiatives that will help Enet to fulfill its longer term strategy of automated service build.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And while he\u2019s conscious that there\u2019s a lot of work still required to reach that goal, he views Conscia Ireland (formerly Agile Networks) as a strategic partner to help them get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We’re looking at a number of short-term initiatives focused on network security, network and service discovery and some legacy platforms. We also need to put in place a governance structure around our automation infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\tJim Molony\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\t\t\tHead of Engineering, Enet\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/section>\n\n\n Enet is Ireland\u2019s largest open access network provider. It builds and operates the largest alternative wholesale telecoms network in Ireland, which facilitates the delivery of affordable, world-class broadband and wireless services to homes and businesses on a nationwide basis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1102,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"global_solutions":[],"global_partners":[],"global_industries":[],"global_business_outcome":[],"global_types":[],"class_list":["post-612","cases","type-cases","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\t\t\tProject Outcomes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Improved Service Levels<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\n
Well on the Way to Automated Service-Build<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\n