Feel the FieldForce!

Telecom service providers are continuously working to maximise the efficiency of their field operations and maintenance teams and subcontractors in order to reduce opex and improve margins. It doesn’t help that they still have to rely on old tools: spreadsheets and home-grown fragmented databases are still widely used for analysis. FieldForce has developed a ground-breaking and highly customisable solution which leverages the latest technology to significantly improve the efficiency of field operations. In this interview, Basit Malik, Founder of FieldForce, explains why he started the company and describes how his solution is shaking up the tower industry.

TowerXchange: Please introduce yourself and FieldForce

I am the Founder of FieldForce. Before starting the company, I led PWC’s Middle Eastern telecom practice. Prior to that, I worked with Sprint and Nextel in the US.

Between 2009 and 2014 it became clear to me that a great deal of MNO and tower company expense was coming from field operations – both in-house and outsourced.

We felt as a company that the time was ripe to change the whole way in which field maintenance is carried out. A lot of companies rely on cumbersome spreadsheets and paper-based checklists to carry out their maintenance. We wanted to use technology to disrupt all of this.

In the past, thousands of data points per site were analogue. We took the same data and built an analytics platform around it to provide much greater visibility into workflow.

Once you have visibility into workflow, you can then move from scheduled to predictive maintenance.

Now we serve three key segments of the telecoms ecosystem – MNOs, tower companies and managed service providers – and help them get much more visibility into their data.

TowerXchange: The first question our readers want to know is how proven is your solution in the field?

We are a very young start up. In the past six to 12 months we’ve done several trials with MNOs in the Middle East and Asia. We’ve also trialled our solution at over 500 locations within a network of over 10,000 sites.

The experience that we have gained from these trials has been invaluable. We’ve been able to reduce field operation costs by up to 15% in some cases. As a result, the market is taking considerable interest in our solution – we are already in negotiations to sign commercial agreements with a number of companies.

TowerXchange: What are the KPIs for field workforce and tower network management?

The KPIs for field workforce and tower network performance are focused on two metrics – network availability and site maintenance. Our goal as a company is to help businesses improve and balance these metrics.

Site maintenance is particularly important as it can save companies a great deal of money over the long term. Let me give a simple example. Every tower will have an antenna clamped on the top of it. It is in the interest of every MNO and tower company to ensure that their antennas are properly tightened and aligned. If the antenna comes loose for any reason it can cause a significant amount of network degradation over time.

Many companies react to these issues by building new sites at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, these problems can be solved much more easily – and cost-effectively – if the problem is identified well in advance. That’s where our solution comes into play.

TowerXchange: How can MNOs, tower companies and their subcontractors move from scheduled maintenance to predictive maintenance?

Currently field maintenance is carried out in a ‘one size fits all’ manner. Most companies carry out scheduled maintenance every 30, 60 or 90 days. However, the actual maintenance requirements may vary depending on geography, primary power availability and weather conditions.

FieldForce customers tend to handle maintenance differently. After a customer has carried out one or two scheduled visits using our solution, the system starts predicting when the customer will next need to visit their site. The customer might need to return to the site again within 30 days, but that may not necessarily be the case. As a result, our system can help customers save a great deal of time and money.

TowerXchange: Tell us about the FieldForce user interface and how the solution manages workflows.

We provide a fully customisable user interface that can be modified depending on the user’s requirements. This allows users to allocate different profiles to field engineers, managers and executives.

For example, if a technician logs into the system they can schedule maintenance tasks based on the condition of the site in question. Managers can then log-in to the solution, review the work of their technicians and re-assign projects to technicians if they feel that their work is inadequate. They can also use the solution to assess the work of suppliers. Let’s say a manager sends a monthly purchase order to a supplier for maintenance work on 5,000 sites. Using our solution, the manager may discover that the supplier has visited only 4,000 sites and done a fraction of the work required on 1,000. They can then feed back this information to the supplier and request a revised invoice.

Currently, CTOs have limited visibility into what their assets actually look like. They find it difficult to visualise their sites and locate issues at a component level. Our solution provides them with real transparency into their networks. For example, a CTO may discover that his company has a certain number of major radio outdoor issues across a tower estate. They can then drill down into these issues in more detail and look at associated pictures from individual sites. What’s more, our solution is unique in that it can provide CTOs with highly granular information about workforces, vendors and fixed assets on the ground (generators, batteries, antennas et cetera) for individual sites. What’s more, FieldForce packages all of this information into easily accessible spreadsheets and word documents that can be reviewed quickly and intuitively.

To summarise, our solution brings all tower insights together in one place. It allows COOs, managers and technicians to identify issues, schedule remedial initiatives, and track progress in real time.

TowerXchange: How do you compare the performance of one site or tower to another?

We have a proprietary scoring algorithm that users can customise to their infrastructure. When a maintenance engineer visits a site they assign a score to every key performance indicator (KPI). The data is then fed back into our solution, allowing managers to compare the performance of one site to another.

TowerXchange: How is data entered into the system and how is data integrity ensured?

We use another piece of proprietary technology to import spreadsheets into the system. The technology is very effective – we can import hundreds of spreadsheets from different departments in the space of an hour.

It is worth mentioning that our customers don’t actually pay for the solution until they start using it. Our solution can be launched in 30 days without any integration or deployment costs.

TowerXchange: Does the system include access management and time attendance monitoring?

The identity access management space already has good suppliers; we prefer to integrate with them rather than compete against them.

TowerXchange: What is unique about your analytics platform?

Most of the enterprise software that is available on the market takes minutes to generate reports. Users expect faster results than that. Take Google, for example. When someone types a question into Google, a series of results will appear on the screen instantly. Our software works in exactly the same way – we harness the power of cloud computing to give customers answers much faster.

TowerXchange: How do you ensure that FieldForce is affordable for MNOs and Managed Service Providers who might be operating on tight margins or startup tower companies with little capital?

As I mentioned previously, there are no deployment and integration costs with our software. Secondly, we charge a monthly fee per site for our services so there are no hardware costs. Nor do customers need to buy any servers.

We’re also very fast at deploying our software. We can deploy the solution in only 30 days and you only have to start paying for it when you start using it. Plus, you can cancel your subscription at any point.

We appreciate that some of our customers are operating on razor thin margins. To get around this we have come to an agreement with our clients that we will only charge them a proportion of what they save as a result of using our technology. As you can see, we’re pretty confident that we have something that can really help our users save money!

TowerXchange: Who do you see as your competition?

Microsoft Excel is our biggest competitor – that’s why we’ve created a solution to automate and consolidate its spreadsheets into our system. We also face competition from home grown solutions and competitors like Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei.

TowerXchange: TowerXchange readers will be familiar with a number of other analytics platforms – namely Tarantula, azeti, nexsysone and Accruent. What makes FieldForce different?

Unlike these other products, we’re not trying to address multiple problems. We have a laser beam focus on addressing issues that arise from preventative and corrective maintenance. In fact, our solution is unique because it is the first integrated end to end field maintenance system in the world. Besides optimising workflow, we consolidate all data in one place with a best in class analytics platform to provide more actionable intelligence.