Coupling Automation With Managed Services Gets Results for CSPs

An Interview with John Denemark, Senior Vice President of Carrier Provisioning at TransUnion

John recently sat down with Barb Mitchell of JSA TV at International Telecoms Week to discuss TransUnion Managed Services — a solution for wholesale order management. Read on to learn more.

Q: Welcome, John. I understand you’re an expert in carrier provisioning. Can you please share a bit more about your role at TransUnion?

I’m Senior Vice President of Carrier Provisioning — which is part of the communications line of business at TransUnion. My team primarily focuses on wholesale order management and helping carriers automate that part of their businesses. This includes number portability, the buying and selling of wholesale access, and telephone number management. Those are the areas where we play a leading role within the industry.

The other thing I'd be remiss to not say is we used to be called Neustar, and many of our customers in the industry still know us as that. We were acquired several years ago by TransUnion. We still have the same great products and services our customers rely on, but we now have the scale of TransUnion behind us — which is a great thing.

Q: I believe you have a new set of offerings around managed services, which is such an important service many businesses rely upon. Can you talk about that?

Our customers know us for our carrier provisioning-focused software solutions, and we've been providing those for many, many years. Over time, we’ve built up a great team who really knows their stuff. It's this knowledge we're leveraging for our latest Managed Services offering.

The buying and selling of wholesale network services has always been a messy, complex process, which makes it especially attractive for outsourcing. Whether it's processing orders, liaising with suppliers, providing customer support or troubleshooting issues, our team excels in handling it all.

We believe our solution is unique in the industry, primarily because of our people. We don't claim to do everything, but when it comes to wholesale access management, we know this business at a very deep level — and can provide the benefits of this knowledge to our customers.

Q: How do these services get implemented?

When you engage us for Managed Services, you’re not paying us for bodies, you’re paying us for results. In the Carrier Provisioning division at TransUnion, we tailor our Managed Services specifically to each customer. This would typically include activities like overseeing the order submission process, Firm Order Commitment (FOC) management, order fallout, test and turn up services, circuit completion, or managing supplier performance and circuit ID/inventory systems. We can also oversee it all with end-to-end project management.

We can quickly scale up and have the flexibility to oversee both network and voice services. From a software perspective, we can work within any carrier’s business support systems (BSS) stack or use our own solutions. We're very flexible that way as well.

We pair Managed Services with automation. When our carrier clients engage us in this way, that's really where the home run results come from. And if they ever decide to transition the work back in-house, they’ll be in a much better place.

Q: I'm hearing a lot from you about being really connected to your customer base. I’m sure understanding what they need is part of what makes that possible.

We work hard to stay close to our customers and genuinely understand their needs. We have approximately 300 customers, mostly in North America, and all of them are carriers in one way, shape or form. We process almost a billion transactions on their behalf every year via our Software as a service (SaaS) solutions, and we have about 12,000 active users. We work at scale and deliver great results. That's our time-honored formula. Our customers appreciate what we've been able to do for them over the years, which has allowed us to expand our footprint further within their operations to include Managed Services.  

Q: What are some important trends you're seeing?

Trend 1: The telecom industry’s focus on cost reduction. Taking legacy operations, like wholesale order management, and outsourcing them to TransUnion can benefit our customers’ bottom lines because we can perform these tasks more efficiently than they can on their own.

Trend 2:  The loss of skills (BSS) within telecom. People are retiring. We offer a specialized skillset that’s increasingly lacking within the industry. People are moving on and new hires aren’t interested in doing this type of work, but it remains a vital part of every carrier’s business. We can do it and we're the best at it.

Trend 3: The fact operators really must focus their workforce on areas that matter most to them and their customers. Again, legacy operations typically aren’t a key focus, but we can take care of it. We can help modernize and automate the process of wholesale order management so it’s more streamlined and optimized. We can even take this over completely. Each operator has their own needs — and we work to meet these needs as efficiently as possible.

Want to learn more?

• Watch the full video here.
• Download the eBook — How CSPs Are Augmenting Staff and Remaining Competitive with Managed Services — to learn how outsourcing (particularly managed services) can be a valuable, strategic tool for service providers looking to remain competitive in today’s challenging market without increasing headcount.
•  Read an interview with Jill Guffey, Senior Director of Client Services at TransUnion: Wholesale Order Management Headaches – When a Managed Services Approach Makes Sense.

Learn more about TransUnion Managed Services.