Siterra’s purpose-built site management solution for telecoms evolves to support the global tower market

Whether you’re an MNO seeking to manage your telecom real estate and assets, a small towerco seeking to migrate from spreadsheets to an affordable SaaS platform to manage sites, or a large towerco with international aspirations, the purpose-built Siterra platform from Accruent should be on your shortlist of prospective solution providers. In this latest interview, TowerXchange focused on the scalability of Siterra in conversation with Accruent’s General Manager of Telecom, Kevin Reichle.

TowerXchange: Please reintroduce Accruent and Siterra for readers not familiar with your company.

Accruent is a leader in real estate and facilities management software. Whereas some software developers are analogous to Swiss Army Knives, adaptable to multiple industries, Accruent builds industry specific suites, and Siterra is our purpose-built, market-leading software-as-a-service solution for site, project, lease, and asset management for the telecom industry.

TowerXchange: The first question our readers always ask is “how proven is the solution?”

Siterra manages over 1 million telecom sites, 750,000 leases, and 1.7 million projects for our customers. In the U.S., Siterra is used by the top MNOs.

In addition to our MNO clients, our towerco clients range in size from small regional towercos to a large U.S.-based towerco that is actively pursuing portfolios internationally. We’ve deployed Siterra for them in six countries, and are currently scaling up teams in additional countries. We’ve worked with regional towercos with as few as 100 towers to multi-national towercos with portfolios over 75,000.

TowerXchange: As independent towercos become increasingly multinational, how does Siterra support that globalisation?

Many of our towerco clients already operate in multiple countries and languages, and they have found their operations in those countries achieve more traction when they make the local language a pillar of doing business.

The underlying architecture of Siterra has always supported configurable languages, and we’ve found that even at a user level people want to specify which language they use.  Now in 2015, Siterra supports this user-level choice. For example, there is a clear distinction between requiring that all users interact with your site management system in German, versus enabling your project administrator and local project team to interact in French while the corporate office interacts in German. Users can be more flexible and deliver work more efficiently and productively when the key piece of software they are using is in their native language.

Being on a single instance across multiple countries makes Siterra the system of record.  This improves operations by sharing PMO best practices across multiple countries, enabling our clients to rollup assets, leases, vacancies, tenancy ratios and other KPIs on a consolidated regional or country level.

International towerco executives need the visibility and tracking to provide accurate financial forecasts and portfolio valuation across multiple countries. Quite simply, without a tool like Siterra, this type of exercise becomes guesswork at best.

TowerXchange: What are the benefits of this global standardisation of systems?

Our clients are starting to realise significant cost savings through a reduction of systems complexity. In utilising different point solutions across multiple countries, it takes considerable time to consolidate data across those systems, thereby increasing risk of error. By migrating each country’s operations to a single system of record, we allow our clients to standardise processes and deliver operational insights in real time.

For example, five different countries may have five different methods to manage build to suit (BTS) projects. With Siterra you can standardise workflows to support global rigidity with local flexibility, resulting in project management, asset and reporting efficiencies across all countries.

TowerXchange: Telecom site management is seldom the responsibility of a single company, and typically consists of a complex ecosystem of operators, towercos, contractors and subcontractors. How does Siterra extend beyond your clients’ ‘corporate firewall’ to unify processes across that ecosystem?

We foster an ecosystem approach where the MNO, towerco and their service providers all collaborate on projects. Conversely, in an environment where all project resources work within their own system, delays and errors are introduced as data has to be “manually” passed between teams and uploaded to different systems. We foster collaboration so everyone is working in the same system concurrently – this is less prone to error, fosters better working relationships, and creates tremendous efficiencies.

As the project manager or vendor completes a given task, the MNO can verify that the work has taken place in real time – there is no lag in reporting, which reduces the risk of time lost and project delays. Telecom has become an arms race to get from 2G to 3G in some developing markets, from 3G to 4G and eventually 5G in developed markets – in such an environment those hours lost consolidating data and those days lost to project delays add up to weeks. And weeks of accelerated time to market add up to an improvement in market share (or an avoidance of degradation in market share).

