Telecommunications companies (telcos) are the backbone of our connected world, providing the critical infrastructure that runs our hyper-connected society. They lay the groundwork for the future where 5G, the internet of things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) will be more than just buzzwords. They will be critical components woven into the fabric of our daily digital lives.

Yet telcos struggle with digital transformation, facing challenges that impede their ability to evolve:

• Legacy systems
• Data silos
• Fragmented IT environments

Despite significant enterprise-wide investments in automation, scaling these solutions across multiple tech stacks has proven challenging, often resulting in fragile, slow, and inefficient systems.

And while the cloud is a critical enabler for innovating faster, supporting new monetization streams, and driving operational efficiency, telco overall cloud adoption is notoriously slow. A recent PwC study found that only 47% of EMEA telcos are “cloud mature,” compared with 54% of other companies in other sectors.

Telcos are at a critical juncture where transformation is no longer optional but essential for survival. With 70% of telcos lacking a clear strategy, many struggle to keep pace in a rapidly evolving market. To remain relevant and competitive, they must leverage process orchestration to overcome the constraints of their complex IT environments, streamline operations, enhance agility, and position themselves for long-term success in a dynamic industry.

The need for change

Telcos are caught in a value trap, relying on isolated automation solutions that create operational silos. These fragmented systems are challenging to integrate, leading to inefficiencies and making infrastructure fragile. As a result, telcos struggle to respond swiftly to market changes, innovate effectively, and undergo the comprehensive transformational change necessary to remain competitive.

Why change? And why now?

In addition to internal inefficiencies, external pressures are mounting, making transformation even more urgent:

• Consumer-grade expectations: Customers demand the same seamless, intuitive experiences from telcos that they get from the best consumer apps.
• Fierce competition: Agile newcomers and disruptive technologies are outmaneuvering traditional players with innovative and cost-effective solutions, free from the baggage of legacy systems.
• Technological advancements: The rapid evolution of 5G, IoT, and edge computing is reshaping the Telco industry. Companies must quickly adapt and leverage emerging technologies to innovate and drive new, future-critical revenue streams.
• Regulatory pressures: Stricter regulations, like the National Security and Investment Act 2021 (NSIA) and the EU Digital Markets Act 2022 (DMA), require additional data governance and compliance, challenging organizations that rely on outdated, disjointed processes.

The game changer: Process orchestration

Process orchestration is not just another tool in the telco transformation toolkit—it is a linchpin making digital transformation possible. By integrating business support systems (BSS) and operational support systems (OSS), process orchestration helps telcos tame the complexity of business processes, maximize efficiencies, and leverage existing investments in automation. It transforms disparate systems into a cohesive whole, enabling rapid responses to market changes, driving agility and innovation, and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Without the foundational layer of process orchestration, efforts to innovate are likely to fall short, leaving telcos vulnerable to disruption. With process orchestration at their core, telcos embrace composable architectures, adopt new technologies, and lead the next wave of innovation, redefining connectivity, communication, and digital experiences.

For decades, organizations have sought methods to manage legacy systems and align IT with business needs, understanding that software must be built to change, not last. Process orchestration is the foundation for that success.

10 use cases to jumpstart innovation

Here are ten use cases where process orchestration can help telcos drive innovation, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and build solutions that evolve and adapt.

1. Customer order management

Upgrading multiple mobile devices for a family may seem straightforward, but a mistake like combining devices into a single return envelope can complicate tracking and processing, resulting in delays, account errors, and unwarranted charges. This highlights the fragility of traditional telco processes that span fragmented systems and manual tasks.

Customers expect the same seamless experience they receive from digital natives unburdened by legacy systems. These companies can easily manage exceptions through integrated customer journeys that trigger customer notifications, manage real-time device tracking, update inventory systems, and integrate directly with account billing to apply credits with greater speed and efficiency.

With process orchestration, traditional telcos can significantly improve their existing workflows by integrating various silos of RPA and other automation solutions. They can leverage their existing investment to enhance user experience. Process orchestration helps telcos accelerate IT modernization efforts, allowing teams to plan legacy system replacement gradually.

