How design automation integrates with other software to deliver streamlined processes that fit customers’ needs

by Alain Meller

In a rapidly expanding fibre broadband market, increased (and challenging) demands are being placed on the suppliers to deliver all of the professional support that the operators (and others) require.

Accordingly, there is an increasing emphasis on strategic alliances and partnerships between companies offering complementary specialist offerings in order to provide the best solution for their customers.

The challenges

Operators are faced with a wide choice of providers and solutions in their requirements to plan, design, build and manage their networks. Most of the time, one single product will not fit the entire scope of the process that needs to be implemented. Customers are then facing the situation to assemble different products from different vendors in order to get the solution that fulfills their own needs.

Unfortunately, focusing on implementing effective processes is not the natural tendency. Customers often focus on the unitary functionalities and performance of tools available in the marketplace rather than on their ability to integrate with other tools to produce a streamlined workflow serving their goals. By focusing mainly on price (particularly in relation to the maximum number of features), they pay less attention to the efficiency and effectiveness of the global process. This is where assembling best-of-breed products have flaws sometimes, as it misses the importance of binding the pieces together to create relevant solutions.

 Setics experience in the field

Setics is one of the leading specialists in providing automated planning and design for operators building fibre networks. We recognised at an early stage that integration with other providers would provide more value to customers.

Since 2000, we have been involved in designing and managing large FTTH roll-outs and we are experienced in advising our customers on how to best design an efficient workflow for their project. By enhancing our software through the consultancy services we provide, we can help our customers save time, reduce costs and increase consistency. 

Our approaches to overcoming these challenges

In many cases, the customer already has implemented or chosen some products and design automation needs to be able to integrate with them. By working with a growing number of operators, consultants, and providers, Setics has been able to understand the market and has built open interfaces that liaise with products that have the same openness principles. However, introducing design automation into an existing process often requires rethinking that process in order to deliver the best results. This not only changes the engine of a Mini into a Ferrari engine, but it also requires you to reshape the fuselage, the tires etc. Therefore,  we need to assess the existing situation and plan to move to a target one. This supposes some level of awareness of the customer to accept and go through some consultative engagement as well as the tool implementation itself.

In addition, Setics has a growing number of strategic alliances with companies that offer such products and services as surveying, asset management, work management, and customer management. Relying on open standards, design automation can integrate with any products with more or less effort required. However, when it comes to implementing real processes, this is where difficulties appear in the details of the integration. As a matter of fact, investments for integrating products from different software vendors usually only occur when a customer opportunity arises. Without excluding any potential partners in the market, we developed the concept of “Preferred Partner”, where we form a mutual commitment to investing in the technical integration of respective products (and in related marketing promotion), prior to any customer opportunities. This ensures that we build a stronger solution for our future customers and hence, help to roll-out fibre a lot quicker in communities.  

Conclusion

As a conclusion, from a customer point of view, we see two important aspects for successful integration of design automation for delivering integrated streamlined processes:

• Dedicate some effort to prioritize your end goal: having a streamlined process. Take the time to analyse your processes, some time to rethink them, and not only focus on the features of each element of the solution.
• All vendors will claim that their software can integrate with others; which is true at a certain level. However, difficulties will arise in the more detailed aspects of the integration. Vendors that commit to long-term relationships and not only by the fact they share clients, will be in a better position to deliver the relevant solution to a particular client.

www.setics-sttar.com