Featured Case Studies - Unicom

Incorporated in 1998, Unicom offers telecom and broadband supply services to small and medium enterprises across the UK. Officially recognized as the fastest growing telecom company in the UK by the Sunday Times Profit Track 100 and Sunday Times Fast Track 100, Unicom is headquartered in Manchester, England with 10 regional offices around the country. Unicom supplies services to over 70,000 small businesses, routes more than 450 million minutes for its customers each year and has helped nearly 300,000 businesses to save a total of £500 million in gas, electricity and telephone bills. The company has an annual turnover of over $80 million.

SCOPE

WLR2 was the standard protocol used by Unicom and other Communication Providers (CPs) in the UK to purchase line access products from the monopoly provider, which they then resold to their customers. A regulatory change led to the creation of the Openreach network and its ‘Equivalence Management Platform’ (EMP), providing a new range of services to CPs such as faster and more accurate placement of orders. However, access to these services required migration from WLR2 to the new WLR3 protocol. Unicom selected Singularity’s WLR3 solution to provide them with the connectivity, process management and integration they required. Singularity were also asked to provide assistance in revising current processes where appropriate and to support Unicom as they went through the migration steps from initial ‘product establishment’ through to ‘business as usual’.

CHALLENGE

COMPETITIVE MARKETPLACE
Unicom operates in one of the most competitive telecommunications markets in the world. New entrants are constantly trying to increase their market share by competing on price or service innovation. Unicom felt it was essential that they use the introduction of WLR3 as an opportunity to get ahead of slowermoving competitors by delivering better services more cost effectively to their customers.

CUSTOMER SERVICE
Unicom’s ability to provide good service to their customers was dependent on the quality of information they received themselves from the line access provider. With WLR2, this information was often delayed and limited in detail. By moving to WLR3 the volume, quality and timeliness of information available to Unicom and their customers would greatly increase.

PROCESS AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION
The provisioning processes at Unicom touch on a number of other key business processes and IT systems. It was essential that the migration to WLR3 take into account the impact on these existing systems and end-to-end processes. The new solution would have to integrate smoothly to back-end systems and provide easy-to-use interfaces for staff.

SHORT TIMESCALES
Unicom had a business-driven timeframe for the launch of their new Titan brand, and this depended on the successful migration to WLR3. To achieve ‘Business As Usual’ (BAU) on WLR3, Unicom required a fast, problem-free integration of Singularity’s solution.

“Unicom chose Singularity to deliver our WLR3 solution because they demonstrated they are the clear leader in WLR3 integration with the work they had already completed for the UK’s largest telecom provider. They have been an excellent solutions partner throughout the service establishment process, successfully bringing us to Business as Usual on schedule.”

Chris Earle,
Operations Director,
Unicom