Nashad Emir was the first Malaysian to be certified as a GE Six Sigma Master Black Belt. He’s brought that philosophy of zero defect tolerance to a telecom tower industry which he feels need to refocus on resolving downtime rather than measuring uptime. Nashad also explains some of the monitoring and management tools he is deploying at edotco, from RMS and access control systems to asset lifecycle management back at the TOC, and describes the structure of the O&M function at edotco.
TowerXchange: What’s your background Nashad, and what do you bring to the management team at edotco?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
I have a background in operations and manufacturing from many different industries, including working for Sony and General Electric. I was the first Six Sigma Master Black Belt in GE Malaysia, so I’m very focused on quality and productivity, and on a project management approach to reducing and eliminating defects.
Six Sigma is a good philosophy – it’s a passion of mine. In my experience, we focus too much on ‘average’ in this business, we fail to focus on variation. To be at 99.8% uptime looks good, but it means there are still a few sites at very low or 0% at times. I want to know how much variation there is in performance at sites where power is down for a couple of days. I don’t want to measure the 99.8%, I want to measure the 0.2%. I want subdivide that into categories of downtime. This requires a major change of mindset to a Japanese philosophy of zero defects. The language we use to describe performance has got to change – we should be asking how to reduce downtime, not how good is my uptime.
We need accountability and visibility into the causes of downtime to create an appropriate sense of urgency to facilitate that change of mindset. Remote Monitoring Systems (RMS) and the Tower Operating Centre (TOC) are crucial – you’ve got to have a real time speedometer and fuel gauge to drive a tower business.
TowerXchange: How does the management and measurement of the performance of O&M differ as assets are transferred from MNOs to towercos?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
All edotco’s current assets have come from the carve out from the Axiata Group. Within a telco, the way performance is measured is a bit different. The main Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and drivers of value are about subscribers and revenue, driven by marketing and branding – towers and passive infrastructure aren’t top of the list of KPIs.
When passive infrastructure assets are transferred from telcos to towercos, it’s necessary to undertake a transformation in mindset, process, and a change in the way we approach managing O&M to become more productive. We need to focus on adding value within the supply chain in terms of cost efficiency and speed to market.
TowerXchange: Is there a significant step up required in uptime as assets are transferred from MNOs to towercos?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
Most countries are at 99 point something percent uptime already, so when we take on assets it’s mostly fine tuning and incremental improvement – even 0.1% or 0.01% downtime translates into a lot of lost revenue! So our SLAs often require improved uptime but it’s not a “significant step up.”
TowerXchange: What KPIs are on your dashboard?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
Our first KPI is quality of service measured in terms of uptime, or as I said earlier, reduction and elimination of downtime. We are managing power systems on behalf of our tenants so as soon as the site goes down it means a loss of revenue and a compromised Customer Experience. So our primary KPIs are focused on minimising downtime, and ensuring that any inefficiencies that might create downtime are reduced to a minimum.
The specific targets in our KPIs related to uptime are defined in negotiation with each customer – critical sites have different grading as defined by the Master Service Agreement, and each customer has their own Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
our primary KPIs are focused on minimising downtime, and ensuring that any inefficiencies that might create downtime are reduced to a minimum… Another set of KPIs measure how fast we deliver towers
Another set of KPIs measure how fast we deliver towers, whether new builds or co-locations on existing towers, in order optimise the management of those projects. Our KPIs measuring speed of delivery vary from market to market and according to local conditions. We coordinate the project coming together using internal and carefully selected third party subcontractors. Different processes may overlap or happen concurrently from site acquisition, leasing and permitting, ordering equipment, installing foundations, and above ground level tower construction. Each step in the process has it’s own cycle time, but much depends on how good the customer is in giving us reliable forecasts of their build requirements in advance.
Of course we also have a number of KPIs around cost, both costs to edotco and to the telco, helping us identify efficiencies that benefit both parties.
Our biggest challenge is not to measure the current performance of the business, but to forecast growth on a Quarter to Quarter basis as telcos are seldom able to share their forthcoming tenancy and tower orders in advance. So our processes have to be agile and flexible to changes; we have to be able to deliver towers within a short period of time with minimal notice. This is a natural challenge of working within the telecoms industry – the dynamics change fast, and cycle time is critical.
