Quintica: How towercos achieve SLAs

Quintica are a systems integration (SI) and service management organization with a focus on Communication Service Providers (CSP) passive infrastructure and are currently managing over 3,500 towers from their Service Management Centres in Accra, Kampala and Nairobi. Quintica also leverages their own OS3 SITE services solution, tailored for the tower industry but built on the popular Remedy platform from BMC Software.

In September 2012 Quintica was acquired by Quindell Portfolio Plc (AIM: QPP.L), the provider of sector leading expertise in software, consultancy and technology enabled outsourcing in its key markets, being Insurance, Telecommunications and their Related Sectors.

TowerXchange: What role does Quintica play in the tower industry?

Quintica are a systems integration and service management organisation, providing solutions to three verticals. Our main market is telecoms, where 70% of our revenues come from, and we also work with financial services and oil and gas.

There are three components to our service offering to CSPs:

• Systems Integration - supplying solutions that deploy both BMC as well as our own developed IP - OS3 SITE, which is built on top of the Remedy platform

• Outsourcing of NOC processes and services via our Service Management Centre (SMC)

• Providing industry specific consulting and advice to improve the management of both passive and active infrastructure based on ITIL, ISO20000, eTOMS and TM-Forum standards and principles.

BMC Remedy is the de facto job ticketing system for the Telecom industry worldwide - just about every major operator in Africa uses Remedy including MTN, Vodacom, Airtel, and the Vodafone Group operations such as Safaricom. Quintica is an Elite Partner of BMC Software across Africa, the Middle East and in the UK, helping deliver excellent customer service to their clients.

Quintica uses the Remedy ARS (Action Request System) to overlay our own OS3 SITE solution, filling gap between job ticketing and all the other services tower operators need: fault, change, tenant management, reporting, asset management, site management, project management, preventative maintenance and fuel/power management. We are currently developing a module to support Health & Safety requirements.

We don’t believe there’s anyone else offering these services on this scale in Africa - we partner with tower operators as well as Mobile Network Operators (MNO) to bring people, processes and technology together.

TowerXchange: Give us an idea of Quintica’s footprint in Africa - roughly how many cell sites aren’t being governed by your Service Management Centres?

We run NOCs in Accra, Ghana, Kampala, Uganda and in Nairobi, Kenya, plus a big service desk in South Africa. We’re also operating processes for a major Dubai-based telco. We also have offices in Nigeria, Angola, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, London as well as a presence in Egypt.

We’re currently managing and supplying NOC/SMC services for of over 3,500 towers, most of which have multiple tenants.

TowerXchange: How can tower operators integrate alarms generated by RMS and job-ticketing together with scheduled and reactive O&M site visits and SLAs to “close the loop” on cell site maintenance?

All site related information (assets, incidents, changes, projects, site access, SLAs, people, contractors, leases, contracts, co-location customers et cetera) is recorded and kept up to date in our site services application OS3 SITE. At the core of the product is a sophisticated Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB/SID) from BMC. The CMDB is based on both ITIL and eTOM (SID).  The CMDB ensures that all of the collected data is related to other relevant data. For example, incidents, preventative maintenance activities, site access and changes can all be related to the affected asset, for example a generator at specific site.

Especially at shared sites, our data needs to be linked to a number of SLAs, and those SLAs may change over time.

Through reporting and data mining we’re then able to answer questions such as:

• Which changes or maintenance activities have caused incidents?

• Are contractors keeping up with the agreed maintenance schedule (as checked against site access records)?

• How are contractors performing by site, region, asset type, and by SLA?

Using our systems and processes, incidents get to the contractor quicker allowing for speedy resolution. The contractor is given all of the relevant information in advance so they can be organised and bring the right people and spare parts to a site. Mobility allows the delivery of incidents to contractors’ smart phones and enables the contractor to keep our system up to date, and to “close the loop” on cell site maintenance, as you put it.

