Acsys: How to lock out fuel thieves

David Meganck’s job is to outsmart the people trying to steal diesel from your cell sites. 90% of the fuel theft cases David has encountered originate within the fuel supply chain, so robust access control systems, combined with key management and access time monitoring, not only combat fuel theft, but also link site visits to open job tickets, “closing the loop” to ensure maintenance alerts are acted upon.

TowerXchange: Please introduce Acsys, particularly your work on telecom cell sites.

Acsys is a market leader in access control, key management and integrated time and attendance monitoring. Our mechatronic lock was designed and developed in France by two military defence contractors as a system to protect heavy-duty military hardware, which is testament to the security and reliability of our solution. We have since taken everything to China to maximise the efficiency and minimise the cost of manufacturing and R&D.

Our solution is the Mercedes of cell site security! We install an mechatronic padlock at each secure access point at a cell site. When authorised field maintenance technicians need to access a site secured by Acsys, they call or SMS their NOC for a unique access code that enables their password key to open a specified lock or locks for a specified period of time. When the technician enters the site, they create an access log that tracks who was onsite at what time by simply using their registered mobile phone number and SMS. This improves accountability in the event of theft, and enables tracking of maintenance job completion as well as registering the amount of time the technician spent on site.

Our first experience in telecoms was in 2007, working with Celtel (now Bharti Airtel), one of the pioneers of co-location in Africa. As we were a startup at that time, Acsys was able to refine our product through deep collaboration with Celtel’s team in Uganda, fine-tuning our solution to meet the specifications of mobile network operators and co-location companies. We developed an "inside the industry view", and a solution designed in Africa for Africa, that is critical to our leadership position today.

TowerXchange: To what extent is diesel theft a problem that originates within the tower industry supply chain?

Based on my experience, 90% of fuel theft originates from inside the tower operation itself, often as a result of one or two staff colluding to try to go around the system. There are instances of armed gangs arriving to strip a site of diesel, generators and other equipment, but that’s relatively rare.

I recall one example that illustrates the extent of the problem. Of 40,000 attempted lock openings on sites operated by one of our customers, 1,300 were by people who tried to open the lock without any access rights. Another 2,700 were by people with keys, but who were trying to access the site outside the times when their access code worked. So 10% of site access attempts were made by people with no access rights! And those are all people inside the supply chain!

Our first clients Celtel were facing a huge problem of theft. They knew that most of the incidents originated internally because at sites where fuel was stolen the locks were open, not broken. After our mechatronic locks were refined for telecoms and deployed across the Celtel Uganda tower network, theft was dramatically reduced. Rumour about Uganda’s cell sites with keys that couldn’t be copied and locks that couldn’t be picked or ’bumped’ quickly spread to Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

So we took our first orders from telecoms between 2007-9 as a result of developing a product as a response to market demand, and as a result of word of mouth opening a lot of doors for us (if you’ll excuse the pun!)

TowerXchange: What is Acsys’ footprint in Africa?

One of reasons we’re popular is that we respect customer’s confidentiality, so I don’t want to name-drop, and I certainly don’t want to tip off a would-be thief! What I can say is that we’ve been installing access control equipment at in excess of 10,000 cell sites per year in Africa, but we’ve seen a big acceleration in demand and may do 20-30,000 sites in 2013.

The basis of our recent success, and a revolution in remote site management, is our Co-Generated Solution, or CGS, which means technicians can only access sites using their key for a limited amount of time before the code expires, which is a critical capability for telecoms towers, particularly for those with multiple tenants and multiple maintenance teams accessing the site.

TowerXchange: Please tell us how Acsys engages with a new client.

We work on a project basis - we’re not a retailer. When a prospective customer calls us, we like to sit down and discuss their requirements under NDA so they can be open and frank. We’ll identify the customer’s requirements, whether it’s reducing theft, vandalism, supplier and vendor access management, or staff time attendance metrics. We then tie those requirements to Acsys’ ‘four in one’ solution: a high security locking key, access control system, time and attendance system, and a key management system.

Installing our new electronic padlocks on cell sites is a simple process, there are no new bolts or screws, so if clients are ready, willing and able we can literally deliver in 24 hours. Deployment can be very rapid; we’ve secured 500 sites in just two to three weeks, which keeps the costs low and is much faster than competitive solutions that can take months. Speed of deployment is critical because as soon as thieves know a new security system is about to be installed, they tend to steal even more!

TowerXchange: Tell us about the integration of access control data into RMS, job ticketing and manager of manager systems at the NOC.

