Max­i­miz­ing Busi­ness Out­comes through Effec­tive Net­work Maintenance

BACKGROUND

The telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­try is a com­plex and rapid­ly evolv­ing sec­tor. Net­work main­te­nance in the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions indus­try seeks to ensure the prop­er func­tion­ing of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works, equip­ment, and sys­tems. Some of the key suc­cess fac­tors for com­pa­nies oper­at­ing with large infra­struc­ture net­works are quick response times, pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance and effec­tive resource management.

THE CHALLENGE

Our client, one of Indonesia’s largest cel­lu­lar providers, asked Reynard to help stream­line and sim­pli­fy sev­er­al key busi­ness process­es relat­ed to Net­work infra­struc­ture expan­sion and upgrades to achieve greater speed of delivery.

Net­work pre­ven­tive and cor­rec­tive main­te­nance oper­a­tions were analysed to assess the oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve their pre­dictabil­i­ty and put in place a lean­er exe­cu­tion approach.

ANALYSIS

Reynard per­formed a thor­ough analy­sis which revealed that:

1. Region­al Field Oper­a­tions Main­te­nance plan­ning was too rigid
2. Alarms man­age­ment was not standardized
3. Regions and Head­quar­ters were both lack­ing prop­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels and coordination
4. The com­pa­ny had out­grown sev­er­al busi­ness process­es, which were no longer capa­ble of sup­port­ing its fast-growing Net­work infra­struc­ture requirements

“Reynard con­sul­tants inten­sive­ly edu­cat­ed, coached and sup­port­ed our peo­ple inside and out­side the Net­work Ser­vices depart­ment. This has led to sus­tain­able results and own­er­ship of their sys­tem­at­ic approach. As a result of this, sig­nif­i­cant oper­a­tional improve­ments have been made in a short time and in line with the promised deliverables”

Direc­tor of Net­work Services

PROJECT APPROACH

Reynard’s Focus Process™ to pre­pare for oper­a­tions Imple­men­ta­tion. The Focus Process™ high­light­ed sev­er­al action areas: 

1. Redesign a more effec­tive Pre­ven­tive Main­te­nance plan­ning sys­tem and install a Man­age­ment Con­trol Sys­tem
   The project team, sec­ond­ed by a full time Client task­force, rede­fined the core & non-core pre­ven­tive main­te­nance activ­i­ties and revised their fre­quen­cies to ensure the most effec­tive bal­ance between cost and reli­a­bil­i­ty. Addi­tion­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains were obtained by intro­duc­ing a more flex­i­ble pre­ven­tive main­te­nance sched­ule. This was achieved by align­ing cor­rec­tive inter­ven­tions with planned pre­ven­tive main­te­nance to avoid unnec­es­sary site vis­its. The over­all exer­cise result­ed in a 35% drop in required man-hours to con­duct planned pre­ven­tive maintenance.
2. Re-categorize Net­work Alarms for effec­tive han­dling and solv­ing
   The sec­ond aspect of the Net­work main­te­nance oper­a­tions improve­ment pro­gram was to revis­it the cur­rent cat­e­gori­sa­tion of alarms. The exist­ing obso­lete clas­si­fi­ca­tion was gen­er­at­ing unnec­es­sary vis­its and adding to the back­log of alarms res­o­lu­tion. The con­sul­tants teamed up with the Net­work engi­neers to go through a detailed re-categorisation of all alarms based on their poten­tial impact on the Net­work and cus­tomers. The result of this exer­cise was an imme­di­ate 30% reduc­tion on unnec­es­sary alarms trou­ble tick­ets. This was cou­pled with a new­ly installed Alarms Restora­tion per­for­mance mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem with SLAs set on the impact to customers.
3. Stream­line end-to-end process­es for new Net­work ele­ments build­ing and upgrades with a tight Project Man­age­ment Con­trol Sys­tem
   The last key result area for this project was to improve the speed of deliv­ery of new Net­work ele­ments and upgrades to sup­port the Net­work expan­sion. The main prob­lem was the lack of real end-to-end project vis­i­bil­i­ty and con­trol, which cre­at­ed counter-productive account­abil­i­ty con­flicts. The project team began by clear­ly break­ing down all the steps of the end-to-end Net­work ele­ment expan­sion as part of the crit­i­cal path analy­sis. This allowed the devel­op­ment of a proac­tive plan­ning sys­tem and struc­ture, espe­cial­ly in terms of site acqui­si­tion and pro­cure­ment. The sec­ond step was to install a Net­work Expan­sion Coor­di­na­tion Group, with clear author­i­ty and account­abil­i­ty, in order to improve plan­ning, exe­cu­tion and speed of deliv­ery of all projects. The over­all project result­ed in an impres­sive 40% effi­cien­cy improve­ment between quar­ters, result­ing in on-time / on-cost deliv­ery of new Net­work elements.

KEY RESULTS