PARTNER CONTENT: The famous management scientist Ken Blanchard defines ultimate services in his book Legendary Service: Consistently delivering ideal services to retain customers, thereby increasing the competitiveness of enterprises.

Sun Fangping, Senior Vice President (SVP) of ZTE said that in recent years, ZTE Global Services has proposed the brand concept of “Ultimate Services” in the hope that by continuously improving network services, we can provide global operators and industry customers with ultimate network experience, continuously improve network value, and promote the development of the global digital economy.

Operators are in the urgent need of digital transformation to ensure the competitiveness of their own networks and business, and to explore new markets. ZTE has a long history of in-depth cooperation with operators, and plays an important role in the transformation process.

The Communications Industry Takes the Lead in Digital Transformation

In recent years, digital economy has become a hot concept. Operators play an important role in telecommunications infrastructure construction. In the wave of digital transformation, the communications industry takes significant responsibilities as the infrastructure builder and digital application enabler of digital transformation of thousands of industries. In addition, its own networks and services also have strong digital requirements. Represented by 5G network construction, the communications industry takes the lead in digital transformation of the economy and society.

For example, to rapidly deploy 5G networks on a large scale, digital technologies play an indispensable role in co-construction and sharing, architecture simplification, and network O&M, promoting rapid implementation of high-quality 5G networks. Looking ahead to the future, network services will be further transformed in the orientation of digitalization and intelligence. ZTE has proposed the concept of ultimate services, which complies with the trend of the era and helps operators build future-oriented high-quality networks.

How to Understand Ultimate Services

Sun Fangping first emphasized that ZTE’s pursuit of ultimate services is to fully understand customer requirements, exceed customer expectations on the basis of satisfying customer expectations first, and understand customers better than themselves. “We should not only meet standards, but also make our services become standards.”

In the pursuit of ultimate services, ZTE Global Services focus on building a culture of ultimate services, an ultimate technical platform, and ultimate professional capabilities. With the goals of “Beyond the industry standards and customer expectations, and zero negative comments on services and complaints from customers”, ZTE aims to achieve win-win cooperation, establish a strong awareness of quality first, and adhere to doing things right the first time. In terms of ultimate professional capabilities, ZTE has built a professional network delivery team of more than 10,000 persons, and has over 2,500 partners worldwide. With more than 38 years of experience in the delivery of global communications network projects, ZTE helps customers in efficient network delivery in different scenarios, improves network quality and user perception, and releases network values.

Behind the concept of ultimate services, ZTE has been serving customers with craftsmanship spirit for a long time. ZTE Global Services centralizes on main services such as “craftsmanship engineering, craftsmanship networks, and craftsmanship services” to build the brand of ultimate services.

In the field of “craftsmanship engineering”, ZTE is committed to achieving ultimate customer experience and network construction efficiency. Based on the diversified requirements of customers, ZTE provides one-stop services for infrastructure network construction, such as new construction, replacement, upgrade, expansion, and integration, to increase network value. In terms of construction specifications, ZTE has extracted and fixed a mature SOP for multiple scenarios. In terms of delivery management and control, ZTE uses intelligent Engineering Project Management System (iEPMS) to build digital and intelligent capabilities based on the ultimate scenarios of “search, recommendation, socializing, and experience” to simplify the network deployment. In terms of ecological co-construction, ZTE establishes digital and intelligent connections with customers to jointly improve network construction efficiency and quality. ZTE proposes to make capabilities and data serviceability, to minimize the transaction costs and maximize the value of engineering delivery. In 2022, ZTE and China Mobile Hunan Branch successfully completed the interconnection between ZTE’s iEPMS and the smart engineering system of the customer, breaking isolated data islands and promoting both network construction efficiency and quality.

In the field of “craftsmanship networks”, aiming to achieve best user experience, ZTE continues to pursue leadership in network technologies and quality. ZTE continuously improves project quality and efficiency through systematic end-to-end digital means, continuously strengthens three-dimensional communication with customers, and optimizes network construction costs to improve project efficiency and maximize network value. Up to now, ZTE has built high-performance craftsmanship networks in more than 100 countries. In 2022, ZTE helped more than 10 networks, including Hutchison Drei Austria, to achieve top results in third-party network tests.

In addition, ZTE Global Services continues to deepen smart O&M and digital and intelligent operations to improve user perception. The digital Customer Support Center, repair centers, and spare parts warehouses around the world provide guarantee for ultimate services.

Benchmarking Projects of Global Services

Sun Fangping emphasized that the core of ZTE’s service advantages is its ability to quickly assemble global resources. Firstly, ZTE uses digital ways to achieve real-time visibility of global resources and employees, thus helping projects quickly and accurately match the right candidates. Secondly, ZTE has established a mechanism for overall management of global resources, which supports allocation and quick assembly of global resources. For major breakthrough projects, we allocate resources to core project teams in special force mode. Thirdly, ZTE integrates resources of multi-national strategic partners and quickly assemble teams. This is especially important for new market breakthroughs and zero-foundation network construction, thus effectively supporting successful project delivery and guaranteeing the fulfillment of commitments to customers.

Relying on the global capability system and mature project management mechanism, ZTE has successfully delivered projects in various scenarios around the world. The most representative projects in recent years are the Wind Tre project in Italy and the P3 project in the Philippines. Taking the P3 project in the Philippines as an example, Sun Fangping introduced that in recent years, ZTE successfully delivered the new 4G/5G Turnkey network construction project of DITO, the third-largest operator in Philippines, setting a new record in the local construction and the fastest commercial use of local communication networks.

In this project, ZTE is responsible for the land acquisition, survey and design, network construction, optimization and maintenance of wireless sites and optical cable transmission in more than 700 cities, and national data center equipment rooms. The project was characterized by high standards of engineering quality and complicated services within a tight engineering schedule. Despite the great difficulties and challenges such as the COVID-19 and natural disasters, ZTE has adhered to the principle of high customer value first and applied digital delivery methods. The high-quality delivery level of the project exceeds the customer’s expectation. ZTE has established its brand of project delivery, and is highly praised by the leaders of the customer group as “the ZTE team is an unbeatable team”. This project has also set a good example in the field of communication network construction, and won many honors such as the PMI (China) Project Management Award 2021, the ATEA Infrastructure Technology Telecommunications Award 2022, and the Telecom Vendor of the Year by Philippines Asia Leaders 2022.

To date, ZTE has served more than 500 operators in over 160 countries and regions, and has delivered more than 200 thousand projects, deployed more than 5.3 million sites, and covered more than 2 billion users. Sun Fangping also stated that ZTE is promoting ecological cooperation with partners, industry organizations, and universities to gather industry resources to the achievement of ultimate services.