TowerXchange: Are purpose-built Site Management Systems like Siterra only affordable for large towercos with thousands of towers?

Siterra can and does support towercos with as few as 100 towers to those with over 75,000.

For smaller companies we have a rapid market deployment methodology which is 90%+ preconfigured – allowing us to get those clients up and running quickly. At this level, it’s usually a case of migrating from spreadsheets to the Siterra platform, and we can repeat a migration process we’ve refined over several implementations.

Our pricing scales up and down based on the number of assets under management.

We enjoy working with smaller towercos in growth mode. Siterra can help them grow fast.  As a towerco progresses beyond their first couple of hundred towers, managing sites, assets, leases and projects soon becomes highly complex: they see the train coming at them and want to be able to move quickly to avoid a crash!

TowerXchange: One of the first questions a towerco asks when it acquires a new portfolio is what space is on each site? How does Siterra help towercos consolidate asset registers and determine available space?

After acquisition, towercos will typically audit and re-baseline their asset register. Once that is complete, by utilising a single system our clients are able to control and manage those assets more effectively, dramatically reducing discrepancies going forward.

The ability to manage depreciable and non-depreciable assets provides towercos with visibility to all the equipment on the tower. Siterra provides a view of what space is available as quickly as possible: the specifications of the tower, the capacity, and what space is occupied, vacant, and/or reserved. For example, one of our global towerco clients uses Siterra to standardise all the attributes they use to describe their sites and the related equipment on their sites that helps them understand vacancies and available space. They consolidate tower, site and equipment data (both owned equipment and tenants’ equipment) down to a granular level with information on the make and model, maintenance schedule, and warranty information. Understanding what’s on a site, what it looks like, and what capacity exists for additional tenants is core to a towercos’ business model.

In addition, after an acquisition, towercos using Siterra can run an asset inspection project which will systematically lead the field force through an inventory of the acquired assets. The results of the asset inspection drive future maintenance schedules, planned upgrades, and visibility into available space.

Our MicroStrategy business intelligence compares leases versus capacity at a regional, portfolio, or global level. Based on these reports, users can take actions to improve availability of space and to monetise the available space on their towers faster.

TowerXchange: How do you integrate Siterra’s ILM ‘dashboard’ with remote monitoring systems (RMS) in the field?

We are growing our partnerships with RMS vendors.

Through our partnerships, RMS data (including alarms) is pushed into Siterra via web services. Once the RMS data is in our data warehouse you have access to powerful business intelligence via MicroStrategy.

While we see a lot of synergies with RMS, Siterra is a software not a hardware solution – we are looking at ways to better integrate with and standardise gathering and consolidating data and alarms from third party sensors.

TowerXchange: Please summarise the benefits to towercos of utilising Siterra to manage cell sites.

In simple terms: we provide a single system of record that towercos need to maximise their revenue per tower. Siterra’s Site and Asset Management provides a consolidated view of the sites in a towerco’s portfolio and the equipment that is installed. Siterra’s Project Management drives process around site development and modification, co-location, and maintenance. Siterra’s Lease Administration module delivers the ability to manage license and lease activity, while creating accountability around critical dates and payments.

We enable spend control – ensuring suppliers are paid for work that’s done, and we enable the efficient ongoing maintenance of the tower – avoiding costly emergency maintenance. Our best in class project management tool enables collaboration through the supply chain and ensures more projects are completed on time and on budget.

It’s easy to focus on a Site Management systems’ ability to drive co-location and tenancy ratios – the ability to increase profitability by improving the speed and quality of BTS and co-location execution. But we think there is at least as much value in standardising processes, proof of task completion, and optimising ongoing maintenance.

Ultimately, consolidation of systems drives bottom line cost savings.