Swinburne University Students in Melbourne Assist with Comptel UI Design

At Comptel, we place a great deal of importance on lending our expertise and partnering with other organisations across the globe to develop the next generation of IT leaders. We have seen great success in our partnership with Saudi Telecom, one of the largest CSPs in the Middle East and Africa, where we worked together to educate and empower the next generation of IT talent in Saudi Arabia through the “Young IT Talent” programme.

Over the past several months, we have also been working closely with a group of talented students at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne on our first academic partnership project. These students had the opportunity to contribute directly to a new Comptel SaaS solution for order fallout management.

Telco operators, specifically fixed services operators, suffer from a high rate of failing customer orders.  Already, 35 percent of orders fail during the initial six months of a new service launch, and as network technologies evolve towards virtualisation, that figure will only continue to rise. When customer orders are not being processed properly, operators are not able to begin generating revenue. The cost of manual labour to determine the cause of these fallouts can be expensive, which is why we created our Automated Fall-Out Management (AFOM) solution to handle this process.

Several of our local team members worked directly with Swinburne students to coach them through designing a user interface for AFOM. The solution taps into a CSP’s service orchestration solution and aims to flag and solve customer orders before they are pushed into the order management process. AFOM was developed through our Fastermind AI solution.

The goal for these students was to develop a part of a User Interface that was easy to use, intuitive and was a true value-add for customers. The Design Factory Melbourne and the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Swinburne University were the perfect groups to take on this task, as it required actual UI design, as well as advanced software development, which is where Comptel’s team members lent a hand.

After a few months of work, the students presented their unique UI designs and impressed the Comptel team with their level of technical understanding and capability, along with their ability to adapt to changes in the process.

It was great to hear some very positive feedback from the students as well. Many of them came forward and expressed that it was “very interesting work” and they were proud to have contributed work to “solve a real problem.” Several of them even said they would be interested in continuing the project for Comptel, as they had many more ideas on how to enhance AFOM.

While IT innovation is on the rise in Australia, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics reporting that 43 percent of businesses overall introduced one form of innovation, the cooperation between universities and technology companies is still in its infancy stage. Comptel is honoured to do our part in pioneering these types of initiatives in the country and looks forward to working closely with the university in the future.

In September, Comptel will host the third Nexterday North event to bring together the brightest minds in telco to spur innovation and explore creative ways to reach Generation Cloud and transform their businesses for the better. Register for Nexterday North to reserve your exclusive spot.