Fast and High-Quality Project Delivery in Today's "Pressure-Cooker" Markets

With the rapid development of wireless technologies, competition within the communications industry has focused on stability and quality of network services as well as shortening the time to market. Operators need to quickly seize upon market opportunities and also fully control and allocate resources. However, by assigning heavy tasks under tight deadlines, pressures of the highly-competitive marketplace are being transferred to operators’ partners. Quick delivery of quality networks can pose a serious challenge to equipment suppliers.

On the premise of guaranteeing network quality, a new round of competition has begun, involving three key links: efficient logistics, customized delivery, and quick response. ZTE’s professional services and close cooperation with leading global operators has helped it overcome barriers within these three links in order to achieve prompt and reliable delivery.

Efficient Logistics Services

ZTE has developed a clear vision of its logistics strategy. It seeks to build an agile, streamlined, and large-scale logistics model to meet personalized customer demands, and to do this with less cost, improved quality, and quicker response. ZTE has formed a global professional logistics system comprising 107 branches and 42 service centers, which serves more than 500 operators in 140 regions worldwide. Currently, ZTE has over 14,000 employees working in logistics services.

Within ZTE’s logistics system there are 9 business areas including finished products delivery, supply plan, materials, production, quality, and procurement. The company’s platform departments support the logistics system in terms of strategic planning of the supply chain, project management, and IT tools. With a powerful and finely tuned logistics system, ZTE has demonstrated its ability in efficient and accurate logistics delivery.

The Aircel project in India serves as an example. ZTE completed the commercialization of 800 base stations in only two months. The extraordinary speed of delivery can be attributed to the smooth coordination of its domestic and foreign logistics. This involved investigating domestic production lines to ensure completion of the delivery, communicating accurate delivery information with the project team before making the delivery, optimizing the delivery procedures and articles to better manage subcontractors, and releasing daily follow-up reports.

In China, ZTE has established its own logistics model—a logistics base plus dispatching center with a storage area of more than 100,000 square meters. A localized and professional logistics system is necessary for smooth cooperation with Chinese operators. China Telecom, for example, came under intense pressure to progress with its project after taking over the CDMA network. ZTE was the fastest among all suppliers to complete the delivery. According to the demands of the project schedule, ZTE developed a reasonable delivery plan which included batch delivery, priority delivery of BSC equipment, and priority delivery to remote provinces. It also prepared adequate equipment and materials, opened logistics channels, and developed unique security policies based on standard logistics procedures (e.g. each makeup delivery had to be completed within 24 hours). By doing this, ZTE covered the project schedule from all angles. ZTE also values sharing a large amount of information with suppliers about the reserve market, and helps them remain stocked up.

Smooth Network Swap and Cutover

Network swap and cutover is one of the difficult issues in network construction. It may involve many adjustments to the existing network or lead to a hard handoff between different manufacturers. Therefore, the speed and smoothness of the swap and cutover process directly affects user experience and can even influence an operator’s brand image.

ZTE has always shared the concerns and needs of operators, and is capable of providing fast, high-quality network swap solutions. These solutions integrate up-to-date high-performance SDR base stations that can be applied in a variety of scenarios, and provide customized services for operators in four layers: network, area, cluster, and site. Solutions are customized according to different networks, and for each solution, ZTE ensures high-quality KPIs as well as fast, stable, and low-cost network swap. In this way, new, high-quality networks capable of smooth evolution and rapid upgrade can be built.

In 2009, ZTE assisted China Telecom in Chengdu to successfully upgrade its CDMA network. This was a pilot project for a rapid network swap. Because the CDMA network in Chengdu had complex equipment and a large subscriber base, adopting a hard network handoff plan would have affected network performance. ZTE therefore customized a “soft handoff” mode for Chengdu Telecom, which made the complex network swap smooth, fast, safe, and reliable. The swap was carried out for a whole service area one at a time by adjusting part of the wireless parameters, and the cutover site could fall back smoothly. A large engineering team was not needed. The “soft handoff” plan, combined with the intelligent “ODD” system configuration tool, enabled stable and fast network swap and cutover. ZTE has conducted 178 network swap-outs around China without fault. It has also succeeded in simultaneous swap operations in 17 service areas in 7 provinces of China, including Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Anhui, Hubei, Shanxi, and Fujian. ZTE created a record of swapping over 2,600 base stations in one night.

Rapid Response

A quality and rapid response service mechanism is a key concern for operators when choosing a cooperative partner. To help operators create better value, ZTE’s Global Customer Support Center has established a complete mechanism for rapidly responding to customer needs. Services, personnel agencies, and regions are grouped together into project management processes for the purpose of greater optimization. Through project-based operation, and supported by business operation and IT platforms, ZTE has constantly improved the mechanism to guarantee efficient and high-quality customer services.

ZTE’s Global Customer Support Center is based in Shenzhen, China and extends to France, India, Russia, Pakistan and other regions. Its overseas customer service teams are primarily staffed with local foreign employees. These professional teams have perfected international customer support procedures such as rapid response to customer demands, 24/7 around-the-clock service hotline, Internet customer support center, and technical support network. Since implementing its rapid response service mechanism, ZTE has raised the rate of permanent problem resolution to over 97.72%; timely resolution of VIP customer problems has risen to over 97.37%, and customer satisfaction has reached nearly 99%.

Efficient global logistics services, customized innovative solutions, and customer-oriented professional service systems have created the ZTE brand of fast and high-quality delivery. ZTE’s project delivery teams are widely recognized by operators all over the world.