The increasing competition in the telecommunications service industry is driving telecommunications service providers towards more efficient and cost effective business processes. As a result, service providers need to evaluate their internal business processes with a notion to come up with innovative ideas to cut costs. This thesis, therefore, focuses on finding a way to reduce the total cost of ownership for a service contract to provide On-Going Support (OGS) services. A further aim is to describe and analyse the principal activities performed as part of an On-Going Support (OGS) agreement for maintaining the telecommunications billing solution at the case organization - a leading telecommunication billing product and service provider company.
The method used in this study is action research, and the outcome of the study is a new OGS framework which is referred to as shared OGS methodology. The study first focused on an analysis of the existing OGS activities. Data related to the OGS activities was then collected from the OGS team members and based on the information thus collected, a detailed OGS activity map was prepared. The brainstorming sessions were conducted with a forum of technical experts and representatives of the management. The forum validated the OGS activity map and came up with a list of criteria for deciding which activities can be offshored. Improvement areas were further identified by comparing the existing OGS team structure with the new proposed structure which consists of a balanced mixture of onsite and offshore team members, working in tandem, led by Group Leaders or Experts working onsite. Finally, the information collected was used to find the gaps in the operations and to modify the existing business processes in such a way as to support the new OGS model
