Kulamani Panigrahi, Technology Director, BT
Openreach is undertaking one of the largest and socially important UK infrastructure builds to rollout full-fibre broadband to 25 million premises by Dec'26, with £15b investment.
PON Digital Survey and Build Project is a flagship programme helping Openreach to meet its target by enabling faster network plan and build by digitising and digitalising business processes and platform agnostic modern day tool adoption while making best use of cloud technologies (On-prem for hosting, Azure for authentication, AWS for artefacts storage, GCP for analytics).
The project transformed the ways of working by replacing paper-based manual processes with automated digital app-based visualisation of complete UK network inventory. We are extremely proud of the work done to serve UK fast-fibre rollout while putting sustainability and safety at the forefront. The project has far-reaching impact in its intent of better connectivity to homes/businesses, and driving employment.
Proof of eating is in pudding: we base the project's success on the outcome delivered and impact caused; using this project – 16.5 million homes surveyed, 13.5 million premises connected, 60% efficiency improvement, £14M+ operational savings, avoiding 4.5 million paper printouts equivalent to saving 100K trees.
It is gratifying to see delight on the face of your customers/users, by the outcome/usage of your product.
Challenges:
- Telecom network planning is complex, manual, time consuming data collection process and error prone.
- Lack of one-truth of network planning data
- Lack of real-time reporting due to paper-based network records
- Lack of digital validation for network planning rules and data causing Multiple hand-offs across teams.
- Telecom network planning and survey where not scalable (one of the biggest hindrances in achieving the fast-fibre rollout)
Solution Doctrine:
Orion - Openreach Interactive Optical Network - is a pioneer digital engineering application which is unique and first of its kind in telecom industry across the globe. It has enabled digital telecom network planning and survey to expedite network plan and build processes of fibre-network.
Below are the use-cases supported by ORION:
- Mobile Planning: Quality surveys driven by digital application, reducing repeat visits, and driving RFTs (Right First Time) of Network layout/connectivity.
- Network Redesign: Simplified network redesign for the users and the heavy lifting network validations automated in backend
- Automated Costing: Automatic calculation of cost for network build, ensured early visibility of the design efficiency and any rework or optimisation can be initiated proactively
- Market Campaigning: Integration of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) at early stage ensured targeted product market campaigning and tracking
- Digitised Auxillary Services: Ability to manage all the other works such as tree cutting, traffic management, gully sucking, ferry crossing, rail management and scaffolding required for the Openreach network build at one place.
- Offline Capabilities: Enabled our partners to be able to work without worrying about service disruption 'offline capability' helped partners to progress with surveys without the need of any network connectivity and update back when connectivity is restored.
- Data integrity: Better validation at the network element level ensures high quality survey network design resulting in more work being Right First Time RFT; there by driving multi-million saving due to lesser revisits and rework.
- BYOD: New architecture has provided better device choice to surveyors (inhouse and partners) to access survey network design related services using their own devices
- Platform Agnostic: Cross platform apps which modernised our app architecture to enable faster development with much more reuse.
- Sustainability: Paperless Digital Survey enabled to avoid 4.5 million paper printouts equivalent to saving 100K trees.
ORION as a solution has given a shot in the arm of digital push in Fast-fibre rollout journey of Openreach across the United Kingdom.
Mr Kulamani Panigrahi is Technology Director at British Telecom (BT) and a true Digital Ambassador. He is an inspirational leader with a vision to bring massive business outcomes which are technologically advanced, meeting superior standards, transformative in nature, resilient and has large social impact. Mr Panigrahi has executed large-scale transformation bringing in an in-house developed state-of-the-art network surveillance engineering platform best suited to Openreach's unique network topologies, replacing a multi-million licensed product. The brilliant and holistic Field Engineering ecosystem he has created would continue to delivery massive business and social outcomes.
This project saw Mr Kulamani Panigrahi shortlisted at the Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2024.
