The top 20 tips for achieving operational excellence

As sophistication in the management of MEA’s towers continues to grow, the opening panel at the 2016 TowerXchange Meetup Africa and Middle East focussed on the subject of operational excellence in passive infrastructure management, and what this really means - whether managing your own sites, those of a third party or overseeing a towerco relationship. TowerXchange were delighted to welcome Helios Towers Africa, Airtel Nigeria, MTN Ghana and Vodafone Procurement Company to the panel.

With towerco focus having shifted from acquisition to the integration and optimisation of acquired portfolios, and management of passive infrastructure amongst operators who retain towers increasingly becoming a specialist discipline, the opening panel of the 4th Annual TowerXchange Meetup Africa & Middle East focussed on the topic of “operational excellence”, welcoming expertise from three of the continent’s biggest mobile network operators, MTN, Airtel and Vodafone and Africa’s third largest towerco, Helios Towers Africa.

As the first of MTN’s opcos to have outsourced their sites to a towerco, MTN Ghana were represented in the discussions by Ibrahim Misto, heading up the opco’s Operations and Maintenance department which interacts with three of the big four towercos in sub-Saharan Africa. From Nigeria, TowerXchange were pleased to welcome Airtel’s Head of Network Infrastructure, Adedoyin Adeola, who, as a master black belt in six sigma also brings extensive experience working for Vodacom, Globacom, Ericsson and Alcatel Lucent (now Nokia) and has ultimate responsibility for Airtel Nigeria’s outsourced network.

With a total of 6,556 sites split across four countries and a recent business restructuring to focus on operational excellence, Helios Towers Africa were represented on the panel by Alex Leigh, who heads up the company’s commercial and business development function.

Plus from Vodafone, an operator whose strategy is based on retaining control of their passive infrastructure, TowerXchange welcomed Ahmed Saeb who oversees the company’s assessment and selection of civil works and O&M providers on a global level.

Leading the discussion was Delmec Engineering’s CTO, Spencer Crawford-White.

Over the course of an hour, each of the participants shared some of the challenges they faced in the management of their networks and offered exclusive insights into new processes and methodologies four of the most important companies in the region’s telecoms have adopted in a drive towards operational excellence. In this article, TowerXchange summarise the top 20 pieces of advice the panellists shared with this year’s audience.

A buzzword throughout the duration of the conference, the importance of partnerships cannot be underestimated. Short term contracts, excessive penalties and finger-pointing are a surefire way to bring inefficiencies into the ecosystem. With reduced revenues for MNOs globally, pressure on opex and the supply chain is set to continue but simply squeezing already thin margins will only lead to a compromisation of quality of service.

Responsible for the procurement of O&M services for the Vodafone group globally, Ahmed Saeb spoke of the importance of giving suppliers long-term business and allocating larger geographic regions whilst supporting them in their growth into new business areas. With longer term contracts, service providers can invest in their business, training staff, adopting improved processes and can find new synergies.

Fostering a positive working environment whereby contractors receive the guidance to improve performance is also key. Penalising a supplier because a mistake is made on one site, or only valuing them by the success of their last site build is not conducive to the achievement of operational excellence. It isn’t just about giving suppliers and contractors business; MNOs and towercos need to train their partners how to work with new products, enter new sectors and cross borders into new geographies.  Only with this true support and partnership can the supply chain reach new efficiencies which can then translate into savings for those at the top of the value chain. ,

It is also important for towercos and MNOs to not abuse the word “partnership”. Every CEO or Head of Procurement likes to use the word “partnership”, a phrase which can often be used to simply negotiate a discount. A true partnership however embeds the suppliers within an organisation, giving them clear direction and accountability; MNOs and towercos must play their part in making the relationship work.

At Airtel Nigeria, Adedoyin Adeola referenced that the majority of his time was spent on governance; setting weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings to scrutinise service providers and their subcontractors and suppliers. This management occurs at both the local level and at the group level, and with a background in managed services, Adedoyin explained the importance of structuring your team to mirror that of your partner, providing multiple levels of interaction between the two companies.

Tracking performance, questioning results and figures and drilling down into granular detail is essential to ensuring that work is being carried out in the optimum manner.

Too often the success of an operator - supplier relationship is measured solely by the supplier’s performance against a set of SLAs. Establishing a common set of goals that the entire ecosystem is working towards, however, instills a sense of ownership at all levels of the value chain and keeps all parties focussed on the bigger task at hand.

In the telecoms sector, the ultimate goal is improved quality of service to the subscriber, MTN Ghana have adopted an approach whereby they share customer net promoter scores and regulator rankings with each of their key service providers, further engendering the partnership spirit and allowing operators and the supply chain to work together to understand the impact and consequence of their actions.

