Revolutionizing Service Delivery: 4 Groundbreaking Reasons to Embrace Automation

Jeisson Gamboa, Network Operations Engineer

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The telecommunications industry is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by the rapid advancements in technology and the increasing demand for seamless service reliability. At the heart of this evolution lies automation, a tactical that is reshaping how telecom networks are managed and operated.

Automation in telecommunications leverages cutting-edge technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to streamline operations, enhance network efficiency, and improve customer experience. With the deployment of 5G networks and the growing complexity of the telecom infrastructure, automation has become essential for maintaining competitive advantage and ensuring operational excellence.

By leveraging automation in network management, service provisioning, and fault detection, telecom operators can significantly reduce OPEX, minimize human errors, and accelerate service delivery. Predictive maintenance and self-optimizing networks are two-of-many examples of how automation is revolutionizing the telecom sector.

Reailize adopts automation at the heart of every solution it delivers, set to a continuous exploration and implementation of automation solutions in a customer-centric approach. In this blog, we’ll walk you through 4 ways how automation is revolutionizing the future of telecommunication services by detailing use cases that we have delivered.

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The 4 compelling reasons to adopt automation

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1. Transforming Change Management

The change is fundamental to mobile networks; without it, improved services and new market offerings cannot emerge. They can occur at various levels, including physical or virtual infrastructure, the net-working layer, or the application layer. While change is essential, effective control and governance of related activities are equally critical. Most operators have established change governance processes that require approvals from Change Advisory Board (CAB) for every maintenance window or testing activity. This process involves approval flows, managing roles for notifications as outlined in a RACI matrix and identifying CAB members. The CAB typically maintains a change calendar to prevent conflicts with pre-approved change requests.

Obviously, this manual process can be time-consuming, often leading to delays and increased risks of network disruptions. Manually checking for conflicts with pre-approved activities and notifying stake-holders via email is labor-intensive and prone to errors, making timely and accurate communication challenging.

In large laboratories, change management challenges like the ones previously mentioned are common. We partnered with one of our customers to automate and optimize their entire change management process. Our proposed solution features a user-friendly interface that allows administrators to define approval flows, manage roles within the CAB such as informed, approvers, executors, identify CAB groups, and automatically alert users in case of activity conflict. This automation ensures that all necessary stakeholders are notified promptly, improving overall efficiency in network management and reducing failures caused by unidentified change overlaps. Additionally, the solution’s ability to send notifications via email enhances communication, ensuring that the relevant audience is always informed of upcoming activities.

The strength of this solution lies in its ability to transform a previously cumbersome and error-prone process into a streamlined and efficient workflow. By automating the CAB approval process and maintenance window notifications, the tool saves time and effort while enhancing the reliability and availability of network services. This optimization allows for network changes to be managed with minimal disruption, facilitating better prioritization of project needs and overall more effective network management.

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2. Revolutionizing Network Monitoring for Optimized Lab Operations

Changes to the lab network, even when carefully managed during maintenance windows, can lead to concerns about potential service disruptions. Any issues arising from these changes can significantly im-pact daily lab operations, particularly the testing cycles, which are the primary focus of the lab. This is where pre- and post-maintenance window health checks (HCs) play a crucial role as proactive validation steps. They help detect any infrastructure or service problems early, enabling timely analysis and troubleshooting, minimizing disruptions, and ensuring the testing team operates in a stable environment.

However, manual health check routines pose significant challenges: they are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Engineers must run test cases, consolidate results, analyze failures, and distribute reports via email. This manual approach not only extends delivery times but also increases the risk of human errors. Consequently, prolonged health check cycles lead to extended disruption times and limit the network’s readiness or subsequent planned testing activities, which may also be impacted. Therefore, automation emerges as a crucial solution.

At Reailize, we have embraced the challenge of automating health check routines within our customer’s lab, implementing key functionalities to digitally transform the process:

1. HC Test Case Definition: We developed predefined sets of test cases tailored to the impacted nodes and services, ensuring comprehensive coverage during maintenance windows.

2. HC Execution: Test Cases are scheduled to run automatically in the simulation tool before and after maintenance windows, eliminating the need for manual intervention.

3. Report Consolidation: Test results are seamlessly exported and organized into a predefined template for easy review. 4. Results Analysis: Our in-house RCA solution automatically troubleshoots any failed test cases, streamlining the analysis process.

