PERFORMANCE Technologies S.A. and OTE Group of Companies (HTO) were granted the Gold BITE Award 2023 in the category of “Big Data” for Business Observability, Insights and Automation Ecosystem.
In today’s dynamic business world, competitiveness goes beyond reacting to events. Thriving requires proactive insights, real-time observability, and deep operational understanding. Enter the Intelligent Business Observability, Insights, and Automation Ecosystem. It transforms operations and decision-making, offering real-time visibility, proactive issue resolution, data-driven choices, better customer experiences, efficiency gains, collaboration, and more. Embracing this ecosystem unlocks sustained success in a competitive landscape.You can read more about the solution below.
Executive Overview
At the project’s outset, Cosmote’s core objective was to create a holistic, near-real-time overview of customer-facing and back-end processes that would allow them to manage and continuously improve operations, system performance, and customer service.
The greatest challenge in achieving this objective is the vast and constantly changing operational and technological complexity of a company such as Cosmote. As a result, it was quickly determined that Cosmote and Performance engineers would develop a platform and deliver value incrementally in an agile manner.
Today, Cosmote uses the resulting Business Observability & Insights Ecosystem platform to boost operational efficiency, make data-driven decisions, and enhance customer feedback. These capabilities provide immediate and tangible benefits for customer satisfaction and financial performance.
Context and situation
Cosmote faced the pressing challenge of efficiently managing complex business processes while extracting actionable insights from vast, varied data sources in near-real-time.
Their objectives were to streamline operations, enhance decision-making, and improve customer experience through a unified, flexible system.
Addressing these needs, Cosmote aimed not only to optimize internal efficiencies but also to adapt swiftly to market changes and elevate customer satisfaction, positioning itself firmly in a competitive landscape.
More specifically, Cosmote wanted to achieve the following objectives:
- Supervise and enhance business process efficiency and effectiveness — Their first concern was supervising and improving complex business procedures and tasks, such as promotions, order submissions, deliveries, and customer support. As these procedures involved many different departments and systems, managing and optimizing them effectively was challenging. The absence of a unified view slowed down efficient management and control.
- Monitor and improve system and service delivery performance — In addition to this, Cosmote faced challenges in monitoring performance due to the complexity of the data coming from various information systems. They needed to process and analyze this data in real time to keep up with the fast-paced business environment. A major operational and technological challenge was simplifying complex data for ease of use while retaining the necessary depth for detailed analysis.
- Build capacity to adapt to technology and process changes and grow. The company also needed to ensure its systems were flexible and scalable to adapt to rapidly changing products, processes, and technologies. This was important to avoid extensive revisions in the future.
- Enhance customer experience through improved performance and data-driven insights — Finally, improving customer experience was a top priority. Enhancing service levels, understanding customer preferences through data-driven insights, and maintaining competitiveness and customer satisfaction was crucial.
Solution description
Cosmote has a wide range of constantly changing operations and services, meaning it must deal with various distinct and disparate data types, systems, and processes. They also operate in the fast-evolving telecommunications sector, with continuous technological updates, changes in market trends, and evolving customer needs.
The operational and technological complexity and rate of change were arguably the number one challenge that the team of engineers and executives from Cosmote and Performance Technologies had to tame to create the business observability and insights platform the company needed.
Agile approach
Leadership at Cosmote understood from the beginning that a bespoke platform of this caliber would need to be developed and run according to Agile and Lean principles for these primary reasons:
A “waterfall” approach, where everything is planned from the beginning and delivered during longer iterations, was deemed too risky for the complexity of the challenge. Agile, on the other hand, offers much quicker iterations, which mitigates risk and the impact of “getting it wrong” and also allows teams to deliver valuable functionality to stakeholders quickly and continuously.
Building an observability and insights platform, especially for an enterprise like Cosmote, is more like building and running a product than implementing and finishing a project. Agile and Lean approaches are proven to benefit adaptability and continuous improvement and help build internal engineering capacity and collaboration with 3rd parties -like, in this case- Performance Technologies.
In the end, following an agile approach has allowed the team to create the first significant incarnation of the platform (named BusinessTracker) and grow it further into a full-fledged ecosystem (now called Business Observability & Insights Ecosystem).
Engineering milestones
The team’s first and fundamental task was to merge various forms of data, such as behavioral data, application information, logs, traces, metrics, and events. These data sources had different formats and meanings, making integrating them challenging. By combining these data assets in near-real-time, Cosmote could start unlocking their full potential and gain valuable insights.
The second primary task was establishing and enhancing a robust data and algorithmic analytics infrastructure and process mining functionality. This entailed building a technologically advanced framework capable of comprehensive data analysis and process optimization, forming the required teams, and fostering collaboration to maintain and expand data-driven capabilities within the organization.
The third fundamental task was operationalizing the newly built data and analytics platform and turning it into a powerhouse of value creation for stakeholders. For example, the team delivered intuitive visualizations and actionable insights to decision-makers; it integrated the platform with the company’s service management tools to help streamline efficiency and responsiveness to customer needs; it created data-driven automations to optimize processes and improve consistency and accuracy in operations.
A significant engineering objective for the platform has been the ability to accommodate new products and technologies without major model changes and to be constantly optimized for performance.
Technology stack
The team used an integrated impressive array of commercial and open-source enterprise software, such as:
- Apache Kafka: An open-source stream processing platform for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications designed to handle high-throughput, fault-tolerant data feeds.
- Dynatrace: An advanced observability platform that provides full-stack monitoring, combining application performance management, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), cloud infrastructure monitoring, and digital experience management.
- Elastic Logstash: A data processing pipeline that ingests, filters, and transforms data from various sources and then sends it to a chosen output destination, commonly used for log and event data aggregation.
- Tableau: A powerful data visualization tool that enables users to create interactive and shareable dashboards from complex data sets.
- Vertica: A leading-edge, columnar storage, MPP database designed for high-speed, large-scale query performance and analytics in data warehousing and big data applications.
Impact
Cosmote’s Business Observability & Insights Ecosystem stands as a testament to the power of data in transforming business operations. The platform is pivotal in boosting operational efficiency and enhancing data-driven decision-making. It helps improve various facets of the business, such as marketing, streamlining multichannel order submissions and executions, refining service provisioning, and optimizing support request management.
Holistic business observability is a game-changer for cross-functional collaboration, breaking down silos and enabling a more cohesive and coordinated approach to business challenges.
As a result, there is a noticeable increase in operational efficiency. Processes become more streamlined, and resources are utilized more effectively, leading to cost savings and better time and effort management. Efficiency gains directly contribute to improved service quality, and the platform allows for more personalized customer engagement, where services and interactions are tailored to meet the specific needs and preferences of individual customers.
Furthermore, the platform’s scalability and adaptability remain relevant and effective in changing market conditions and evolving business requirements. Cosmote can swiftly adapt to new trends, adjust to customer needs, and scale its operations accordingly. This adaptability secures a competitive edge in the market and ensures long-term sustainability and growth.
Cosmote’s Business Observability & Insights Ecosystem platform is a cornerstone in its quest for operational excellence, customer satisfaction, and financial success. It exemplifies how leveraging data and customer insights can profoundly transform business operations and customer relations.
