From Monolith to Modern: How Deutsche Telekom Orchestrates Over One Million Network Activities a Year

Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s largest integrated telecommunications companies and the number one telecom company in Germany and Europe. With more than 261 million mobile customers, 25 million fixed-network lines, and 22 million broadband customers, Deutsche Telekom is constantly investing to advance innovation, digitalization, and modernization of its network.

Part of that modernization effort is maintaining and updating hardware for the radio access and mobile backhaul networks that connect customers’ devices to the core network—requiring the coordination of multiple people, tasks, devices, and systems over varying lengths of time. To modernize mobile operations maintenance processes, streamline operations in Germany, and improve the value stream to build, maintain, and operate their networks, Deutsche Telekom uses Camunda’s universal platform for process orchestration and automation.

The challenge: Constantly modernizing to keeping ahead of the competition

Deutsche Telekom’s radio access network includes antennas, base stations, and everything needed to provide high frequency over the air. It interconnects user devices to the core network, enabling communication and access to services like voice calls, messaging, and data services for mobile users. Their mobile backhaul network connects the radio access network to the core network by aggregating and transporting data from the mobile network sites. Both networks are essential for delivering fast, connected services for businesses, consumers, large events, and special interim sites, and both require equipment replacement every few years as part of a regular maintenance schedule.

In the past, Deutsche Telekom replaced its radio access and mobile backhaul technology approximately every 10 years. However, in a marketplace where technology is rapidly evolving, the company now needs to make equipment and make related database updates about every seven years to maintain market leadership in 5G service. As a result, Deutsche Telekom’s teams orchestrate over one million activities every year—and like other large, global businesses, they do it with fewer employees while navigating older, monolithic, legacy, and manual systems.

Equipment modernization includes significant human task management. In the past, internal teams began planning and organizing radio and mobile backhaul network modernization tasks at least 12 to 16 weeks prior to project start. But any number of issues could arise during that 12 to 16 week lead time, creating data quality issues and conflicts. Also, the length of time needed to complete a modernization process varied, and even though the main tasks for the processes are recurrent, they sometimes needed to be reordered. Further complicating their work, Deutsche Telekom did not have a holistic view into the structure or status of all required processes. They turned to Camunda’s platform to rebuild processes, improve data quality, reduce time lost to manual task work, increase agility, and prioritize project delivery for multiple, complex processes running in parallel.

The solution: Rebuilding legacy BPMN and manual processes into composable process components

Deutsche Telekom’s mobile equipment teams began by working collaboratively with business process engineers to break each process into sections. They focused on identifying and building the business objects essential to each process because business objects allow them to decouple from their legacy systems. “Since legacy systems may ultimately be replaced by new systems, with this approach, we only need to adapt the business objects to the new systems without having to modify each workflow,” explains squad lead Guido Sommers. The approach gives the team flexibility in both creating and automating complex, long-running, end-to-end processes.

For example, the pre-check process was lengthy, so the team rebuilt it as a subprocess. It now executes on its own and reports any errors to the Webex or Teams channels so that users will know which pre-check items need to be corrected before maintenance begins. This helps prevent process errors or process interrupts that may cause complex and time consuming rollback scenarios.

The team also built a subprocess to access their internal API catalog and automatically subscribe to a required APIs via a REST connector. With this subprocess, the team can more quickly connect legacy technology that is still critical to their modernization processes.

The outcomes: Reducing manual work, gaining process visibility, and improving efficiency

Deutsche Telekom’s agile approach to continuous process improvement is generating business value fast. Using Camunda’s open BPMN standards, visual design tool, and process orchestration and automation capabilities, the team is breaking legacy processes into process components and reusing those components to modernize and scale processes more quickly and in parallel with other teams. As a result, the team is moving from planning to execution 6% faster.

Process transparency is also improved. Now the team can view and monitor all the tasks in a process from end to end, plus create a “master processing” holistic view to track interrelated workflows. Overall, the team estimates they will eventually reduce planning time by nearly 30% and manual work by 60%.