Local expertise and knowledge is a huge asset in managing a cell sites. As voiced by Adedoyin Adeola from Airtel Nigeria, when American Tower entered the Nigerian market following the acquisition of Airtel’s towers, whilst they had extensive experience of managing a global network of towers, they did not have the experience of managing towers in Nigeria, but were keen to learn from their new partners. You can’t enter a market and assume what has worked in one country will work in another. Similarly differences don’t just occur country to country, between the north and south of Lagos challenges vary greatly and it is important to be cognisant of these differences in order to optimise your operations.

A local supply base is also critical from a logistics standpoint. A large part of time spent by maintenance contractors is due to extensive travel to site; having partners based in close proximity to the cell sites can bring huge time savings as well as local knowledge. Vodafone have invested heavily in building out a list of preferred suppliers country to country, a feature which brings real value to their operations.

Whilst the importance of local knowledge cannot be underestimated, there are certain best practices (albeit with local tweaks required) that translate globally. Combining this international experience gleaned from operating large tower portfolios in multiple countries with your local knowledge on the ground can bring significant improvements to your processes.

There are also significant efficiencies to be gained by encouraging your suppliers and service providers to expand to neighbouring regions and countries. Vodafone’s Ahmed Saeb referenced how he would love to make his suppliers larger and have them work across borders, but it can often be difficult to convince them to go from one area to another. Committing to long term contracts and supporting the companies through their expansion is key to making progress on this front.

In addition to sourcing local suppliers, it is also critically important to engage with local communities, both in accelerating new site build and also in the protection of existing assets.

Theft remains one of the biggest challenges for African tower owners and operators, with the cost of theft not just being in equipment replacement but also in system downtime and SLA penalties, especially in the case of energy equipment and fuel theft.

Employing villagers as security, engaging with local chiefs and giving a sense of ownership to the community has delivered sound results for Airtel in Nigeria, where pilferage levels are some of the highest on the continent. Whilst there is no one stop solution for tackling the crime issue, having the local community on side is one of the most critical components in ensuring the security of your equipment and sites.

Maintaining expat salaries represents a major cost to operators, towercos and major contractors, whilst highly skilled workers are often in short supply in many sub-Saharan regions. MTN Ghana have embarked on extensive road shows and training with local workers who have access to their sites, delivering training which has yielded strong results.

Partnerships shouldn’t just exist between an MNO and the supply chain, or a towerco and the supply chain; it is important to integrate your suppliers with each other. The relationship between DG, rectifier and battery bank is one critical dependence. Another example: diesel generator manufacturers should be extensively involved in training your maintenance partners how to operate and maintain the equipment, ensuring that it is managed in accordance with the manufacturer’s guidelines.

Enabling the ecosystem to understand who else is involved in managing the tower portfolio will improve visibility and cross-pollination of ideas whilst avoiding a culture of finger-pointing when things go wrong. At MTN Ghana, Ibrahim Misto has adopted a strategy to bring maintenance partners for both active and passive infrastructure into one monthly meeting. If a site goes down, the two partners are challenged in unison on why this has happened and can develop a strategy to minimise the risk of this occurring again.

Operational excellence is a moving target, with expectations of towercos, operators and ultimately mobile customers continuing to rise as efficiencies improve. Helios Towers’ Alex Leigh noted that when towercos first took over the management of passive infrastructure there was significant improvement on how towers performed, just from the sheer focus that towercos were able to give to passive infrastructure. Initially, towercos just took the process and systems that MNOs had put in place and simply executed them better.

As the well known moniker goes however, repeating the same action and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Without implementing significant changes and improvements, the performance of sites can only plateau, and the rising expectations of operators after initial experiences would fail to be met.

Ensuring that you remain at the top of your game and continuously improve is essential in the drive to operational excellence, especially as technology and the shape of operator networks continues to evolve.

Solving a given problem requires you to understand the true root cause of the issue in order to develop the most suitable fix, and minimise risk of repeat occurrences. For example, combatting fuel theft isn’t simply about increasing your security and surveillance; you need to understand why and where the theft is happening.

In order to combat issues operators and towercos face, Helios Towers Africa’s new management team has applied six sigma methodology to their operations, interrogating why events are occurring and drilling down into the root cause. In the case of fuel theft, Alex Leigh referenced an instance where a security guard was stealing fuel. Drilling down into the issue further revealed that the maintenance partner wasn’t paying the security guard. Fixing the issue wasn’t simply a case of replacing the security guard, it required a solution to track and monitor whether the maintenance partner was making payments correctly.

