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OTE-Cosmote Unified Customer Master - CCDI

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Executive Summary

OTE, the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization is the largest telecommunications provider in the Greek market and, together with its affiliate companies, forms the leading telecommunications Groups in SE Europe. It is a member of the Deutsche Telekom Group. The OTE Group offers a full range of products and services, from broadband services, fixed and mobile telephony, to high-speed data communications and leased lines services. In addition, the Group in Greece is involved in a range of activities, notably satellite communications, real-estate and professional training. At present, OTE companies employ more than 30.000 people in 4 countries.

OTE’s customer data reside on a number of IT Systems, thus making it difficult to create a unique Customer view that will serve the CRM strategy of the organization in all aspects of its Sales, Service and Marketing processes. Therefore, the need for a Continuous Customer Data Improvement (CCDI) & Quality process on a centralized Customer View, is crucial for the organisation.

OTE awarded Cognity with this ambitious project, which allows the centralised management of Customer data, based on the best-of-breed Customer Master Data Management system of Oracle Siebel UCM (Universal Customer Master). OTE holds one of the largest and long-standing Customer bases in the region.

Business Challenges

The main business challenges addressed in the context of this project were:

  • Integrate Customer data from multiple back-end systems, to create a 360 degree customer view that will be accessible by a number of operational systems
  • Decide on Customer data survivorship and business rules for cleansing, standardising and merging Customers. Cleanse, standardise and de-duplicate Customer data coming from multiple back-end systems
  • Create a unique Customer view in the Universal Customer Master and maintain its relationships with the data residing in the back-end systems
  • Provide a unified working environment for Data Steward teams, so that the quality and harmonisation of data within UCM and across the board is ensured at all times
  • Streamline the Customer creation process, starting from the Universal Customer Master and continuing to the relevant back-end systems
  • Address the complete Customer lifecycle, (create, update, terminate, etc.)
  • Enable external systems and applications to participate in the Customer lifecycle processes
  • Improve Customer Experience by empowering the customer-facing employees with a complete Customer view
  • Ensure the integrity and consistency of all Customer-related data and enable real-time data cleansing, matching and merging
  • Enforce Data Quality processes and enable continuous Customer Data Improvement

Turning Vision into Results

Cognity has successfully completed, in phases, one of the most important Master Data Management & Data Quality projects in the region, in terms of size and importance.

A key element of the OTE Master Data Management Architecture is that master data is accessible from the source systems, especially customer facing systems operating at the channels, like Siebel Call Center, Convergys Billing, OTE’s Order Management System, Oracle eBusiness Suite ERP, Retail POS, etc. This provides OTE with the ability to improve data quality at the source and leverage UCM capabilities in terms of on-line data cleansing matching and merging.

The real-time integration between the Oracle Siebel UCM system and the rest of the systems of OTE takes place over the OTE BUS, also implemented by Cognity on the Oracle SOA Suite. Cognity adopted a standards-based integration and a SOA approach that will enable OTE to further expand this architecture and adapt to the changing business environment.

Cognity’s solution enabled OTE to achieve its objectives to:

  • Create and enforce a business process to support the Continuous Customer Data Improvement
  • Create a central Customer Hub using Siebel UCM and align Customer data management related applications
  • Provide a real-time mechanism to maintain synchronization among Customer data management related applications
  • Provide a tool for Customer cleansing, matching and merge actions (clean-match-merge) in UCM, for use by OTE business users
  • Provide a set of customer management services (create/update/view), to be used by the business applications which manage Customer data
  • Provide the Roadmap for Master Data Management Architecture in OTE.

Cognity’s UCM implementation enabled OTE to gain insight on customer value and improve business processes, as well as achieve operational savings by reducing IT maintenance costs, related to Customer data management.