Down to the last two breakout sessions at Innovation World, and we heard from Ophir Edrey of Amdocs, a company providing software for business support, with a focus on the communications, media and entertainment industries. They wanted to be able to leverage their own experience across multiple geographies, leading their customers towards a best practice-based implementation. To do this, they created a solution book that brings together best practices, methodologies, business processes and other information within an enterprise architecture to allow Amdoc consultants to work together with customers to collaborate on how that architecture needs to be modified to fit the customer’s specific needs.
The advantage of this is the Amdocs doesn’t just offer a software solution, but an entire advisory service around the best practices related to the solution. The solution book is created in ARIS, including the process models, solution design, solution traceability, customer collaboration (which they are migrating to ARIS Connect, not Process Live), and review and approval management.
He showed us a demo of the Amdocs Solution Book, specifically the business process framework. It contains four levels of decomposition, starting with a value chain of the entire operator landscape mapped onto the full set of process model families. Drilling through into a specific set of processes for, in this example, a mobile customer upgrading a handset, he showed the KPIs and the capabilities provided by their solution for that particular process; this starts the proof of Amdocs value to the customer as more than just a software provider. Drilling further into the specific process model, the Amdocs consultant can gather feedback from the customer on how this might need to be modified for their specific needs, and comments added directly on the models for others to see and comment.
They have had some pushback from customers on this – some people really just want a paper document – but generally have had very enthusiastic feedback and a strong demand to use the tool for projects. The result is faster, better, value-added implementations of their software solutions, giving them a competitive edge. Certainly an interesting model for the services arm of any complex enterprise software provider.