SIGMA Managed Services

Out of SIGMA’s several success stories, we had an inspiring story with one of market lead operators in the Egyptian market. In 2017, the operator decided to launch its mobile services and was seeking to adopt a strategic plan to become a fierce competent in the Egyptian market. It had a great challenge beforehand as it purchased the Huawei stack for BSS, a stack that did not have the qualified manpower to support as other operators were using the Ericsson and Siebel stacks. And since the operator is a governmental one, it could not seek the help of foreign experts as no vpn, entrance permits, or remote access was to be allowed except to Egyptian manpower.

SIGMA was a partner and sub-contractor to Huawei then. Thus, we were requested to carry out an acceptance to Huawei system, a totally new system in the Middle East and Africa. That was a risk, however, we succeeded in the acceptance process. The time we spent in mobilizing was almost two days since we had the experience with one of our operators in Iraq working with Huawei stack. SIGMA accepted the solution on behalf of the operator with all its business requirements and  testing cases. While Huawei tested as a vendor or solution provider, SIGMA tested as an operator and a business owner.

After this success story, the Egyptian operator and Huawei recommended SIGMA to take over the Managed Services. Thus, by the end of 2017, we took it over including operations of the whole stack of Huawei and business configuration. To do the business configuration, we were authorized to sit with the business teams of the operator to understand what they wanted and consequently create   a solution for it. We coordinated internally with all Huawei teams, for most of Huawei technical teams were not Egyptians, so SIGMA team facilitated the communication channels across teams. During the five years we were in charge, there was no single breach for the KPIs nor the SLAs agreed on from day one. Year over year, we gained more trust. The operator became no more concerned about the number of resources we had or their entities, it was more concerned about   the high-quality service they received. On times where there was a workload or seasonal promotions, we did not stick to a certain number of resources or the same resource names all the time; however, we were flexible enough to inject more resources for a limited period of time when needed for temporary workloads, catering for Ramadan promotions for example, or any events or festivals causing a large number of hits on the network needing special handling, with no additional cost or business impact.

The volume of tickets transferred to Huawei HQ line decreased notably. This reflected the technical capabilities and learning curve of the team, being able to solve tickets before reaching Huawei as a result of the experience gained from the site and with the operator, having the innovation enough for workarounds and business limitations in systems. The team created this breakthrough, not depending on an individual, but on a process and a whole organization. We had rotations in teams working on the project, the current team is not the same team that started. Once, it was a team of around 30 persons, but now it is optimized as SIGMA launched initiatives for automation to  decrease manual intervention into systems. We had a large dedicated team divided on site and offshore from SIGMA DRCs ISO certified offices, working in a hybrid mood for highest quality with optimized cost.

Our success story was exceptionally reflected during COVID-19 strike. All enterprises were forced to work from home, while SIGMA nature of work was around 70-80% offshore, with ready equipped DRCs, and resources having an offshore mindset and tools provided by the  company to work from their homes; a pre- existing policy in SIGMA before COVID. Thus, the switch from onsite to offshore was seamless for the Managed Services team at the operator’s site, as we were used to this nature of work from the ongoing business in Iraq, KSA and Kuwait projects, working with high efficiency and seriousness, logging onto machines remotely, using online calls and tools to keep the team connected together, existence of a wall room for the whole team to solve any rising problems, on-duty shifts and having the tools to monitor team and the handover of their work among each other. This all passed seamless for the Managed Services team, although for the client and Huawei this was a must-to-have that happened in no time and was a reason for business continuity, unlike other operators who had a drop during COVID as they were not used to the Work From Home environment, nor did they had ready tools for it. The operator realized that offshoring can sometimes be the best model with a company like.

During this journey, we had great milestones:

• First, the operator started as a fourth mobile telecom operator in the market. To launch successfully, this needed a technical acceptance to cover the business features and technical functionalities to go- live successfully.
• Second, to operate a new system with complicated solutions and compete in the market, this needed a business edge to create things that did not exist with other competitors, so SIGMA had to create complicated offers and promotions that other operators cannot This happened smoothly.
• Third, SIGMA’s Egyptian Managed Services team could manage the Managed Services and business configurations seamlessly without getting back or referring to Huawei Except in minor issues.
• Fourth, with the first seasonal event, SIGMA could pass the business without a drop in network or failure in Time-To-Market for the offers and promotions.
• Fifth, is gaining trust in the system and team capabilities.

SIGMA got an additional scope to be in charge of the whole UAT business “User Acceptance Testing” with business teams for any new offer or CR from Huawei. We started working on the migration of the ADSL, from old systems of the operator to transfer all its subscribers to Huawei new system. After we were one to two million in the first year, we are now 15+ million subscribers, including mobile and ADSL users, and we currently plan for the execution of the fixed voice lines.

This would be a major milestone, to have a system that handles ALL the business lines of the operator, whether landline, mobile line, data line, or ADSL to be under one new umbrella.