TowerXchange: What are the implications of pressure on time to market for the maintenance of contingency capacity within supply chain?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
We make sure we have vendors who can ramp up if they need to. However, everyone is trying to save cost by keeping minimal stocks and raw materials, so having better planning and forecasting is critical, as is having secondary and tertiary sources of vendors. This gives rise to challenges in countries lacking a good base of local suppliers, at which point we have to select partners who can import quickly and easily. Alternatively we may create new designs that require different raw materials.
TowerXchange: Do edotco manage O&M in house or is it outsourced?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
Our O&M business model is defined by a balance of what makes sense in each country, together with trying to standardise the way we manage O&M.
In most countries we outsource O&M, but we manage the projects. But in Bangladesh we undertake maintenance of passive and active infrastructure in house.
TowerXchange: How deep is edotco’s service proposition? From pure steel and grass to full service inclusive of energy, maintenance et cetera?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
Our core service proposition in all markets will include power and passive infrastructure O&M but in selected markets, such as Bangladesh, we’re going into active infrastructure management as well. We intend to expand our offerings to meet the changing needs of our customers.
We are investing in a state of the art approach to remote monitoring. We’ve signed the deal with our vendor partner and are in the process of implementation in our TOC. This will enable us to offer a value added service to monitor and manage different tower components such as the remaining charge in the batteries, the level of fuel in tanks, temperature inside the cabinets, and it will help minimise fuel pilferage.
TowerXchange: What performance measurement systems do you use?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
Across all our towers, edotco are investing in tools designed specifically for passive infrastructure performance measurement, tools which telcos wouldn’t necessarily invest in.
We have already awarded a contract to a proven asset management system provider that will enable us to ensure that all the documentation about a site is in the right place, to ensure assets are tracked, to monitor the delivery timeline, and to automate the collection and analysis of data to ensure visibility at country and headquarters level.
TowerXchange: How do you translate data into actionable intelligence, for example integrating RMS data into job ticketing and project management workflows?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
Our asset lifecycle management platform has modules for project management, billing, inventory management, and resource management. So we’re able to track assets from when we inherit or build them all the way to decommissioning.
Real time data from our RMS is fed into our TOC, enabling edotco to be more focused on performance on a day to day basis.
We are also implementing digital lock access with time attendance monitoring. Data will be integrated between this and the RMS to create a more complete dashboard monitoring performance.
TowerXchange: How important is having an accurate and up to date asset register?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
We want to improve the accuracy of inventory data at all sites. Given the number of different countries edotco is already operating in, we need to automate the maintenance of a reliable asset register, otherwise data literally will be all over the place.
We’ve commenced our audits, gathering complete documentation on lease agreements, tower loading data, and site inventories. Once the asset lifecycle management system is up and running, the data will be input and all future orders will be through this platform, providing valuable visibility for us and for our customers so they can see where orders are, and potentially improve forecasts.
Having a reliable and up to date asset register is also critical for sales, who are then equipped with the tools they need to tell the customer exactly how much space is available on any given tower
Having a reliable and up to date asset register is also critical for sales, who are then equipped with the tools they need to tell the customer exactly how much space is available on any given tower.
TowerXchange: Talk to us about the challenge of building and managing distributed generation and backup power systems within your networks.
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
Our approach differs from country to country. For example Malaysia has good grid supply, so our dependence on redundancy is less. Therefore our focus in Malaysia can be on the delivery of new towers, and structural upgrades, because uptime is stable.
In contrast grid availability is very poor in Bangladesh, basic transport infrastructure is lacking, and flooding creates havoc – so our focus is more on availability and site autonomy.
TowerXchange: Do many of your towers need to be upgraded to co-locate multiple tenants?
Nashad Emir, COO, edotco Group:
The specification of the majority of towers we’ve acquired to date allow us to put additional tenants on – most towers don’t need to be upgraded, they tend to be built over-spec. Moving forward we want to optimise and right-size tower design.
Nashad will be among the roundtable leaders at the TowerXchange Meetup Asia. Join him and many other senior executives from the regional tower industry in Singapore, 9-10 December 2014.
