BACKGROUND

Our client is a media company that operates in the Balkans, specializing in wireless and digital media solutions. They focus on delivering innovative content and services across various platforms to engage audiences and drive digital transformation. The client needed to modernize the customer interaction model of their sales department with the aim of enhancing service quality and boosting sales.

CHALLENGES

1. Automate order creation
2. Maintain a unified customer database

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS

1. Implementation of the SAP Sales Cloud system with the required customizations for a holding company that sells advertising through various channels: internet, television, press.
2. Integration between cloud services of the SAP Sales Cloud system and the customer’s SAP S/4HANA system.

KEY RESULTS

1. The responsiveness of the sales department has increased through the automation of the order creation process:

• creation of proposals in a single application
• added options for printing proposals for clients
• order processing in the ERP system, which is used for invoicing and payment in the future

2. Optimization of infrastructure maintenance costs through implementation of the SAP Sales Cloud solution.
3. Short Time to market: The standard system functionality with extensions was implemented turnkey in 4 months.

Challenge

• Implementation for infrastructure management
• Implementation of IBM Smart Cloud Control Desk
• Training of customer personnel

Solution

• Asset and configuration management
• Centralized storage of inventory information
• Service request management
• Service catalog management
• Visualization of assets on Google maps

Result

In this joint project, the customer’s team completed half of the work under IBA Group’s remote supervision. The customer’s team managed significant tasks with IBA Group providing strategic guidance, technical support, and project management remotely, ensuring adherence to standards and objectives while leveraging their expertise for smooth project progression.

Challenge

• Upgrade from Maximo 5.0 to Maximo 7.5
• Migration of 90+ siloed and poorly documented legacy apps
• Continuous system operation during migration
• Integration with seven External Systems

Solution

• Holistic approach to migration of every application
• Data synchronization procedures
• IBA-developed automation tools
• Introduced automation resulted in 80% reduction in efforts

Result

A robust system designed for stability and scalability, it meets stringent security standards. Capable of handling varying loads, it ensures performance and uptime. The system includes advanced security features like access control, and continuous monitoring, making it ideal for high-security, high-performance environments.

Business challenge

Automate the processes of recognition and validation of documents.

Solution

The Company processes lots of orders and contracts every day, most of which are in paper form. There are four different types of orders/contracts. All of them must be entered into the system, validated in other systems and supplemented with new data. Previously, this was done manually by operators.

IBA Group experts took part in the development of a system that automated these processes.

Result

The customer received a system that uses OCR to automate the recognition of four types of contracts. In addition, robots were created to validate documents and obtain additional data.

Business challenge

Process data on the counterparties of the telecommunications company and import them from Excel to the SAP ERP system. Then, based on this data, create Word documents to conclude additional agreements with contractors and enter them into the workflow system.

Solution

IBA Group team conducted a benchmarking analysis of the three leading RPA systems: UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. To address the challenge, they chose UiPath.

In the course of the project, several remote consultations on RPA and solution demonstrations were held for the customer. An algorithm has been implemented for obtaining data from an Excel file, processing and entering it into the SAP system. Also, the robot automatically generated contracts in Word format based on the data obtained.

Result

The pilot project showed that the robot can take on the routine manual work of users. So the company’s employees will have more time for analytical tasks.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

As-is process required extensive manual work to fill the forms in SAP, copy pasting data from 2 spreadsheet. There was a high risk of typos due to high volumes hence involved manual control to
comply to data quality and audits requirements.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

UiPath was selected as the vendor.

Repetitive tasks were automated using workflows prepared in UIPath studio. Robot could run by user reading certain folders for input data, extracting information to fill in SAP forms. Robot does also control on results, ie addendum contracts created, Web forms extracted and logs message with results.

This case also included the step required to convert Cyrillic text into Unicode via .NET snippet.

Business challenge

Lifecell uses IBM Maximo as a centralized management system for network operation and development. IBM Maximo integrates and automates more than 30 business processes across radio network, transport network, network control, and network planning departments and serves more than 1,000 active users, with 120-160 users working simultaneously.

Based on the legacy Maximo 5.2 technology, the customer’s management system was unable to meet the new scalability, performance, and security needs. The main challenges included the following.

• The management system had roughly 100 custom applications and complicated business logic. No migration procedure was in place
• The legacy applications were poorly or not documented and the developers who initially performed the design and implementation were not available
• Certain parts of the business logic were implemented in the form of PL/SQL procedures
• The IBM Maximo management system is integrated with a number of external systems, including SAP (material transactions), Oracle IDM (user information and organizational structure), NetAct Planner (site and radio link information), HP Temip (Trouble Ticket Management and alarm information), and Nokia, and Ericsson OSS systems (automated site halting)
• According to the estimates, the migration process could take up to one year. Within this period, it was necessary to perform development and enhancement for the legacy applications and all applications were to stay up and running during the whole migration process.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

The Maximo migration started with a preparation stage that included a visit to the customer’s premises by IBA Group experts. Following the analysis of the requirements and estimation of the scope of work, IBA Group participated in a tender organized by the customer and won it.

The migration project was launched in March, 2015. The project team included IBM Certified Maximo specialists, Oracle DBA, business analysts, a QA specialist, and a technical writer.

The project was implemented in four stages and for every stage a subset of applications was selected, forming an application group. Each application group was migrated, switching the production from Maximo 5 to Maximo 7 for that group within one night. Within the migration process, data synchronization procedures were established to ensure data consistency between Maximo 5 and Maximo 7.

For every migrated application, the following scope of work was done:

• Reverse engineering to prepare the technical task document that describes the application’s design, database objects, business logic, UI, and all data dependencies
• Data migration and synchronization plan to document the data sources to be migrated and the data sources to be synchronized between Maximo 5 and Maximo 7, including all required data and structure transformation
• Application UI transformation from custom Maximo 5 jsp pages to Maximo 7 application XML markup, ensuring identical source UI layout and structure
• Business logic, including workflows and java customizations for Maximo 7
• Transformation of the existing PL/SQL procedures into Maximo cron tasks
• Data migration and transformation according to the data migration plan
• Report transformation to match the data structure modifications.

The following IBA-developed automation tools became a part of the Maximo development environment.

• Automated Maximo configuration management designed to create and update Maximo objects, including MBO, domains, and person groups based on the repository data
• Automated Maximo 5 application analysis to identify and document all data sources used by an application
• Automated transformation of Maximo 5 visual application forms into Maximo 7 application’s XML, preserving source layout.

With the enhanced development environment, the project team managed to deliver the second, third, and fourth application blocks with an 80 percent reduction in efforts as compared to the first application block.

Results

The project was completed successfully in December, 2016 with positive feedback from the customer. The upgraded management system is stable and meets strict security requirements. With the newly available platform features, especially REST API and Web Services, the system is deeper integrated into the corporate information system, meeting the growing requirements of business units.

Konstantin Zhylin, Head of Department for Telecommunication Systems Operation at Lifecell

“We would like to express our gratitude to IBA Group for the IBM MAXIMO Upgrade they implemented at Lifecell. Our teams worked hard for almost two years and successfully completed the project. It is safe to say that it was an exceptionally challenging project that is second to none with regard to the approaches and methodologies applied. I’d like to thank every participant of the project for the work performed. In addition, I would like to underscore an operational excellence of the team, their flexibility in problem solving, sociability, and customer–centric approach. As a result, it became possible to build up the processes of project management and successfully complete the migration of 80 applications to the new version of Maximo, conduct the training of users, and launch the new system. We are happy to recommend IBA Group as a reliable and proficient partner who is able to solve the most sophisticated problems to the best advantage.”