PegaWorld iNspire 2023: NTT: Improving Customer Experiences and Streamlining Operations with Pega Cloud

NTT Group is one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, providing ICT services on a global scale. NTT is supporting its customers in the adoption of digital services and strongly developing its own digital transformation through smart operations without the human workforce. The organization is using the Pega Platform™ and Pega Cloud® as the core solutions to realize this. Watch this replay to learn more about NTT’s digital transformation initiatives and future plans of NTT East, a core company of NTT Group.

Transcript:

- Good afternoon everyone. My name is Ken Benner. I'm the Industry Leader for the communications industry. I have a real treat today. I have the presentation from NTT in Japan, Improving Customer Experiences and Streamlining Operations With Pega Cloud. We have our team that's come all the way from Japan, Yukimasa Mimura and then Yuki Kaneko. They've come all the way from Japan. Now I do wanna give you a little bit of guidance for the session today. Our speakers, English is not their first language, so I just wanna let you know that please keep your minds and hearts open for them because presenting in a foreign language is obviously a little bit challenging so just please be aware of that. Now we will have a Q and A session at the end. We have Kana here who's gonna be our translator. So when you ask a question, I encourage it. Please use the mics. We have mic one and mic two. You'll ask it to Kana, she'll translate it to our speakers and then obviously they'll speak back to her and she will give it back to you in English. So without further ado, I would like to present our presenters from NTT.

- Hello everyone. Thank you all for your attendance. I'm Yukimasa Mimura. I've been working for NTT East for seven years. After working as a core center operation, I am now working in project management and-

- Hi, I'm Yuki Kaneko. I'm mainly engaged in system development. I had only been on this job for about six months and had no experience with using Pega. Pega has many easy to use features such as local development and unified platform and so on. So I can get involved in development work right away. In this presentation, I would like to talk about these unique points of Pega.

- We came from Tokyo, Japan. Nice to meet you. Today we are wearing Hapi. The traditional costume worn at Japanese festival. Is this cool? Thank you. Thank you. We explain about improving customer experience and streamlining operations with Pega Cloud. English is not our mother language, so some parts might be harder to listen. Please excuse us.

- Our presentation has five sections and section one is about the NTT group, which I belong to and love so much. Our NTT group began 150 years ago with the start of the telegraph service. This is the same age as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Also, our company has a very strong history. We have expanded our business since 1870 focusing on telephone services, and are now divided into four major groups. Among them, we belong to NTT East, which is responsible for regional telecommunication business. Here are some numbers of NTT group. We have more than 300,000 employees and we have more than 950 subsidiaries. In 2021, our revenue was $90 billion. The number of employees is the third largest in Japan, second in operating revenue after Toyota Motor Corporation. Second in Japan in number of consolidated subsidiaries after Sony. I believe you will understand that we are a very large company in Japan. These are about NTT East, which we belong to. We provide telecom services in the East area of Japan. We have 4,900 employees and our revenue was $13 billion.

- And I guess, I would like to explain the features our business. One of our main service is to receive some optical line orders from our customers. This is workflow. We receive customer orders by web or home. These orders are forwarded to the back office. We have three main operations in the back office. Number one, to confirm order's details. Number two, to coordinate with the sales channel and to finalize the order. Number three, to submit the order to the system. There were some challenges with these operations, so we try to improve them. In the next section, I will explain the challenges and how we solved all of them. We had a lot of issues before introducing Pega. At the reception, sales rep don't get enough information from the customer. They usually use Excel files. Therefore, these Excel files have some blanks. So back office staffs, most of all sales rep, sales rep to fill some blanks. Also, they use some paper for notes. As a result, we need ton of paper. We must check each operation. We have 8.5 million orders per year. So we need a lot of resource. Of course, we also have some operation risk. To solve these issues, we introduce Pega platform and we got three effects. First, we got more reliable application by using Pega UI. Second, we got easier communication by using chat. And above all, we could reduce manual operation and promote automation of work. I explain these three effects more. We improved the mistakes of Excel forms dramatically. The application incomplete rates became 0%. We also improved paper used dramatically due to chat communication. However, paper reduction is just the beginning. This is paper. This is paper. This is another challenge. We automated 130 manual operations. We are now able to handle large orders and what I really want to say is that we achieved this improvement in just three months.

