CUSTOMERS

SFR
Individual points for loyalty
Loyalty programs play a crucial role in helping mobile phone operators retain customers, as well as up-sell them to new products and services.

SFR (www.sfr.fr), France’s No. 2 mobile provider, operates the Garantie Carré Rouge (GCR) loyalty program, which awards points that customers can redeem for new cell phones, SMS and MMS services, Web and multimedia access, and other popular products and services.

SFR recently upgraded Points Engine, the point-allotment application behind GCR, with ILOG JRules, ILOG’s leading business rule management system. ILOG JRules enhances SFR’s customer services and provides more comprehensive management of the GCR subscriber base.

The old system operated at a high level, implementing decisions across subscribers. ILOG JRules automates the policies governing point acquisition and redemption, enabling Points Engine to manage customer accounts individually. Subscribers accumulate points based on their profiles, seniority or specific bonus programs, and can more easily spend them on SFR offers or even use them to make charitable contributions.

The new system interfaces with customer management, sales and billing systems, and allows greater flexibility and versatility for implementing new loyalty policies quickly and easily. ILOG JRules’ power and scalability also allow SFR to provide special GCR offers for significant events and holidays, such as company milestones, Christmas and Valentine’s Day, and handle the resulting upsurge in customer traffic.

Wisor Telecom (www.wisor.com) expedites service fulfillment with Exchange Path, a high-performance interaction gateway for handling a broad range of transactions between telecommunications companies. Exchange Path relies on ILOG JRules to capture and manage the thousands of business rules that must be applied to check the completeness, accuracy and compliance of service orders. More than 15,000 rules can be needed to apply all the regulations of one regulatory agency, which can frequently change its requirements. With ILOG JRules, ILOG’s leading business rule management system, Exchange Path automates the process for filling orders and gives users an easy way to keep the application’s rules in sync with changing regulations.

Exchange Path has enabled users to shorten their time from order creation to fulfillment and billing by 85 percent, and in one case, trim 10 days from a highly complex service delivery cycle. The application also lowers associated costs, improves the accuracy of provisioning activities, and reduces the number of personnel needed to process orders.

“I really appreciated the architecture of ILOG JRules,” says Matt Costello, chief technical officer at Wisor Telecom. “I could see that it would allow us to better deal with the many changes that occur during the order management process in telecommunications. This architecture lets Wisor deliver timely updates and be more responsive to our customers.”

ADAVANTAGE map of IT network Enlarge image (opens a new window)

Magnum Technologies
The IT ADVANTAGE
As a corporation grows, its IT infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. Hardware and software are constantly being added or updated, and new lines opened to connect resources.

Magnum Technologies (www.magnum-tech.com) specializes in business service management products that automate the identification of IT assets for operational and service level agreements. Its flagship product, ADVANTAGE, lets IT professionals quickly view an entire IT network and its performance data through a graphical dashboard built with ILOG JViews, ILOG’s leading visualization development system.

ADVANTAGE goes through a network and maps all the links and resources. The resulting diagram and status information are shown in the application’s dashboard. In another view, the dashboard uses charts and realistic graphics to show performance information such as user traffic and resource availability. A history of network activities is also maintained to enable IT personnel to track events.

The power and utility of ADVANTAGE have made the application a popular choice among a growing number of major corporations, including Fortune 500 companies. Magnum Technologies selected ILOG JViews to shorten ADVANTAGE’s time to market. ILOG JViews not only reduced the initial application development time to just a few months, but also assured complete customization for deploying the best solution for the end user. “ILOG JViews gave us the discovery and mapping functionality needed to make ADVANTAGE a true advantage for our customers,” says Tim Hadden, chief technology officer and executive vice president at Magnum Technologies. “It shortened our development time and made the product easier to configure – must-haves for us as our business grows.”

The German soccer league Deutsche Fussball Liga (DFL: www.dfl.de) has been organizing matches for decades. The league schedules an average of 612 games for 36 soccer clubs every year. Months are needed to manually build a schedule that satisfies most of the stakeholders.

That was the old way. Now the league does it the easy way, with a state-of-the-art scheduling system based on ILOG Optimization Decision Management System (ODMS). The new game scheduling system applies more than 150 constraints and an extensive list of conditions in generating solutions for the league.

DFL planners start the scheduling process by gathering and entering information that includes the number of games allowed on each day of the week, security and league requirements, national holidays, and tournaments held throughout the season. The game scheduler produces 20 to 30 feasible solutions in less than two hours.

“We have to address numerous constraints to create a schedule that is acceptable to all the clubs,” says Holger Hieronymus, managing director of DFL. “Our ILOG ODMS-based system generates several schedules from which we choose the one that best meets our requirements.”