MNOs, towercos and their partners need to continuously ask “why” and then take their learnings and constantly reapply them in order to improve processes.

It was observed by panellists that a large proportion of theft occurs when contractors and service providers are present on site. As such, it can be derived that by reducing the number of site visits you start to reduce the occurrence of theft.

This requires coordination of your service providers and suppliers, synchronising their maintenance schedules and deliveries in order to reduce the amount of visits to your sites.

The rush to deploying capex is a common mistake, agreed the panellists, no matter how good the solution is. If it goes into the field without the skills or systems to correctly install, integrate, commission and maintain it, the solution is doomed to fail. Capex decisions need to be carefully evaluated and considered, with assessment of existing infrastructure being an important first step.

One must also not underestimate the cost of change. Whilst a solution may promise improved efficiencies, requirements to train contractors in using the solution, or the extensive and complex integration into existing systems, may quickly erode some of the financial and operational benefits that you had been expecting.

It is not uncommon, observed Helios’ Alex Leigh, that when you inherit a portfolio of sites there can be five different types of generators and five different types of controllers across the fleet of assets, creating 25 different potential combinations which maintenance contractors need to familiarise themselves with.

By rationalising the amount of different equipment on site, it simplifies the work of the contractors, allowing them to become familiar with the equipment and as such, experts in ensuring that it runs and is used optimally.

Helios Towers Africa observed that it is also not uncommon when taking over maintenance contracts following a tower transaction that you have two different maintenance partners overseeing sites next to each other. Rationalising these contracts to give each contractor clusters of towers in close proximity to each other will reduce the amount of time each partner spends on the road and will ultimately improve the efficiencies of your operations. It is a straightforward solution but one that is often overlooked in light of companies not having a granular view of who is doing what on their sites.

Whilst sophisticated solutions on the market can offer significant benefits to your operations, it is also important to not overlook low tech options. Advanced locking and surveillance systems and unique anti-theft battery designs can go a long way to decreasing theft of batteries, however MTN Ghana referenced one of the most effective systems they put in place were simple metal bars to restrict access to their batteries.

All decisions need to be based on facts and data; you need to know what information you require and you have to be scientific. Whilst data can never be overvalued, sometime the quest for perfect data means you become paralysed by reams of analysis instead of drawing conclusions from more simple data sets. There are a lot of clever people who can do a lot of clever analyses, but ultimately you need to be able to extract as much value as you can from data without overloading the system.

Integrating new RMS systems can sometimes reduce efficiency as it often adds a layer of operational complexity as you have to retrofit it within existing operations. Understanding what you really need to be measuring and simplifying your monitoring can achieve real benefits.

It isn’t just remote monitoring and site management systems that can reveal information into the efficiency of your operations; your P&L can reveal interesting insights into what is and isn’t working on cell sites. For example, it may be that you notice fuel usage is a lot lower on some of your sites but on closer inspection this may correlate with some of your worst performing sites, thus indicating a problem with the generator which needs to be inspected.

Combining data from non traditional monitoring sources can give you a much more sound picture of your network operations and identify problems that other systems have missed.

Whilst optimising energy efficiency was the subject of a separate debate at this year’s Meetup, all panellists were in agreement that reducing dependency on diesel would have a positive impact on operational efficiency.

With fluctuating prices, localised shortages, substantial delivery challenges and its attractiveness to thieves, the dependence of cell sites on diesel is the source of a whole array of issues for tower owners and operators. Whilst the grid situation in sub-Saharan Africa not expected to improve dramatically in the short term, the switch to hybrid systems and alternative energy generation sources by tower owners is starting to reduce their dependency on diesel and all its challenges that it brings.

Diversification of the towerco business model was a  much talked about area at this year’s Meetup, however the growing interest in integrating the management of passive and active equipment was also echoed by the opening session’s panellists. In order to bring bigger synergies to the sector, Airtel’s Adedoyin Adeola felt that towercos needed to move out of the mindset that active and passive should be segregated, and forecasted that we would be seeing towercos entering the active space in the next five years.

In line with this, Vodafone’s Ahmed Saeb commented that the MNO has worked on a project where the same supplier carried out the passive and active maintenance thus reducing the number of site visits required and also creating efficiencies in the supply chain.

The list of steps that can be made to improve operating efficiencies is endless but ultimately the people managing the process have a finite capacity to execute such steps. Prioritisation of tasks and streamlining of processes and implementation of supporting technologies to reduce workloads is critical to ensuring that focus remains on the steps which will make the most difference to your operations.

Prioritisation of tasks is also essential when making process improvements, it is impossible to change everything at once and expect it to run smoothly, you need to start with the extremes and work your way in, gradually tackling the more subtle inefficiencies in the process.