In the heat of the moment
Keep track of our latest achievements
The future is shaped by zillions of interactions. Whenever we want a kind of future, we fall into unpredictability. What happens in the future depends on zillions of factors, billions of people and their interactions, between near-infinite possibilities: from molecular biology to a chat over a cup of coffee. This makes the future delightfully uncertain, giving us a healthy feeling that we can shape it. This gives humanity an enormous curiosity to build and invent things, but also to learn and adapt, establishing constant communication between past, present and future. Things created by human beings arise from a virtuous combination of experiences, knowledge and intentions. These are the secret ingredients of any winning product or service. And what to say about their success or failure? The future will tell.
Three - Real 5G
March 2020
3UK – Online Charging Systems Live
In partnership with Matrixx Software, a US based Online Charging system, Celfocus was involved in the transformation project of Three UK, the 4th operator in the UK with around 14M subscribers.
This transformation program includes an extensive transformation of the digital channels, integration, charging and billing systems.
Celfocus’ successful delivery of the Online Charging system provides Three UK with vastly improved capabilities to charge its customers, in real-time, based on service usage.
As of March 12th, all Three UK Prepaid customers are using the new system.
This is an important accomplishment for Celfocus as it represents the first successful go-live for a major project, since we started our partnership with Matrixx. We believe it positions us for great opportunities in the future.
Celfocus’ partnership with Matrixx Software started at the end of 2018.
We have since then worked in 4 different projects – in Kuwait, UK, Sweden and Switzerland – and we are now official Matrixx Regional Implementation Partners .
IoT | Audi Plug in
Audi, on behalf of the Volkswagen Group, contracted Vodafone IoT as the connectivity partner to provide a set of services in line with automotive processes, terminology and identifiers. At the time, Celfocus and Vodafone IoT delivered an adapter, translating automotive processes into connectivity configuration, offering a set of provisioning and messaging services to Volkswagen brands. However, after its implementation a persistent series of operational incidents disrupted the availability of the service offering, leading to customer complaints, and ultimately a request for an architectural audit.
Given customer dissatisfaction, and ongoing operational incidents, Celfocus was called to deliver a solution that would improve the reliability of the solution by unifying the platforms delivering the services, modernising the technology supporting it and optimising the internal flow between systems to reduce the likelihood of errors. Both resilience of applications and end to end services were improved, and additional monitoring was put into place to allow earlier detection of incidents, or anomalies that could end up resulting in incidents. Finally, measures were put into place to ensure that future upgrades of the solution can be performed without any service impact.
This solution was successfully delivered by our team in August 2019 and after long end2end testing phases, went live this month.
IoT Platform Acceleration
At the end of 2019, Vodafone Global reported instability issues, affecting the IITC System, due to Failed Orders Backlog and lack of monitoring and alarmist tool that could allow a preventive action from the support teams.
As result, the IoT Connectivity Platform Acceleration programme was launched and Celfocus proposed to improve the IITC service by improving fail orders and building knowledge to establish a proactive maintenance
In a matter of 12 weeks, Celfocus’ team managed to resolve 100% of orders (68000 down to 4) and receive the highest praise from the Head of IoT Connectivity.
Escalation turned successful opportunity | MAPS
Partner Revenue Sharing for IoT is designed to automate the revenue sharing process between Vodafone and Partner Markets, by producing detailed monthly reports(RPSS) with a low level of data granularity, configuring new revenue share models, and providing accurate calculations based on partner and event attributes.
The solution, delivered by Celfocus in 2016, facilitates the creation of new finance models that enable revenue and reduces the number of manual activities, and subsequently increase the accuracy of revenue share results. However, at the end of last year, Vodafone encountered an issue in what concerns changes to partner pricing, an operation that had been sent to Egypt.
After severe escalations, Celfocus turned this moment into an opportunity to propose a solution to facilitate the operation. After 3 strong and successful months of collaboration with Vodafone (business & IT), new configurations were delivered for 11 partners based on microservices.
Celfocus @ home
Working remotely is a practice we have grown used to over the years considering the extensive footprint in international clients. However, amidst the coronavirus outbreak this has become an everyday reality that requires dynamism and the right dose of energy.
