Dutch telco giant KPN, despite its market leadership, was finding that giving its VIP customers what they wanted alone was not enough to keep margins healthy, as TCO was proving a major issue. By working together with Huawei, KPN was able to accelerate their service provisioning through the Huawei E2E Planning & Engineering Service solution, creating a situation where both user needs and the bottom line are well cared for.

KPN, the leading telecommunications and ICT service provider in the Netherlands, has been dedicated to providing communications services for 160 years. Private line, one of its premium services, is important to KPN’s internal and external VIP customers. Whilst service provisioning acceleration and service quality improvement efforts indeed helped the carrier turn market potential into business growth, KPN had found its total cost of ownership (TCO) to be growing almost exponentially, making for a serious burden on its profits. Despite the carrier’s many attempts to curb TCO growth and accelerate service provisioning, KPN had seen little improvement on this front. Huawei, a long-time KPN strategic partner, joined hands with the operator in 2009 to tackle this issue through an E2E Planning & Engineering Service solution.

Effective TCO control

With E2E Planning & Engineering Service in place, KPN issues E2E service provisioning directives to Huawei upon receipt of customer orders, with the vendor delivering the requested private line services as per the agreed KPIs and deadlines. Payment is only made after KPN acceptance of Huawei’s network equipment and integration services, enabling the operator to build and expand its network in an orderly fashion to meet real business demand (which Huawei refers to as its on-demand E2E network rollout and expansion model), while effectively holding TCO growth in check.

Accelerated TTM

To minimize handover, the E2E project team simplifies the original delivery flow and combines its equipment supply flows. Moreover, Huawei implements prime-integration, performs planning and engineering, and unifies interfaces to accelerate time to market and reduce management costs. KPN only needs to perform monthly service forecasts and focus on service orders and service provisioning. After receiving service development requirements from KPN's marketing department, Huawei makes network plans and prepares the required equipment in advance, based on commitments with KPN, and quickly builds the network according to the service order.

Aligning business and network plans

During network design, the E2E project team aligns business plans with KPN's periodic service forecasts, and then plans the network based on Huawei best practices to ensure practical, innovative network design, while determining the network engineering requirements for the next stage.

Furthermore, a balanced capacity management solution is used to translate network engineering requirements into optimal equipment requirements.. With the equipment supply flow, it then translates network plans into executable provisioning plans and prepares the required equipment in advance.

Standardized engineering implementation management

During engineering, the E2E project team categorizes service orders by scenario, while clarifying order types and delivery requirements to ensure continuity and consistency between the network plan and design, based on systematic methods and unified platforms. Moreover, with the balanced management of equipment prepared during the planning phase, Huawei can quickly and efficiently supply equipment on demand.

Last but not least, the E2E project team delivers fast high-quality networks in a timely fashion through standardized implementation and acceptance processes.

Efficient project delivery

Experienced business consultancy experts, network planners, and engineering implementation and supply experts are all involved in the project team. Huawei works with KPN to create feasible and innovative solutions; in the E2E joint project, the systematic tools and platforms offer visual project monitoring and process management during each stage until successful delivery. The Global Network Evolution and Experience Center (GNEEC) can enable predictable evolution, verifiable solutions, manageable processes, and assured service.

Significant improvements

The E2E Planning & Engineering Service, by integrating various service capabilities in consulting, process management, data integration, network design, network planning, supply chain management, engineering implementation, customized software development, outsourcing management, and HR management, as well as certain telecom network solutions and an IT platform, greatly streamlines the service provisioning process for much greater efficiency, both in terms of time and cost. At less than two years after delivery of this project, KPN has enjoyed a 50% increase in its overall service provisioning speed. This greatly supports KPN’s relevant business growth, which expands two to three folds annually, and reduces 21% of its TCO per service.

" In this way, we could allow us at KPN focus on our customers, where we’re fully relying and also very confident that Huawei could help us out, setting up this whole process behind it to deliver a better performance than we had before." KPN NetCo Operations Fixed Director Paul Bosch commented about this partnership with Huawei.

As the operator implements its IP-based network evolution strategy, this E2E KPN Huawei project has grown beyond the delivery of simple private services to the accommodation of multiple technologies, thanks to the strength of Huawei’s Global Network Evolution and Experience Center (GNEEC) and KPN’s excellent architectural scalability, forming a good basis for the latter’s IP network evolution.