The National Network Management unit of Oi, in 2005, had a diversity of tools designed to troubleshoot its network. There were at least 5 different systems used by the operators and engineers to solve problems on customer's networks. These customers used to pay for deterministic and non-deterministic network usage to integrate branches through broadband connection.
Some common problems used to take up to 40 minutes to be solved due to the time spent accessing different management systems and the manual execution of command lines.
Another problem was the need to maintain the knowledge acquired by the team. New employees needed too much time to be fully trained and losing an experienced one could have a big impact on the team productivity, sometimes depriving the team of important knowledge acquired by not documented experiences.
Silicon Strategy was then hired by Alcatel to look for a breakthrough solution for this problem. Working together with the Alcatel's team, Silicon's engineers built up automatic mechanisms diagnose and recover failures in the network, integrating information from network equipments, management systems and scripts used by the Oi's team.
Silicon's team mapped many manual procedures such as node's status verification, network circuit definition, clock synchronization, etc. The mapping process was documented in intelligible flowchart diagrams, listing all the possibilities of failure and success.
The troubleshooting activities that could take up to 40 minutes now would take less than 3 minutes. And the process of capturing, documenting and updating the network management knowledge through flowcharts that can be edited anytime and be used as instruction to new employees proved to be as valuable as this productivity improvement of the management team.
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