Corporate Performance Management
Case Study: A Network Profitability, Modeling and Optimization (PM&O) solution provides visibility to the drivers of a Telecom giant's profitability
Client
The client, a US wireless service provider, did not have visibility into the fund utilization and return on investments for network enhancement projects. The network, for a wireless telecom service provider, is the source of core revenue generation and the projects are worth billions of dollars.
Challenges
The executives of the company spent a lot of time compiling information from various vendors and projecting the health of the project and anticipating the changed timelines. So as the timelines were being pushed out and milestones moved, it was difficult to establish change control, and figure out the root cause of the delays. A mature solution was missing. Progress was reported and tracked on excel sheets. The vendors did not proactively share information with the company. There was no common Project Management System. The systems had latent data reported from vendors.
The Project monitoring group began facing the following problems:
- There was no consistency in operational and financial reporting
- No visibility to return on assets for large chunks of investments.
- The network profitability was not optimal
- Reporting on profitability itself in question
Benefits
- The initiative enabled tracking the funding, payment timelines and return on investment of 200,000 network enhancement and maintenance projects with budgets in billions of dollars.
- Significant improvement in the ROA (Return on Assets)
Context
The telecom company provided contracts to vendors for EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) activities. A fixed budget was allocated per vendor and the utilization of that budget had to be tracked. It was difficult to track the vendors and the utilization of their budgets. Importantly pay points were linked to milestones.
Solution
A common project management and profitability tracking system that could monitor all the vendors was felt to be the need of the hour.
- A Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehouse (DW) solution enables accuracy and transparency of network Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting (BP&F), allow network profitability modeling and optimization (PM&O) and provide better understanding of the drivers of the company’s profitability.
- The Solution consisted of a .NET information gathering application, SSIS for information integration, SQL server Data Warehouse for information persistence, and Cognos for information reporting.
- A facility to upload excels was developed in line with the necessary application format. The vendors were provided with a single sign on so that they could upload information based on their role.
- All modifications, data had to be directly brought into the .NET application. Any changes/ modifications had to be carried out in this application only. It had to fall in the nationally approved schedule. The changes and deviations were sent to the Data Warehouse for the purpose of tracking. Workflows were built to get approval.
Technology Stack
Reporting Tool
Cognos v8.4 & 10.1
Database for Data warehouse
Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008
ETL / Data Integration
SQL Server Integration Services