We've brought the right energy to colleagues spread out across the world fighting this pandemic at home through:
- Music to our ears – while taking professional photos over the past few months colleagues were asked which song puts them in a relaxed state for this moment and allows them to block-out the big lights and fancy camera. As a result, nearly eleven hours of all genres were collected and now available on Spotify through four playlists: Going Quarantine Crazy, Get moving, Keep the kids away, I need to think, Rock your body. If you have not received an invite for a professional photo, you will soon (start thinking of your favourite song or send us an email communication@celfocus.com).
- Virtual Golden Hour – an initiative that brings colleagues together at the same bar every last Thursday of month. This time, a virtual bar and newly discovered musical talents that energised over 150 colleagues on the last Thursday of this strange month.
We are not quite certain when we’ll be together at the office again. However, creating moments like these make distance feel shorter and give us the team-spirit we need to make it through.
Thought times… are good times to say and hear “Thank you”
Some
of our most valuable clients have made the time to drop some delightful
words about our commitment, especially during this pandemic situation.
It’s always good to hear something that recognises our passion to do our
best, in each project, meeting, fix… and every piece of code.
It’s the case of Sarah Jane Johnston, the Business Demand & Architecture Manager at Vodafone Ireland, when she writes about our colleague Inês Martins, giving feedback about their performance as a team leader:
“Ines has been a member of the UFE agile time for some time but I have had little 121 interactions with her. In my interactions with her over the two weeks she really impressed me with 1. Her knowledge and 2. Her confidence to say that she didn’t know but would revert and she always fulfilled her promise. During this time I know she worked long hours and had a steep learning curve.”
It's also the case of
our colleague José Faneco working at the SIRO project; where our client
Owen Murtagh (SIRO Service Delivery Manager - Technology Operations),
dropped some of the finest feedback on the team commitment:
“I would like to give some positive feedback on one of your team members who, I believe, deserves special recognition.
I have been working with José a lot over the last few weeks, and he has been very professional, patient and positive. He always has time for a laugh also which I consider most important especially considering some of the issues we have been facing have been VERY frustrating! He is doing a great job and is a pleasure to deal with at all times!
I do not want this to detract in any way from the rest of the team, as all of them are a pleasure to deal with, whenever I have been given the opportunity to work with them and I am sure this will only expand and grow as time goes by. I know and understand that working in support can be at thankless job at times, and especially in the current climate with the change in work practices, and I feel that the entire team deserves very high praise, but with a special mention to José.”
Of
course, in every project, our teams are committed to solving customer
challenges. This did not go unnoticed by our client Mary Gibney (Release
Manager TEC-CIO-IT Delivery Team at Vodafone Ireland), who had the time
to write some very nice feedback about our UFE Agile team:
…. We have a really good working relationship with the UFE Agile team and they are most flexible and accommodating when the need arises. They do this without the need for an escalation”
And last, but not the least, Florian Bettermann (EDO, ZV, komm. Department Head B2B & Online Portals at Vodafone Germany), used some of his home confinement time to share some thoughts about how he feels about our AWS team - Josué Rocha; Vítor Magalhães Moreira and Pedro Carmezim:
“From the perspective I see the guys handling their work in the AWS team we generally want to say a big THANK YOU especially to Josue, Pedro, Vitor! Thanks for your hard work and dedication in the last months!With this dedication and your outstanding expertise & your willing to dive into new technologies, you built a highly advanced, enterprise-level platform which will be THE platform for hosting modern services of our online area (Vodafone Business Germany).
This rock solid platform with its rich ecosystem like Prometheus, Jaeger, Istio and others will help us to provide the best infrastructure services for our apps of tomorrow and speed up the work of our developers, increase quality and lower risks. We are happy to strive for this vision jointly with you.Thanks for the high flexibility, when something got broken or we had to reprioritise work, thanks for the nightly roll-outs, thanks for your responsiveness, when something did not work or a quick fix was needed, thanks for the architectural and operational experience you are sharing with us, thanks for your well-structured and confident way of working. ”
We are sure there are plenty of stories like these out there. Please feel free to share them.
Congratulations to all. And a special “Thank you!” to our colleagues mentioned on these spontaneous messages!