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Pelion

Success for Fortune 100 Company in the World's Largest Enterprise eUICC Migration

July 24, 2024 — 5 min read

Pelion has demonstrated the huge potential of eUICC technology by solving the problems related to changes in network coverage and desired reduction in operational costs for a large-scale logistics business.

We have proven eUICC to deliver a futureproof solution for cost of ownership and network coverage management.

Like Carlsberg would say in their adverts, outside consumer handsets and automotive markets, this case study highlights what’s ‘probably the world's best large-scale eUICC migration in IoT (Internet of Things) to date’.

The scale of this eUICC migration shows the need for a well-managed solution. It underscored the vital importance of having a partner-based approach ensuring technical readiness, collaborative problem-solving, and careful management of migration processes.

Using Pelion's Managed eUICC Service for their network connectivity meant our customer not only improved their connectivity service quality, but they also achieved substantial cost reductions, setting a new benchmark for eUICC deployments and network profile switching.

What did Pelion deliver?

Our customer, a leading Fortune100 company that provides consumer and enterprise services, runs a large logistics operation with over 20,000 vehicles. Their delivery drivers faced problems with connected door access devices. When drivers reached the doors with connected entry devices, they should have been able to enter a code, open the door and deliver the packages. Too often, however, they encountered slow or disconnected devices, which led to them not being able to make their delivery, this resulted in delivery retries or at worse failed deliveries. It was contributing to higher costs and lower customer satisfaction. After investigation, the issues related to these devices were found to be caused by challenges with device firmware, limitations on cellular network coverage on roaming networks and the availability of different radio network technologies.

To help resolve these issues, a new network configuration was required and a resolution that involved migration to a new SIM profile was selected. Pelion's Managed eUICC Service was identified as the best option to enable this activity.

So, our customer embarked on a journey to enable their devices to migrate their cellular connectivity services from Provider A to Provider B, the latter of which presented a more promising and cost-effective cellular network service.

Pelion had provided the customer with eUICC (embedded Universal Integrated Circuit Card) enabled SIM cards

While Pelion has expertise in eUICC migrations there were a few challenges related to this case. These included complexity around the device firmware and configuration between profiles, the eUICC migration itself, and establishing to address any migration failures.

 For this customer, we needed to ensure

  • Devices within the vast fleet were compatible with the eUICC migration.

  • Meeting firmware update requirements to ensure a seamless transition to the new provider.

  • The customer needed to deploy a new  untested firmware upgrade processes to enabled updated APN selection, which introduced an element of uncertainty.

  • Pelion SIMs all use the same APN details regardless of network but some devices try and use an APN name based on IMSI prefix.

To enable the eUICC migration, the Pelion team had to start the migration with small numbers of devices during the initial migration test. Doing so, we were able to help iron out potential issues before full-scale implementation. This mostly involved sure that they were able to tackle any encountered contention problems at scale, which would have ultimately lead to significantly lower success rates during the migration of larger device batches.

Migration failure is a risk with any eUICC profile migration, the core risk to any process is loss of service. With Pelion this was mitigated by ensure an always available fall back profile and timely intervention with a ‘revert and reset' for each migration failure. Manually doing this in the small scale tests to help refine and automate the process.

Collaboration between our and the customer teams was key.

Pelion’s team worked closely with the customer's technical teams to assess and update device logic and firmware, ensuring they were all coordinated. A strong partnership with the eUICC technology partner allowed Pelion to run campaigns and helped identify and mitigate contention issues. The experience and knowledge gained doing this at scale was one of the lasting outcomes from this project.

While dealing with migration issues was initially a manual process it became streamlined by creating an automated de-staging and rollback process for failed updates, while incorporating rigorous auditing and profile management protocols. This allowed the migration to be able to run at significant scale and completed within the timescales.

Pelion’s CTO Alan Tait said “It was very satisfying to see excellent results across the board. To me, the most notable achievements were the high success rate of the migration, the way we managed the change without affecting the connectivity uptime for our customer’s logistics operations and that ultimately that this customer achieved a 40% reduction in operations costs, which was the main goal in this case. The migration also improved available network selection with lower latency and better uptime. To the customer, overall service quality was increased and throughout we could effectively keep coverage from both Provider A and Provider B helping us prevent any potential disruptions”.

Like all our other customers, this customer stayed well-connected through the process.