Many of our customers ask for integration with a third party site management / job ticketing platform such as Remedy. Remedy has around 90% of the African market, and ours is the only access control system that has and can integrate with Remedy, which again sets us apart from our competitors.

Without an integrated access log, the NOC is running in the dark when it comes to the verification of maintenance job completion. If Remedy creates an event triggered by a power outage or genset breakdown or fuel tank nearing empty, the NOC doesn’t know if remedial action was actually undertaken until much later, and the NOC doesn’t know how long it took to undertake that remedial action. Without the time of attendance data from our keys, verification of task completion relies on the goodwill of subcontractors and suppliers to feedback, using archaic methods to cross-reference and find out if people did their job.

Using data from Acsys, tower operators can derive KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and benchmarks and can set and enforce SLAs based on MTTR targets calibrated to the distribution of cell sites within the portfolio.

Another benefit of the integration of access control data into the NOC is that tower operators prefer to integrate data and services into a single “manager of managers” platform like Remedy, as this mitigates the risk of staff turnover. When tower operators’ staff trained on several different pieces of complicated software move to another job, the tower operator needs to retrain new staff which is both costly and introduces higher risk of mistakes. As Remedy is the industry-standard in Africa, people are much more familiar with it - so if we run our software on backend of the platform, it makes apprenticeship and operation of the platform much easier overall.

TowerXchange: What are the benefits of access control - how does your system yield ROI?

One of the simplest sources of RoI in our system is a reduction in the O&M time spent on the road and a corresponding improvement in uptime. With previous mechanical locks, field technicians often had to make one journey to pick up the key, then another to the cell site, which influences outage time. A strong component of our value proposition is our ability to reduce outage time by guaranteeing 24/7 access come rain or sun, war or peace, with or without electricity.

If we add one site theft caused by copied keys or picked locks then the RoI is immediate because the cost of our solution is negligible versus the loss incurred after a theft and the additional costs (material/productive time/logistics) that need to be made to put the site back in its original state.

Preventing fuel theft doesn’t only reduce diesel costs, it also reduces outages due to unscheduled refueling. For tower operators and subcontractors operating on tight margins, if four monthly refueling visits are scheduled and a fifth is required due to theft, it often means they lose money on servicing that site. Many O&M suppliers are also tied to down-time penalties so for them every minute counts.

Many O&M suppliers bill by the hour, and the reality is that many site visits consist of a 15-minute repair and a four-hour nap! With time attendance data, tower operators know how long maintenance engineers are spending onsite, can benchmark the time each job ticket should take to resolve, and can set SLAs and award contracts according to performance against those benchmarks. Knowing how long field engineers spend onsite can save a huge amount of O&M hours.

Monitoring time spent onsite doesn’t only apply to subcontractors, it also to applies to the operator’s own staff, and is a means of increasing in operational efficiency.

TowerXchange: How do the typical access control requirements differ between towercos and mobile network operators?

Our business is divided quite evenly between operators and towercos.

When an operator outsources their towers, they shift all their operational problems to a third party, binding towercos into contracts with performance related benchmarks and penalties per hour of outage time. In the event of an outage, the mobile network operator can sometimes redirect traffic to an overlapping cell tower, but as towercos don’t control active equipment, they can’t do that. So Mean Time To Response (MTTR) becomes critical for towercos.

The other big difference is of course that the number of people who need to have access to a multi-tenant tower is much higher. While a single tenant tower might need to be accessed by 6-8 users, a multi-tenant site may need access for 20-40 users, which creates much higher risk of theft and a much more complicated investigative process to narrow down who was on that site.

TowerXchange: Finally, what is the impact of access control systems on Health & Safety?

At the end of 2012 Acsys was requested to investigate and design a solution for a mobile network operator in MENA. They had a number of tragic incidents where tower climbers fell either during construction, maintenance or teardown of towers. If a tower climber isn’t properly protected and falls, the incident is more likely to result in a fatality in Africa because many cell sites are so remote that they are a long drive from the nearest hospital.

After a comprehensive study we came up with two solutions: the first was to ensure the right equipment was onsite. We have a strategic partnership with Karam, one of the market leaders in fall arrest and fall retention equipment. The second part was to ensure nobody could go up the tower without having access rights, so we installed a metal cage at the foot of each tower with one of our locks, so the NOC receives a real time notification if someone is trying to access and climb the tower. This also ties in with cell tower security, as one of the most frequently stolen items is the copper cable from the top of the structure. I know of one case in West Africa where a thief got onto a cell site, climbed the tower, tried to steal the copper and fell. In that instance the tower operator had to pay compensation to family of the thief.