Why the NorthStar program is pushing boundaries

We started three years ago with a customer-experience-led transformation, which means deciding where the customer experience and the customer journeys need to be, then working back to the components and capabilities that deliver them. The mantra is simplification, standardisation and scaling across the five Ps: products, processes, platforms, people and partners. Simplification took legacy products and platforms to less than half what we started with. Standardisation settled on the TM Forum APIs, so components talk to each other like Lego bricks instead of through an integration project each time. Scaling means building once and deploying many times across our markets.

The transformation has delivered. We have turned around to growth on top and bottom line, and the Net Promoter Score has been improving for several quarters. The biggest single piece is the entire B2B segment in Sweden, our core business, which was thoroughly untransformed in 2020. We defined the B2B experience and the journeys, put the components in place, and built it around a product catalogue. Business internet shows the result: a fixed-line product that took weeks to provision now takes minutes. Fallouts in the BSS have dropped sharply, and the people running sales and service are more satisfied because the system works for them.

NorthStar is the innovation half, run with Ericsson, research institutions and customers. It pushes 5G slicing, APIs and edge compute out of the lab, and it is live R&D rather than lab R&D, so we learn what works with real customers and what does not. The illustration is a logistics fleet. One truck carries three concurrent slices: a keep-alive and alarm channel, a video stream supporting autonomous operation, and a maintenance path carrying data between the control room and the vehicle. Orchestrating three slices on one truck is interesting. Orchestrating them across a growing fleet, profitably, is the question we are answering now.

Slicing changes what we can sell. Where a branch office needed fibre, service-assured wireless connectivity now does the job. The harder architectural point is that a customer buys an end-to-end service, never a segment, so quality of service has to be industrialised across radio, transport and IT together, with the product catalogue and CPQ for configuration, service order management for provisioning, and observability to prove we met the SLA we sold.

Three things make Ericsson the partner for this. Cutting-edge products with a lifecycle behind them, because an innovation that fizzles out helps nobody. A personal connection between the companies at every level, engineers included. And a shared responsibility for the industry and for our region, which we have to earn again every day.