Tower companies and tower managers at MNOs have access to an increasing amount of data about the performance of the assets in their portfolio. Progressive tower owners are able to analyse that data and translate it into actionable intelligence, optimising the operational, commercial and ultimately the bottom line performance of their businesses. But the reality is that telecom infrastructure owners are relatively new to the art and science of data collection and utilisation. TowerXchange has inaugurated a new working group to share requirements and experiences among the Chief Data Officers of tomorrow.
The inaugural TowerXchange data collection and utilisation working group took place at the TowerXchange Meetup MENA in Dubai in January 2019. Thanks to initial participants, both on the day and in advance, including buy-side participants Russian Towers, edotco, Helios Towers and STC as well as supply-side participants Delmec, Infozech, Invendis, M2Catalyst, Sera4 and Tarantula.
Case study: Russian Towers
The working group opened with a case study from Timur Shikov, Head of Strategy and Marketing at Russian Towers. Russian Towers operates a portfolio of 4,000 sites and, with 25-30% year on year organic growth, is one of the world’s fastest growing towercos. They are also one of the most innovative, both in terms of business model and site typologies, but also in leveraging IT as an enabler.
Russian Towers had used off the shelf software solutions, but grew frustrated with their technology partners’ unresponsiveness to customer service and customisation requests, so they brought their requirements to market through a tender sent to many of the most established and widely used site management and Business Process Management (BPM) systems used by communications infrastructure operators. Finding nothing that met their needs, Russian Towers resolved to develop an in-house solution, dubbed RUBAHA, which has been live since March 2018.
RUBAHA has a BPM module at its heart, a customer portal with a digital interface for order placement, checking status, and where MNOs can overlay their rollout plans with Russian Towers’ sites.
All internal documentation and workflows now run through RUBAHA, as well as 35% of customer communications. Russian Towers have successfully created transparency within their internal processes, enabling them to diagnose what is right (and wrong!)
A second case study was presented by an emerging market towerco which acquired a large portfolio of unmonitored towers, and which implemented a flexible BPM platform to meet their incident management needs. Once implemented, the platform and associated process improvements reduced meantime to dispatch significantly, and helped identify underperforming sites, enabling buying decisions to be made based on the real performance of equipment in the field, rather than based on the manufacturer’s stated performance characteristics.
A data platform is only as good as the data in the platform
A similar example was shared in the working group of another towerco which, at the point of being carved out from its MNO parent company, inherited multiple data tools and data sets, with no ‘single source of the truth’ database. This prompted a mammoth data integration exercise, demonstrating that cleaning data is at least as important as collecting data!
Incentivised to hit a ‘go live’ deadline, the towerco’s selected vendor had their tool up and running on time within four months, but the legacy data within the tool was incomplete and out of date. A new data template and scope had to be defined and agreed in partnership with the vendor, field team and internal stakeholders. Data had to be cross-checked and validated cell by cell, a process which took six months. Weekly data reconciliations were undertaken, with random data checks and reviews against site visit photos – the persons responsible for any data gaps were penalised.
When the architecture and the data was ready, the towerco encountered a new challenge bulk uploading 500GB of data into the platform. The project ultimately concluded successfully, but took closer to two years than the one year initially targeted, and serves to illustrate the criticality of sound IT project management and painstakingly detailed database management.
One point which came up was around Data Quality and the need for good input data. In cases where the input data is not complete or not interpretable because of complexity, the first step is to make it consistent and understandable. For instance, with a large telco operating in India and 14 countries in Africa they had over 200,000 leases to account for, as a part of the new IFRS 16 regulations. In this example, the telco needed to get accounting details of the leases down to each site by month.
The input data appeared to be simple (just one record per lease) and the output was the right of use and lease liability numbers for the entire lease duration. Once the processing started, after every iteration of processing, there was realisation that some input may have been incomplete or partial. Five iterations were done over a one month period to finally cleanse the data to get complete numbers for all of their 14 countries’ deployment in Africa. One of the key reasons for this becoming possible so quickly was due the high speed data engine, part of the Infozech framework, which automated the transitions over multiple iterations.
“This example illustrates the importance of Data Quality Management and data cleansing when it comes to effective Data Utilisation”, said Tulika Pradhan, Director of Analytics at Infozech.
