Overview of the Challenge
Legacy Solutions was contracted by JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) to reconcile and optimize the 30,000 lines of City Wide Centrex service at their headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.
The Columbus Centrex service included a complex set of telephone numbers, individual lines, trunk equivalents, multiplexed high-speed connections, and multiple customer premises and equipment – all interconnected by inter-central office network access. The cost was well above current market prices.
Objectives
The objectives were to save the bank money, prepare them for a migration to IP Direct Inward Dialing (DID), and reduce end-user impact.
In the process, we were to identify telephone numbers (TNs) not in use, determine any dispute occurrences due to inconsistent Universal Service Order Codes (USOCs) with contract terms and invoicing, and identify the list of numbers to migrate to an IP DID solution.
Due to the volume of TNs involved, the complications of service records over a 20+ year period, and the rules around conversions from the bank and AT&T, we recommended an iterative approach and a full IP trunking migration.
Applying Legacy Solutions’ Process and Knowledge
Our approach was to a) establish a voice engineering baseline, b) translate the routing information provided, c) inventory the Centrex numbers in service for usability, and d) baseline the total cost of ownership of the Centrex service.
Legacy Solutions worked with representatives from JPMC’s telecom billing, legal, and sourcing departments; AT&T; and the Public Utilities Commission (PUC). The documentation used for our due diligence was provided by these organizations. The tariff data from the PUC dated back to 1989.
In our discovery we found no two dependent documents to be consistent.
Outcome
Legacy Solutions defined the City Wide Centrex environment into three categories:
1) disconnect immediately, 2)migrate to DID, and 3) trace for usability. We also recommend that JPMC catalog the individual dialing plans in place, determine feature sets that could be standardized across the entire service, and create one clean inventory.
In the process, we found a systemic error due to the nature of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) billing formats. With the contribution of the telecom finance department and sourcing organization the dispute went into millions of dollars, generating a huge ROI for this project.