PROBLEM

OTA (Over The Air) is a service provided by a leading telecommunications company.  In the pre-paid phone market customers must purchase a pre-paid phone card and activate the service via the appropriate method.  This company had a system that required the customer to enter several numbers through their website or via telephone using the IVR (Interactive Voice Machine).  As the customer, you must first enter the multi-digit number given on the card.  In return the customer will receive an even longer number and those numbers must be entered into the phone to reclaim airtime.  This is where the problem lays, there is a great deal of room for human error and it is time consuming.

SOLUTION

The solution lies in developing a system where the numbers could be sent and entered over the airways. SMS (Short Message Service) was made available for their customers.  SMS is a message service offered by the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) digital cellular telephone system. When using SMS a short alphanumeric message (160 alphanumeric characters) can be sent and received via the network operator’s message center to your mobile phone and is displayed.  If the cellular phone is powered off or out of range, the GSM network stores the message until the phone becomes active. 

Everett Consulting Corporation (ECC) implemented vital parts of the system to make it a success.  The SMS plan, Weblogic GMS, MBEAN -Managed Bean (Java management extensions), and Message Demons, etc. were implemented.  ECC built an SMS plan and integrated their current backend plan (SOA – Service Oriented Architecture).

CHALLENGES

The principal challenge occurred while working with different formats of SMS from the many different carriers; each carrier receives messages differently.  Additionally, the integration of the external system and the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) was also challenging. 

TECHNICAL PROCESS

IT Development

Everett Consulting Corp. provided design and implementation of functionality for WEB and WEB CSR to support the new Pre-Paid SMS (OTA) technology.  New functionality included all system changes for Customer Web, Clarify Business Objectives, Database (Oracle) schema change and DBMS Jobs, and Mobile 365 interface.  IT development also created reports as needed and modified TOSS reports to include the Pre-Paid SMS (OTA).

RESULT

OTA project was satisfied.