In 2007, Claro Nicaragua was introducing high-speed internet services and needed a solution to manage them. In just a few weeks, Open was able to make a rental implementation of their solution to help handle the first 10,000 internet service customers. Claro surpassed their market penetration goals, which motivated them to use Smartflex to manage other services. In 2008, Claro decided to acquire Smartflex to support all of their services in Nicaragua: telephony, cable TV, satellite TV, and internet. Following this success, Claro decided to extend operations in 2010. Now, Claro manages more than 1.5 million services with Smartflex in 5 countries: Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama and Guatemala.

Unnecessary wasted time that was generated by management of commercial operations was reduced, according to Walter Gómez, Configurations Coordinator at Claro Nicaragua, “The process has evolved and is now quite simple. First, we receive a requirement, then it is validated with the finance department, next the configuration department analyzes it and makes a time estimate, then it is configured, eventually product tested with the user, and finally put into production.”

“Having the autonomy to set up our own business processes means we can solve issues or create new services ourselves, with our own staff,” stated Milton Obando, Project Coordinator at Claro Nicaragua. He also mentioned that another added value was “to be able to set our own processes; it allowed us to document them. We could to learn from the developments made by the team, for example, if one of our engineers made a modification, they could then document the procedure and share this information with others in the department.”

A good example of this is the development of the “Casa Claro” commercial plan, which offers customers in Central America triple-play packages that consist of internet, telephone, and television services at very affordable rates. Prior to Smartflex’s implementation, developing a commercial plan of this magnitude would have taken 3 months, but with flexible configurations and the use of business rules, it was developed in less than three days.

This platform has offered each Claro operation the ability to manage its various processes with a standardized operating model and multiple commercial services, all the while strengthening their leadership in the region by introducing new products much faster than their competitors.