NTT East & Cisco Systems

Background

NTT East is one of the worlds largest ISPs. They service all of Eastern Japan, including Tokyo, and their network is made up exclusively of Cisco products. Prior to April of 2005, NTT East was supported by several of Cisco's large partner companies in Japan. On April 1st, 2005 Cisco took over direct support for NTT East's network. This meant identifying the product type, location, and serial number for over 500,000 parts at over 2,000 locations. Unfortunately, due to a quirk with the software being used, some older products did not return the correct serial number when pinged electronically.

Project Summary

The project was broken down into 4 major phases. The first phase focused on quickly gathering data from NTT East's 50,000 chassis and their parts without affecting network performance. With limited access and time pressures, custom scripts were developed that gathered over 6 million lines of data from NTT East's network in less than 4 days.

The second phase of the process focused on collecting a clean database of valid product information. A process was developed that parsed the data to identify serial numbers, product types, location, and other information. This data was verified against Cisco's internal systems. Serial numbers that failed initial validation were cross-referenced with manufacturing and other databases to determine the part's actual serial number.

The third phase of the process focused on reconciling internal systems with the data collected. Tools and processes were developed to prepare and upload hundreds of thousands of records.

Once products were accounted for, the fourth phase of the process focused on implementing an improved change and tracking process to make sure any change to the network was accounted for on a monthly basis. This process directly assisted in selling over $50 million worth of service, and resulted in a 100% support success rate for the first 3 months following its implementation.

The lessons learned on this project have been standardized into an official company process, and have been used internationally on many of Cisco's global top accounts.