Innovative Systems

CTC in Brainerd MN Consolidates their OSS with eLation

October 13, 2011

BRAINERD, MN - According to Steve Holmvig, Network Operations Manager, at Consolidated Telephone Company in Brainerd, MN, fear of the unknown caused them the most apprehension when they converted over completely to the Innovative Systems eLation OSS solution.

According to Holmvig, “We had not gone through a project of this scope or size so we were very dependent on Innovative’s experience to make this happen.  It is one thing to convert billing or financials, but to do a complete conversion of all our company’s operating systems was somewhat intimidating.  The leadership team at Innovative helped guide us through this process with no CTC casualties during or after the conversion!”

CTC, a 10,000 subscriber line cooperative company is located in Brainerd, MN and serves over 7,000 homes and 795 businesses in Todd, Cass, Crow Wing, and Morrison counties in the beautiful lakes region of northern Minnesota. CTC customers can use and enjoy voice services, high speed fiber internet and digital television.

Prior to converting their OSS to eLation, CTC was using a variety of different solutions and the conversion helped to achieve a major goal for CTC - having a single operating system that communicated to all other parts of the OS. Holmvig also added, “We appreciate the reporting capabilities using Advanced Search and the Windows based navigation of accounts. Our techs can now close their own jobs using the Field Communicator/Trouble Ticket System.” Last, but not least, Holmvig explained, “Was the ability for CTC to go paperless.”

As far as preparation for the conversion, Holmvig offered, “We had sessions with Innovative to help us prepare for the conversion.  This preparation work included a review of the conversion process as well as what work CTC would need to do to help insure that the conversion would be a success. Holmvig also commented, “Due to the long history with our previous vendor and the countless USOC’s that had been created, we had to focus on clean up and simplification of the tables.”

In the future Holmvig says that CTC looks forward to eLation’s capability to do sales tracking by sales person and taking advantage of SDP provisioning of our IPTV.

About Innovative Systems
Innovative Systems is a dominant provider of voice and video services as well as OSS/BSS solutions to the telecommunications industry. The APMAX and Application Peripheral (AP) are the most feature rich and widely deployed voice and video service platforms in the IOC industry with over 1,200 systems in service interfacing with all switch types and IPTV networks. The eLation OSS/BSS solutions is the leading next generation solution and is deployed at over at over 100 customers providing fully integrated billing, automated provisioning, financial and staking and mapping solutions for wireline, wireless, Internet, IPTV and CATV companies. For more information, please contact the Innovative Systems corporate office at 605-995-6120.