In 
The Reime Group, a part of the ACME Group, is a passive infrastructure solution provider to wire-line as well as wireless telecom players. Headquartered in New Delhi, the company offers the entire breadth of materials and services needed for telecom roll-outs. Reime’s activities also include post-installation services such as energy management and maintenance of the telecom infrastructure. Among its major clients are Bharti Infratel and Indus Towers.
Unmet SLAs and long billing cycles
Reime has a field force of more than 1,000 technicians who maintain more than 120,000 telecom towers spread across the country. The company was finding it hard to monitor the activities of the technicians on the field.
“On an average, each technician had to attend to four-five calls every day. However, they were not reaching the site on time, which resulted in the calls not being closed on schedule. According to the Service Level Agreements (SLA) with our clients, we had to resolve each issue within three to five days. It was often taking as many as seven to eight days,” laments Manoj Kumar, CIO, Acme Group.
“With the SLAs not being met, Reime was being penalized heavily by clients. This resulted in not only a loss of lakhs of rupees, but also dissatisfied customers,” he said.
The number of complaints and issues being received by the company were also increasing, resulting in additional costs.
The lack of an effective monitoring and reporting solution had a negative impact on the Field Service Reports (FSR) too.
“The filing of FSR was done manually and, despite repeated follow ups from the managers, the technicians took their own sweet time, in filing the reports. Since the bills would be raised only when the reports came in, the entire process got delayed. It was taking as long as 2.5 to 3 months to close a billing cycle,” Kumar reveals.
To solve this problem, the management decided to leverage an enterprise mobility solution.
“It was a top-down mandate. The top management knew the power of mobility and wanted the IT department to use it to address the bottlenecks,” Kumar said.
Harnessing the power of mobility
Kumar decided to arm all the 1,000 field technicians with tablets. This was easier said than done.
“There were major challenges. The budget, despite the mandate from the top, was on the higher side (given the average price of a tablet was Rs 10,000, the cost of tablets alone would have come to Rs 1 crore). As carrying the tablet would have increased the accountability of the technicians, they were resisting it. The company was wary of mass attrition,” Kumar said.
Kumar addressed all the issues innovatively. To counter the high capex, he brought in the concept of BYOD (bring Your Own Device). The tablets were given to the employees and a small sum of Rs 250 per month was deducted from their salaries. This way, the company recovered 60 percent of the cost (Rs 10,000) of the tablet within two years. At the end of the two years, the device would be owned by the employee.
“We also deployed a MDM solution, and allowed employees to watch videos or listen to songs on their tablets. This provided them flexibility during office hours while their kids could play with it at home. The plan worked and there was no attrition,” Kumar exclaimed.
A mobile app was created in-house, which was integrated with the ERP. The primarily data was stored in the tab database (SQLite) and was periodically synced to a MySQL database (Web Server). The MySQL data was updated after every 15 minutes. At an interval of every 15 minutes, spares consumption and man power validation was updated in the ERP from the CMS system.
“To ensure that attendance was recorded at the right time, the latitudes and longitudes of all the towers were maintained. A technician could only press the attendance button on the app once he was in the vicinity (50 meters) of the tower. The button was not visible otherwise,” Kumar explained.
But what about those towers that were not mapped? “About 90 percent of the information of each tower (latitude and longitude) was with the service provider and the rest 10 percent was recorded as and when we received a complaint. Whenever a technician visited a new site, its latitude and longitude were automatically captured by the tablet,” he says.
The entire project cost the company about Rs 1 crore.
Healthier bottom line
With the mobile solution in place, Reime can now track and monitor all the field technicians. This has made a significant impact on the company’s revenues.
“With technicians becoming proactive in reaching the sites and resolving issues, our SLAs have improved by 36 percent, which has directly impacted the bottom line. With the reports now being filed instantly (the e-FSR has reduced the report filing time to zero), the billing cycle has shortened, and profitability has gone up by 3 percent,” Kumar revealed.
Kumar also implemented certain parameters (identifying the actual rating of assets, site capacity management, inventory management etc) in the application which allows the company to have better understanding of problems and perform RCA (Root Cause Analysis) of complaints. This has helped in reducing the number of complaints.
The company has seen a strong impact on its human resources too. Earlier there were 60 people in the call center to monitor the incoming calls from the 1,000 technicians. With the calls getting reduced by 80 percent, 10 to 12 people from the call center have been freed up, and deployed on other activities.
The new solution has also provided Reime with an opportunity to add to its top line.
“By projecting the benefits to other customers, they were more than willing to give us business. We would now be rolling it out in Africa. Given the stringent penalties for not meeting SLAs in Africa, the company is already losing millions of dollars there. This implementation could stem the flow,” Kumar said.
“Going forward, the management wants IT to further maximize benefits from the application. We have lined up another 8-10 new applications, and intend to roll them out in FY15,” he added.
Add new comment