This afternoon in San Antonio, Paulo S. Furukawa, Director of Network Access, and Marcos Faria, who
was the Network Records manager responsible for the  Sagre Constellation project, accepted on behalf of the Sagre Constellation team, the annual GITA Award for Excellence in Telecommunications.

I wrote a blog about Telefonica earlier last year, but I think it is worthwhile reiterating some of the outstanding achievements that led to Telefonica S.A. receiving this award.

Telefonica S. A. was one of the first companies to attempt to automate the process of provisioning telephones and managing network infrastructure.  At the time Telesp, which was later acquired by Telefonica, was a division of Telebras.  The system that Telesp designed with the assistance of the Telebras equivalent of Bell Labs and which later become CPqD, was remarkable for its time and is still remarkable today.  It is
an integrated outside plant management and provisioning system, that stored all data including spatial data in a relational database (Oracle).  The ability to store spatial data efficiently in an Oracle RDBMS was a key innovation and relied on technology developed by GeoVision, later VISION* Solutions, now part of Autodesk.

Telefonica S. A. runs the telephone
network for the State of Sao Paulo, which accounts for 60% of the

Brazilian GDP, and has over 12 million customers and 14
million access lines.  Every month they process hundreds of thousands
of work orders generated by people who want a new phone, to get a new
line, or need a repair.   

Three years ago Telefonica S.A. initiated a project that was recently
completed to automate the entire process of provisioning.  Marcos Faria was the technical lead for this project with full support of the IT team and Telefonica’s higher executives.  The resulting system a combined a centralized data
repository for all spatial and other data in Oracle, integration with
SAP, and CPqD’s Outside Plant Management product with
integrated provisioning support.  Among other problems that the system resolved was the as-built problem.
The project led to major benefits for Telefonica S. A. among which probably the most important from a business perspective was reducing the cost of provisioning
by 40%.  Anyone in the telecom business will immediately recognize what an incredible achievment this is.  They eliminated their as-built backlog,
reduced their
provisioning life cycle to days from weeks. and achieved an ROI of 100% over
the three year period of the project.  Amazing!