In parallel, they implement new technology to evolve and adapt workflows to align with business needs better. This approach maximizes returns on their existing systems while eliminating the risk of a big bang approach to migrating from older technology to a modern, composable architecture with microservices.

2. Service activation and provisioning

Telcos provide diverse offerings, from mobile and internet services to home security and streaming, often bundled into complex packages. For enterprise and B2B customers, a different set of offerings adds to the complexity. Outdated tools that provide limited insight into service status and configuration accuracy make it challenging to ensure that orders are activated and provisioned accurately. This often results in delays, the need for in-home visits, or long wait times to reach customer service, providing a less-than-optimal customer experience that can negatively impact customer satisfaction.

Process orchestration can transform service activation and provisioning into a well-oiled machine. By coordinating tasks across disjointed systems and teams, process orchestration provides real-time insights at each stage of the service delivery journey. With support for advanced workflow patterns that help with long-running processes and handling exceptions, telcos can easily manage an order cancellation, delivery address update, or an out-of-stock item by including proactive notification for customers through their preferred communication channel and accounting for logistical supply chain delays.

With system insight into accurate information about technician availability, in-home appointments can be scheduled automatically and modified as needed by the customer, mitigating frustration and managing expectations.

3. Network resource management

Legacy network management systems were designed for a time when network patterns were predictable, data volumes were limited, and there were fewer connected devices. These systems struggle with today’s streaming services, which cause data surges, and multiplayer online games, which demand ultra-low latency and high speeds.

The result is network congestion, poor service quality, and missed revenue opportunities. So it’s no surprise that 55% of telco executives say their primary goal is improving network efficiency and performance.

With process orchestration, telcos build more intelligent, adaptable networks that respond in real time. This means more efficient resource management and the ability to detect and fix issues and make data-driven decisions quickly. These capabilities result in a better customer experience, fewer complaints, and lower churn rates. Process orchestration helps optimize networks so telcos can scale efficiently and explore new revenue streams.

4. Billing and revenue management

Complex billing cycles and the need for real-time transaction accuracy can lead to delays and mistakes that can hamper cash flow and increase the rate of disputes. Imagine changing your data plan mid-cycle, but the system does not update charges immediately, resulting in incorrect bills and dissatisfied customers who have to navigate notoriously long wait times in support channels to fix the issue.

Telcos can tackle these problems by streamlining their billing processes, ensuring real-time updates. This approach helps reduce errors and speed processing times and delivers a more reliable and seamless billing experience. By coordinating various automated tasks across multiple systems, telcos can efficiently resolve issues like applying for discounts or promotions with accuracy, ensuring customers receive the correct adjustments promptly.

5. Customer support and issue resolution

A recent Ericsson survey found that customers often feel exhausted by interactions with telecom service providers, requiring an average of 2.2 attempts and 4.1 days to resolve an issue, with half of these issues still relying on traditional channels. Automation of support systems evolved separately across mobile, internet, B2B, and cable services, resulting in complex, fragmented workflows across disparate systems that lack integration.

This fragmentation limits support team access to customer data, leaving them without a comprehensive view of account history and making it difficult to resolve issues efficiently, further contributing to customer frustration. Even with customer data platforms (CDPs) designed to unify data, users are often limited to the specific data available through their applications.

With process orchestration, Telcos can enhance operational efficiency, deliver a seamless omnichannel experience, and elevate customer satisfaction. By simplifying their complex IT environment and integrating processes, telcos can manage tickets more effectively from start to finish. This unifies communication channels across technology stacks, providing a comprehensive view of each customer’s products, services, and history of interactions. Additionally, insights from CDPs enable swift responses and proactive issue resolution.

6. Network slice management

As 5G networks continue to evolve, telcos face the challenge of managing network slices—dedicated virtual networks for specific applications—with precision. Mismanagement can result in service degradation, regulatory issues, and the potential loss of high-value contracts.

Streamlining network slicing operations and dynamically allocating resources helps ensure consistent performance and allows telcos to adjust to changing demands quickly. This is critical for meeting service level agreements (SLAs) in essential areas, like power grids and emergency response systems. By focusing on these benefits, telcos can achieve high reliability, maintain their competitive edge, and continuously drive innovation.

