Bringing new products to market 4x faster with workflow-enabled agility

The Background

T-Mobile Austria is one of Austria’s largest telecommunications providers. It serves around 7.5 million customers, with 97% of users accessing fast LTE reception.

The telecommunications market is extremely competitive. Consumers have high expectations, and in order to meet them, T-Mobile Austria needs to deliver new products and services on a regular basis. Workflow automation offers a key opportunity for differentiation when innovating for customers. Deloitte’s 2017 Telecommunications Industry Outlook Report notes:

“As carriers seek to remain competitive, operations is one area that is ripe for improvement. Many telecoms still rely heavily on manual processes; the availability of new technologies and innovations may make 2017 the year of digital transformation for carriers in both in the US and globally.”

To better serve customers, business teams at T-Mobile Austria regularly design new products, services, and promotions, and it’s up to IT teams to implement these ideas as quickly as possible – slow delivery risks products becoming irrelevant in a fast-moving space.

Bringing new products to market involves a significant amount of complexity for the more than 100 developers who are responsible for implementation.

T-Mobile Austria needs to integrate with more than 40 different back-end systems to ensure that customers have a seamless experience when using new products, and the company adheres to strict service level agreements to deliver best-in-class quality.

Camunda serves as a key layer in T-Mobile Austria’s architecture, helping the company to maintain agility within a complex, large-scale environment.

Enabling Innovation

T-Mobile Austria’s more than 40 core backend systems are critical to the company’s operations. Camunda connects to these systems via the Java API and REST API, providing an agile and adaptable layer in the architecture.

There are nearly 200 process definitions running on Camunda at T-Mobile Austria, with thousands of distinct tasks.

Camunda makes it possible to connect and orchestrate different combinations of backend systems for the delivery of a new product or service. Workflows are defined in BPMN to document and manage these integrations, leading to stronger business and IT alignment and increased transparency.

Integration made simple

In 2018, T-Mobile Austria launched an online top-up service for customers with prepaid cell phone plans, making it easy and quick to purchase additional cellular and internet offerings on the go.

Customers can activate or extend a bundle of services with just a few clicks on the T-Mobile Austria website or mobile app, pay online activation, and receive the service shortly afterwards. This significant extension in flexibility for prepaid customers has become hugely popular.

Launching the bundle required T-Mobile Austria to leverage many different back- end systems, including systems outside the normal scope of prepaid plans. This integration was made simple thanks to a Camunda process.

After a launch, Camunda provides stability and traceability for T-Mobile Austria’s technical operations teams, making it easy to diagnose issues and troubleshoot at a granular level.

Seamless performance under high load

T-Mobile Austria has nearly 100,000 process instances running on any given day in Camunda. The resulting data traffic is traced in Camunda Cockpit, and controlled by a comparatively small support team.

To enable T-Mobile Austria to process high volumes of data more quickly and efficiently, Camunda built a new database partitioning feature which speeds access to T-Mobile’s databases. Engineers from Camunda worked directly with the T-Mobile Austria team, and other stakeholders, to ensure the partitioning feature would meet the needs of the business and users, allowing T-Mobile Austria to continue scaling at speed.