Business process management in customer contact services

The trend in telecommunication services management is to focus more on managing the services to better meet customer demands at the management layer closer to customers. For example, in customer-contact-work, the aim is to more efficiently provide a higher level of service to customers. We have been developing an operation flow and process management system (OFMS) that meets these requirements. It treats staff members, work groups, and tasks as managed objects (MOs), and by mapping the actual work situation to the relationship between MOs, it can better manage the structure of business processes and the task-load distribution. It can also use the information from these MOs to manage the resources available for providing services. In this report we describe the framework for managing business processes in the OFMS and the OFMS implementation using distributed objects based on CORBA V2.0. We also describe a trial application of the OFMS to handling work at a call center and quantitatively assess its benefits.