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Sigma Systems/Charter Communications
Based in St.Louis, Charter Communications is the fourth largest cable MSO in the United States with more than 8.2 million video subscribers, 2.8 million residential high speed Internet users, and 1.2 million VoIP subscribers. Sigma Systems has been instrumental in helping Charter to automate its service fulfilment processes for all IP-services, enhancing its ability to create and introduce new service offerings and deliver voice and high speed data to both residential and commercial customers.
Charter was looking to enhance its operations to support its growing HSD and VoIP businesses. The MSO originally engaged Sigma to take on its VoIP provisioning and activation, but was having issues with its legacy HSD provisioning system. "We had a legacy system in place that clearly demonstrated its lack of ability to deliver on the vision Charter had for a service delivery framework," says Matt Bell, vice president of IP service engineering for Charter.
After a 3-day provisioning outage, Charter shifted Sigma's focus to automating multi-service device provisioning. Installations had to proceed regardless of any continuing outages. Sigma delivered integration with IVR-based activation functionality for to eliminate the need for technicians to call contact centers to handle activation, number porting, and service testing. Provisioning desks were given tools that let them identify and resolve service provisioning and activation problems. The first release, which was delivered in May 2007, enabled automated device activation for cable modems, embedded multimedia terminal adapters (EMTAs) that support voice service, and advanced set-top boxes.
In a second phase, Sigma helped Charter to automate service fulfilment for its PacketCable 1.0 compliant primary voice line offerings. Sigma would replace a largely manual effort with an automated order capture, service creation and provisioning tools.
To enable services like distinctive ringing, voice mail, and "change of telephone number" announcements, Sigma manages as many as 28 call management server instances, including Nortel CS2K and Cedarpoint Safari equipment. Order flow through was achieved as a result of Sigma's successful integration with Charter's existing billing and order management systems.
Charter has seen significant improvements in a number of critical operational and business areas.
www.sigma-systems.com
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