We can also find out where fuel leakage is coming from by recording and relating low fuel alarms and usage, generator run time, planned and unplanned site access, security events, and by comparing ordered fuel to delivered fuel and invoiced fuel.

Equipment that is maintained properly will last longer. You’ve got put everything you’ve got into a comprehensive asset register. Our asset management module is not complicated like an ERP system, and it’s built for the tower industry. Combining all the meaningful information, together with all maintenance contracts, enables us to automatically produce maintenance schedules, to forecast future maintenance costs, and to provide alerts when maintenance contracts are up for renewal.

TowerXchange: Take us inside one of your Service Management Centres - which sounds like a Network Operations Centre (NOC) - and introduce us to the people and the processes.

I’d describe our Service Management Centres as more than a NOC. The main service we provide is 24/7 fault management - taking alarms from BTS equipment or telemetry systems, correlating and de-duplicating alarms, looking for trends and instantly feeding that information into our refined version of Remedy, tailored for telecoms. Ours is not the normal out of the box version of Remedy, which for example might typically only display a couple of fields about a cell site. Our system provides a myriad of information about a site, from co-ordinates to size, load capacity, the model and status of equipment, lease agreements et cetera.

Our SMC always has two people on a shift, covering weekends and evenings. We also have one person on change management, then another one or two people for site access management, depending on the number of sites managed and the degree of automation. With the technicians to cover shifts and an SMC Manager, each SMC employs 11-13 people, in some cases joined by key contractors who might sit in the SMC enabling us to respond to a critical incident together.

TowerXchange: How do you support the achievement of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and the measurement of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

Quintica are an independent arbiter in the achievement of SLAs, which are critical to the profitability of towercos and to QoS for operators.

Most tower industry KPIs measure availability using different models. The majority of SLA penalties are based around availability. But it’s not just a question of whether the site is live or not, some sites are hub sites that feed other sites, so it’s important to know dependent sites as downtime can affect the functionality of other sites.

Quintica have recently developed models to configure Remedy, keeping all the relationships within the CMDB, so we can track what passive and active equipment is on site and what is functioning, differentiating between 2G and 3G equipment.

We’re also able to measure other change management and project management KPIs related to the rollout of new sites and upgrades to the batteries and generators at sites.

We give the tower operator the information necessary to manage contractors, particularly O&M service providers. We’re able to correlate scheduled maintenance, job tickets and incident resolution to site access, so the towercos are able to ensure they get sites maintained when they want it - there’s no arguing any more. And if a contractor goes to a site and changes something, breaks something or even steals fuel or equipment, we can link those incidents to specific site access and to specific contractors.

TowerXchange: How does the use of systems like yours optimise tower operators’ deployment of capex?

We use a Remedy tool called Analytics for Reporting to create dashboards - data mining with the ability to slice and dice data on energy efficiency, for example listing the ten worst performing sites, showing the critical incidents at each to determine the source of problems. For example, by relating performance to specific incidents and to our comprehensive asset register, you might find a common make and model of generator that is consistently failing as the maintenance contract was not extended. Remedy’s CMDB ties everything together and gives users the power to translate operational data into actionable management information.

We’re technology agnostic and can take data feeds from the range of different active equipment (Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson et cetera) and from any RMS system (Inala, Kentrox, Telemisis et cetera).

TowerXchange: Tell to us about the management of change at cell sites.

We build templates to log changes, whether it’s the replacement of a generator or a structural upgrade for capacity. We report, assign and escalate, creating a standard set of steps and a start and end date, usually tied to the SLA - we’re like a quality check in the project management office, but the towerco still has to lead the change project.

If a change is lagging behind, and it’s affecting the tower operator’s ability to achieve SLAs, we get involved, talking to the project manager and checking daily activity logs to ensure things are being done properly.

TowerXchange: How do the requirements of your clients differ between mobile network operator users with mostly single tenant towers, and the requirements of multi-tenant towercos?

