The supplier onboarding process helps to create a formal relationship between customers and Group 2000, enabling both partners to understand expectations and implement the necessary requirements. It also helps to manage compliance and mitigate risks by conducting due diligence, verifying legal and regulatory adherence, and evaluating financial stability.

There are many reasons for a good supplier, like Group 2000, to welcome the onboarding process despite the amount of work that is involved sometimes.

After the onboarding process has been completed successfully, you as a customer can raise a purchase order whether this concerns a solution for lawful interception, data retention, or one of our adjacent solutions. The purchase order is then confirmed by our sales department.

The director Customer DevOps, will assign a project team consisting of a project manager, one or more Software Project Engineers, and a Test Engineer. Obviously, human resources are assigned based on their knowledge, experience, and availability.

Our customers procure LIMA solutions which allow them to adhere to the laws and regulations of the country where it operates. Experience with Law Enforcement agencies, the Monitoring Facilities of that specific country, and the used handover interfaces are often key to a delivery and implementation that is efficient and first time right.

Hence it is good to know that Group 2000 has active deployments in more than 40 countries around the world and that it is an active member of the technical committees of standardization institutes, like ETSI and 3GPP.

Especially, customers that have operations in multiple countries benefit from a consistent project team. Furthermore, it is beneficial for both partners if the project team already knows the customer organization, its staff, its internal processes, and last but not least its technical environment with which our solution has to integrate.

After the project team has been assigned, the project manager will write a project plan with clear and feasible timelines. The project plan describes which steps have to be taken to deliver and implement a LIMA solution in accordance with the purchase order, including the associated timelines. It also describes which project dependencies are foreseen and how to mitigate them.

Once the project plan and associated planning have been approved by you, the project execution will start.

In case Group 2000 has to provide the hardware, the first step is usually ordering the commercially off-the-shelf hardware. But with virtualization, we nowadays see more and more deployments where we only supply the LIMA software which is then installed on virtual machines.

The second step is to compose the solution by gathering all the LIMA software components that are needed to build the required solution. This includes the software modules for integration with network elements and the in-country Law Enforcement Monitoring Facility. Group 2000 has hundreds of interfaces for leading network equipment vendors available off the shelf and also supports all relevant ETSI, 3GPP, and Calea handover standards. The software is then pre-installed and pre-configured at our premises. If no new interfaces or customized software is required, then the next step is the Factory Acceptance Test.

Once the Factory Acceptance Test is successfully passed, the LIMA solution will be delivered to you. In case Group 2000 also provides the hardware, we will ship the servers with the pre-installed and pre-configured LIMA software to you. If we only provide the software, the LIMA solution is transferred to you digitally. In those cases, we will provide you with a virtual image or container which can be installed in the virtual environment.

After the installation of the solution in the reference environment, the integration with the network elements is extensively tested covering all possible call and routing scenarios. Once these tests are passed successfully and documented in a test report, the rollout to production is scheduled.

Rollout to production is performed during your service window when there is limited traffic. This implies that roll out to production is usually done in the late evening or at night. After roll out some limited tests are performed to confirm that all is working as intended. Then the stability period starts which implies that a Project Software Engineer is on standby to resolve any problem that might arise, although at this stage none are expected.

The last stage is then to transfer all the information about the project to the Group 2000 Service Desk so that should an incident arise sometime in the future, the Support Engineer has all the information at hand to resolve the issue well within the agreed service levels.