7. Cloud service orchestration

Managing multiple cloud environments is a complex task that requires skilled resources that can manage advanced cloud strategies. Add to the mix telco-specific clouds—designed for low latency, high availability, and enhanced regulatory compliance—and the complexity grows significantly. This often results in higher cost and service delivery disruptions that ultimately impact customer satisfaction, reputation, and revenue generation.

With process orchestration, telcos can cut operational costs and speed up the deployment of new services by unifying cloud resource management, including vendor-specific telco clouds. This facilitates smoother integration and more adaptive resource optimization, enhancing performance and service reliability.

As a result, telcos gain greater agility, improve service quality, and strengthen their ability to gain a competitive edge.

8. IoT device management

The number of IoT devices and the complexity of onboarding and managing them are skyrocketing. Every device, whether an intelligent appliance, wearable, traffic, or manufacturing sensor, has bandwidth, security, and data processing requirements.

Think of smart traffic lights that need to adapt instantly to an emergency trigger to redirect traffic or environmental sensors that must detect hazardous spills or smoke from fires in seconds to kick off a rapid response. Bringing these devices online and keeping them running securely and efficiently is challenging for telcos, who must navigate a complex web of outdated systems, operational silos, and multiple communication standards.

With process orchestration, telcos can address these challenges and ensure secure, efficient IoT management for various devices. Process orchestration streamlines device management at every step, from onboarding through the entire device lifecycle to integrating new device management protocols with existing OSS/BSS systems to efficiently handle the scale and complexity.

9. Fraud management

The growing complexity of telecom networks, driven by 5G and the surge in connected devices, has created the perfect storm for sophisticated fraud schemes such as SIM swap and international revenue share fraud (IRSF). At the same time, 42% of the top ten methods of fraud do not involve technology and are related to account manipulation, such as account takeovers, subscription fraud, and credit mule fraud.

Telcos can enhance fraud management with real-time analytics and AI-driven models. This reduces revenue losses and improves customer data protection. Integrating and coordinating fraud detection efforts across various systems enables telcos to respond quickly to new and evolving threats. This unified approach strengthens fraud defenses, protecting revenue and reputation in a highly competitive market.

10. Predictive maintenance

Servicing equipment before it fails is critical for telcos to avoid costly repairs and minimize unplanned service disruption, but predicting these failures can be tricky. Getting the correct data to make accurate maintenance decisions at critical steps in disparate processes is difficult.

Telcos manage massive amounts of data in various formats scattered across multiple tools and systems, including legacy systems that often lack integration capabilities. Without an effective strategy to integrate data into critical processes, the risk increases for service disruptions, higher operational costs, and regulatory penalties for failing to meet service level agreements (SLAs.)

Telcos can incorporate data from disparate systems into a single workflow and leverage AI/ML and other predictive analytics tools for precise planning and task execution. For organizations with centralized, single sources of truth for data, process orchestration enables a streamlined approach to data access at every step in a complex workflow, mitigating the likelihood of unplanned outages, enhancing the quality of service, and lowering maintenance costs.

Embracing digital transformation

Digital transformation is not just about adopting new technologies but fundamentally reimagining how organizations operate and incorporate technology to deliver meaningful outcomes. Process orchestration enables this strategic organizational shift to escape the value trap of disconnected automation solutions and move past the limitations of fragile, legacy systems by laying the foundation for scalable and future-proof operations.

Camunda: Driving telco innovation through process orchestration

Camunda is an enabler and force multiplier for telcos navigating digitalization. As the leading platform for process orchestration, Camunda equips telcos with the tools to design, automate, and manage processes with agility. This essential layer of seamless integration and real-time operational insight can empower telcos to align business with IT, combat technical constraints, and deliver seamless customer experiences.

For telcos looking to establish themselves as digital leaders, Camunda offers the foundation necessary for innovation and operational resilience and supports telcos in their evolution.

Learn how Camunda’s process orchestration can address your unique challenges and position your organization to lead in the digital age. Request a demo to see how you can achieve agility, innovation, and resilience.