With a mobile network operator client, we’re focused on that one main client.  MNOs tend to be focused on the eTOM business process framework, with siloed services for networks, IT and customer care. When we’re building solutions for MNOs, our brief is often to unify those three service desks into a single OSS platform.

When tower assets are transferred to towercos, service standard expectations are often raised beyond what was achieved previously. SLAs are numerous and complicated. You have the MNO using exacting SLAs to guarantee service from the towerco, who in turn have SLAs with O&M subcontractors, with one of the most challenging SLAs being to the fuel service provider. Grace periods are reducing and the penalties for failing to achieve SLAs are severe.

While towercos undertake substantial due diligence before acquiring towers, it is difficult to audit 100% of the infrastructure. The only way to achieve SLAs is often to automate and implement state of the art telemetry systems, which in many cases aren’t pre-existent on cell sites - many have only a basic monitoring system with a few alarms working only spasmodically. Implementing telemetry systems to thousands of remote cell sites within six months is quite a challenge!

Then you have added complexity when towercos start selling co-locations immediately. Those co-locating tenants might have different demands, for example the anchor tenant might classify a tower as a priority three site, yet when a tenancy is sold to a TV company they want it to be a priority one site, reducing SLA response times from eight to four hours.

TowerXchange: Looking beyond the systems, how does Quintica support the people and processes necessary to optimise tower management?

We offer services and support to get maintenance processes working efficiently, helping clients to get incident and change processes up and running and operating smoothly. We train users to use Remedy effectively, improving reporting and making sure processes are embedded.

We also offer a mentorship service. Remedy is a sophisticated service desk system and over time established processes start to fail when people leave, SLAs change and new products are added - running a tower operation is a living, growing beast, while Remedy needs to be kept updated. In response, Quintica will sell blocks of time over a year in which we’ll refine the integration of reporting, the setting of monitoring tools et cetera. For example, for a client in Kenya we have two people onsite all the time to look after tools around Remedy.

We also offer our unique MAST simulations; group exercises that simulate a day in the life of a towerco. We give participants a number of realistic service management challenges to help them understand the processes, SLAs, KPIs, reporting, and integration necessary for a towerco to work effectively.

TowerXchange: Finally, please sum up how you would differentiate Quintica from your competitors.

We’ve built our OS3 SITE solution for the tower industry on top of BMC’s Remedy platform. Using Remedy is a big advantage as it’s the most widely used and best solution in the industry, and offers a very stable, reliable platform. Competitors that have built their own product from scratch don’t have the depth of functionality already built in that Remedy has, and don’t have the capabilities that we’ve built on top of it to make it telecoms specific for both passive as well as active infrastructure. Coupled with the other products in the Quindell OS3 Frameworks suite (SPO and SPE) we can truly start offering solutions up the “food chain” into the OSS and CRM platforms.

We offer highly customisable solutions. It’s not built for just one customer, it’s highly modularised, has full user manuals, installation instructions, and the use of our support teams. Most importantly, Quintica is tried and tested managing thousands of cell sites, many with multiple tenants, in Africa. Having the ability to manage, monitor and report on multi dimensional SLA’s in an independent fashion is a huge strength.

Automation is one of our main USPs; from incident creation, reporting, and escalation to passing job tickets to mobile devices via our mobility solution. We also have exceptional workflow capabilities - Quintica isn’t just a sophisticated database, we’ve mapped and automated critical processes. When towercos sell space to a new tenant, we track everything from logging the new tenant enquiry, automating workflow delivery to the right person, analysis of the application, technical and financial review... by the time the new tenant’s equipment arrives on site you have all the data in place (contract, equipment specifications, load requirement, who sold it et cetera) in order to meet and exceed that tenant’s expectations and SLA.

As mentioned previously, our OS3 SITE solution, part of the Quindell OS3 Frameworks product suite for the Telecommunications industry, will soon be sold directly via the BMC MarketZone portal, which would allow any BMC salesperson or partner to access, purchase and sell our technology suites globally. This is indeed a great endorsement of our product!