5. Results Repository: All HC results are stored in an accessible repository, complete with historical reports organized by change request number and by date.

6. Results Distribution: The tool facilitates direct report distribution via email, with pre-defined distribution lists for efficiency.

The power of this tool lies in its ability to streamline and enhance the entire validation and health check process. It eliminates human error, ensures timely validation of results, enables rapid troubleshooting, and provides accurate, real-time results. This is evident in our experience, where we reduced report creation time by two - thirds: from 15 minutes to just 5 minutes per report. As a result, we have increased our capacity to handle approximately 180 reports per month. The benefits are clear: lab reliability and availability have improved significantly, making this solution an invaluable asset for network monitoring routines.

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3. Ensuring Timely Reporting for Enhanced Decision-Making

Reporting —whether for testing, health checks, implementation, or build results —is essential in both lab and production environments. This data garners significant attention from management and serves as a critical foundation for strategic planning. Timely reporting is not just important; it's vital—every second matters when management is making decisions about future directions and immediate priorities. In many instances, planning for the next few hours relies heavily on the insights these reports provide, highlighting their pivotal role in driving effective operations, optimizing resource utilization, and setting clear goals for success.

In one of our key initiatives, we have empowered a leading customer to elevate their service health check reporting through comprehensive automation. We streamlined every aspect of the process—from data import and analysis to report generation and distribution—ensuring that management is continuously informed when it matters most. Specifically, we developed an advanced automation solution for service health checks across 20 lab instances, enabling reports to be generated and sent multiple times day for all 18 services running on the labs. This system automatically imports health check results from the simulation tool, processes the data, and visually presents the status of services, providing immediate clarity and insight.

By adopting our solution, the team achieved remarkable improvements in reporting accuracy and efficiency. We ensured zero delays in report generation, reducing preparation time by an impressive 75%, which was our primary goal. Additionally, designed in a scalable way, this automation has expanded the team’s reporting capacity, allowing for more checkpoints to be set each day. With the automation in place, team members no longer need to work early mornings or late nights, as only manual validation is required. This shift has enabled the team to refocus their efforts on troubleshooting failed results, driving continuous improvement and operational excellence while maximizing resource utilization.

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4. Minimizing Human Errors for Reliable Service Delivery

Telecom operators face complex, manual processes that increase the risk of human errors, particularly during SUPI provisioning audits. These audits are crucial for maintaining network integrity, especially after technology updates, which can lead to issues like incomplete or incorrect SUPI profiles.

To address this, we took on the challenge to automate our customer’s SUPI audit process. Our solution, integrated within their 5G Lab, allows users to audit hundreds of SUPIs in minutes through an easy-to-use interface. It checks over 80 parameters, provides flexible data export options, and keeps a detailed history of audits for tracking and trend analysis.

This automation has cut audit defects by 95%, saving over 100 hours annually and significantly reducing human errors. It also introduced a pre-health check step, improving service health checks by 80%, ensuring accurate results after each technology release. Beyond time savings, the solution enhances accuracy, boosts operational efficiency, and provides a reliable pre-validation step to ensure SUPIs are ready for testing.

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The Takeaway

The automation solutions discussed in this blog are designed to be flexible and adaptable to various net-work environments, ensuring that all telecom operators can benefit from enhanced efficiency and accuracy. By integrating automated processes such as SUPI audits, daily health check reports, pre- and post-maintenance window validations, Change Advisory Board Approvals automation and Network Portal integration with other monitoring platforms, operators can significantly improve their operational work-flows.

The journey to fully autonomous networks requires a clear vision and a well-defined architecture. How-ever, the path to achieving this should be gradual, focusing first on implementing automation solutions that deliver the greatest tactical value. By addressing critical operational challenges and optimizing existing processes, telecom operators can drive immediate benefits while laying the groundwork for long-term transformation. This step-by-step approach ensures steady progress toward resilient, autonomous networks, even as large-scale automation initiatives bring their own complexities and dependencies. At Reailize, we place automation at the core of every solution we provide, ensuring they not only tackle current operational challenges but also adapt to future market needs. Our partnerships with Tier-1 operators worldwide position us as a responsive leader in addressing the evolving demands of the telecommunications industry.

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