Project Background

Vodafone's operations team legacy collections activities were mainly manual processes, run on several disparate systems. Vodafone needed to centralize this Collections solutions into one central solution, migrating in-flight Collections processes and decommissioning legacy solutions.

What was my role

My role was as an Technical Implementation Manager for the project, covering:

  • Translation of system requirements to technical design

  • Responsible for conducting technical workshops, architecture and specifications

  • Design and development of ETL to map Vodafone's data to Experian products

  • Development of interfacing for 3rd party applications, external Collections agencies, legal institutions,

  • Managing a team of technical developers & analysts in delivery the product to production

What I learnt on this project

I learnt many things on this project:

  • Deep understanding of the Collections business requirements and policies in Vodafone, in order to design the system specifications for the solution

  • Managing the workload of a team of 5 technical developers/analysts and external interfacing providers.

  • Definition of architecture for environments, and software architecture requirements and sizing

  • Specification & development of a wide range of interfacing channels to handle integration with core systems and 3rd party applications via DB interfacing, XML file generation, web services, socket programming.

  • QA test definitions and testing harness for API testing

  • Decommissioning of legacy solutions, and archival of legacy data

  • Technical design of database structure & system configuration to meet system requirements

  • Configuration control and promotion of configurations between environments

Database design

Database design consisted on the definition and development of the following 3 schemas in Oracle:

  • Staging schema - used for staging area for incoming data from Vodafone core systems and the decommission and archival of legacy solutions.

  • Integration schema - used for the development of ETL objects in transferring the data to the new Collections solution and running the nightly batch.

  • Core Collections schema - designing structure of core model (as per depiction) with system configuration, interfaced data and data for extraction to 3rd party systems.

Architecture specifications

A series of technical workshops were conducted with the client on project initiation. The goal of these workshops was to define the technical architecture covering:

  • Environment specifications. Determining volumes, sizing and failover for each environment

  • Interface specifications. High level interface specifications. Identifying all touchpoints to support the system requirements, and technical definitions of each interface channel

  • Technical environment. User management, SSO, security, reporting, migration

  • Technical risks and key decisions. Project defined risks to be tackled and tracked during the project design and build

Interface development

Interfacing to the Collections solution was particularly complex, as we had many varying formats from different core systems and 3rd party providers. In total there was over 50 interface touchpoints for the Vodafone solution, which required careful interface design, development and specifications.

  • Development of ETL to move DB-DB data seamlessly and performant between Vodafone's core systems and the Collections solution

  • Definition of triggers, formats, handling for all interface touchpoints

  • Interfacing flow definitions for data coordination feeding

  • Development of XML files generation complying to legal institutions format in Portugal

  • Integration with Vodafone's communication center for sending SMS, emails, letters to clients

  • Varying formats for integration with external debt collections agencies

  • Web services integration for retrieving key data to integrate to ATM Collections

  • Facilitating the integration of Collections strategy data from lawyers, solicitors and external agencies to automatically classify and treat the collections processes

Additional project areas

Definition and design of large volume data migration from Vodafone's legacy systems to new Collections solution.

Archival of historic data for performance of the solution.

Data purge processes from Collections on a regular basis in line with Vodafone's retention policy on data storage.

System design specifications, following Experian product best practices.