Data collection and utilisation working group objectives (initial draft)
- To support and accelerate tower companies and tower management teams within MNOs on their journeys to business process optimisation and IT transformation
- To enable the collection and consolidation of data from multiple sources: site audits, RMS, site visits et cetera
- To share best practices in data validation / data quality management
- To share best practices in the transformation of data into meaningful, actionable information, for example through integration with job ticketing
- To enable the creation and maintenance of comprehensive asset repositories, defining the load, capacity, condition, and ultimately the value of cell sites, and to leverage such data for revenue assurance purposes
- To ensure user adoption of data, IT and BPM tools across multiple functions to break down silos
- To enable smarter procurement and partner selection decisions based on robust analysis of performance in the field, rather than being based on the performance characteristics stated by manufacturers
- To ensure the scalability of data, IT and BPM platforms as towercos expand into new regions and new countries
- To share success stories illustrating the return on investment in IT, BPM and data initiatives – and to defend (where relevant expand) the budget for such initiatives
- To evangelise best practices in IT project management to ensure delivery on time, on budget
- To seek to extend data collection and utilisation initiatives to improve the business intelligence governing the selection of new site locations, the sale of co-locations on existing towers, and the evaluation of the lease-up potential of towers offered for sale
- To leverage innovations such as AI, machine learning, Blockchain and drones to further enhance data collection and utilisation strategies
- To define a new role of a Chief Data Officer, whose job it is to aggregate, organise and analyse data, leveraging it to drive business process optimisation
- To leverage all the above technology and process improvements to accelerate time to market, to reduce site visits and operating costs, to improve site level profitability and ultimately enhance the profitability of tower companies, or to position operator-captive towers as a profit centre
Creating and maintaining accurate asset registers
Among other services, Delmec specialise in auditing tower structures and forecasting capacities – an essential step when evaluating lease-up potential when buying or selling towers. Post tower transaction, maintaining asset registers to the same high standards is critical to revenue assurance.
Delmec uses an in-house platform to combine data from their own site inspections with data and photos from third parties, and to visualise the current capacity and co-location potential of a given tower. “Our goal is to create a facility that enables a towerco’s sales team to instantly know what they can sell,” said Delmec CTO Spencer Crawford-White.
Some of the other insights Delmec are able to share are cost benefit analyses where a structure requires strengthening to accommodate an additional co-location – should the towerco add capacity for one or two further tenants? And where should towercos and MNOs focus their investments to minimise the health and safety risks associated with overloaded towers?
Educating shareholders and investors about the importance of IT investments
Tower companies are asset-based businesses, and generate tremendous ROI on those assets. In comparison, investment in IT can seem intangible. This makes it imperative for towercos, and their brethren within MNOs, to identify shareholders and investors who recognise the transformational potential of IT, and to demonstrate a specific business case showing (achievable) return on investment.
Reducing the cycle time to permit, build and QA a new tower, or to add a new co-location, can yield exponential returns, while automation can keep SG&A costs to a minimum, maximising margins.
Savvy investors increasingly appreciate the value of reliable data for their own reporting and forecasting. “Given the impact on valuation, shareholders will appreciate the value of good data when they exit!” Quipped one working group participant.
Infozech CEO Ankur Lal wrapped up the inaugural data collection and utilisation working group by emphasising the need to increase awareness of the power of data, building trust and transparency, and ultimately securing investment in IT.
“We want to increase belief, and investment in, data collection and utilisation tools,” commented Lal. “If IT currently represents 0.5-1% of towerco expenditure, we believe an increase in spend to 2% could increase returns tenfold.”
Towercos and MNOs now have access to huge amounts of data from remote monitoring systems and sensors embedded into energy and access control systems. For example, patterns in diesel genset runtime can be analysed to forecast battery cell failure months in advance – not only can that cell be replaced without risk of downtime, but the cell can be replaced at a scheduled maintenance visit instead of a reactive visit, saving expensive truck rolls. Leveraging data in this manner will avoid SLA penalties and improve the efficiency of the field workforce.
Similarly, revenue can be assured based on accurate asset repositories that track every piece of equipment on a site. “We should strive to make a site audit last ten years,” recommended Lal.
Utility bills can be reconciled against meters – substantial savings can be realised. Tower owners can realign their businesses to be focused on project outcomes. “One example of this”, added another working group participant, “is that sharing performance data with your field workforce partners can enable linking remuneration with actual performance.”
But there are significant challenges yet to be overcome. Too much data is locked in guarded silos such as project and finance Excel documents – data flows within towercos and MNOs must be standardised and streamlined. Data templates must be reviewed to capture new data templates to ensure IFRS16 compliance
Leveraging data to drive co-location sales
M2Catalyst briefly presented their capability to leverage crowdsourced network performance data to drive co-location sales. A more economical alternative to drive-testing, M2Catalyst is able to pinpoint weak or non-existent signal strength. Of particular interest to towercos is M2Catalyst’s ability to triangulate cell site locations, determining which MNOs’ equipment and which technologies are co-located on any given site, providing unique insight into lease-up potential.
Used wisely, M2Catalyst could transform co-location sales from reactive to proactive, and could become an invaluable tool during tower transaction due diligence.
We’d like to invite YOU to participate in future data collection and utilisation working groups!
TowerXchange will host data collection and utilisation working groups at all our future Meetups, and we’re calling for the participation of IT, process and operational specialists from MNOs and towercos! Whether you have a success story to share, or simply wish to listen and learn to inform your own IT / BPM transformation journey, we would love to get you involved! Also most welcome: developers of data collection and utilisation platforms, from remote monitoring and access control systems to site management, data analysis and visualisation platforms – this working group is a great way to connect with current (and prospective) customers, and to inform product development to align with customer need!<
Interested in taking part? Email Kieron Osmotherly, CEO of TowerXchange at kosmotherly@towerxchange.com.