- This section I will explain how Pega brought DX to us. This is the overflow of the system. We have already developed RPA systems internally for automatic data input into the backend system. We orchestrate this RPA and manage among internal network collaboration by using Pega. As a result, we can manage the overall process from receiving reports to putting them into the backend system on Pega. Next, as mentioned before, we have achieved automation of 100 and starting operations just in three months. I will explain the key point how achieved such a short period. The key point of this project is the standard model known as KATA-GAMI in Japanese. The standard model is patterned so that it can be reused in various business flows. The standard model defines when to call RPA and inter-network collaboration. Oops, sorry. If we developed from scratch, it would consume time at each stage resulting in a significant amount of time spent. Therefore, we have designed by using the standard models. By adapting these develop applications, we got great efficiency in the short period. Next, I will talk about the reasons for choosing Pega for this project. The reasons can be boldly categorized into this. One major reason is the richness of the functions on Business Process Management System, so-called BPMS. Pega is a unified platform that can manipulate data, UI, and processes. So we can develop a system easily. Although it was my first time using Pega on this project, I could understand the implementation methods easily. Furthermore, Pega can achieve flexible inter-network collaboration. So we can define combination of inter-network collaborations and RPAs in the standard models. The second reason is cost. Pega's usage fee is based on the number of transactions processed rather than the number of users, which means we only incur cost for the actual usage. Additionally, Pega support local management so we can develop on insourcing, which means we can reduce cost compared to outsourcing. For some other reasons, Pega has ability to handle large scale processing and has robust security and authentication. Pega is named as leader in Gartner's report on BPMS.

- As the last section, let me explain our plans for the future. We could achieve great results such as automation of 113 operations in just three months by using standard models and collaboration with the user department. However, not all operations have been automated. We intend to further expand our measures based on this successful case study. We have realized automation of manual operations by RPA. Next is we will further expand the area of this automation. First, in 2023, we'll achieve automation decision-making tasks in back office using process AI. This project will be the first in Japan. For example, in inquiry of inventory status, the system will confirm the inventory status and delivery date. Then it will order necessary item automatically. Furthermore, in 2024, we will expand to achieve constant automation from reception to construction. Also, we would like to realize this initiatives through in-house production. Finally, I will talk about three things that we learned from this project. And first, we can make flexible response to system improvement requests from users. Since the innovation of the core system is commensurately costly, it was difficult to implement something that was not expanded to produce certain effect. However, by using Pega, we could meet business requirements without modified cost system. Next, hearing on field work is important to create optical effects, not desktop studies. In the end, there were some operations that could be made or more efficient without systematization. So by identifying the areas that really needed to be addressed by the system, we could achieve more efficient operations at the low cost on proficiency in in-house production, we dispatch in-house production staff to development vendors in addition to the traditional hands-on lining methods who are in-house production. And we can acquire practical skills in a short period of time. We have not yet reached to the point where we can do everything in-house, but we will continue to work with development vendors. We would like to thank everyone associated with this project. Mr. Kobashi and development team members of NTT data, who work together to create the KATA-GAMI. Mr. Kobashi, KATA-GAMI is his idea. Thank you. Mr. Miyagawa and Mr. Sasanama of Pega Japan for their excellent suggestions and support. I would like to thank all the members of my team who all flew to be in Japan today. Thank you. Thank you for your attention. Thank you.

- I just wanna thank you so much. I can't imagine how it is to present in a different language. Please give our friends from NTT another round.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Alright, we're gonna move to the Q and A section. So I have a solution consultant from Japan, Kana. She is gonna actually help with the translation, so please ask your questions in English, please using the mics one and two there. And then she will translate it and then she will give your answer in English. So with that, we'll start our Q and A section.

- [Attendee 1] I have a question. It was very impressive. 120 process automation within three months. Wow. That's great. My question is that, can you give us what was the most challenging, you know, challenging things that you faced during the, you know, automating the process, the 120 process that you mentioned and also what was the highest or the first thing that really helped the automation goals smoothly?

- For the first question, we had five patterns of KATA-GAMI and the challenging thing was to like change or like modify the business workflow into the five patterns.

- For the second question, they first like implemented easy use cases so the users can like understand how their work will be very efficient, then it went smooth.

- [Attendee 1] I see.

- Will that be the answer for you?

- [Attendee 1] Yes.

- Okay. Thank you.

- [Attendee 2] Konichiwa. Thank you for a very good presentation. How did you prioritize the 120 journeys you've automated? How is that prioritization done? What did you choose them over something else?

- They made their... Categorize their work into three types. The easy one and the normal one and the very complex things. And they started with the easy workflow, yeah, works and when they got to the very complicated things, they sorted out which work is, will be the most like affected one, which will be the most like efficient one. And then they started to touch from that and then go down to down the list.