MNOs and towercos participating in the site intelligence, management and optimisation working group represented every alternate buyer scenario: from early stage towercos yet to select software and still managing site intelligence on Excel, to MNOs and towercos that had built their own systems, to towercos working with vendors to customise off the shelf solutions to meet their requirements. This report also features insights learned in the edotco RMS vendor briefing.
Working group participants
MNOs and towercos: edotco, Indosat Ooredoo, Indus Towers, Mobilink, Mobitel, Myanmar Infrastructure Group (MIG)
Suppliers: Delmec, Ericsson, Ganges Internationale, GSMtowers, Hetreogeneous, Infozech, Invendis, MAFI, Moseco, Qowisio, Ramboll, Telcon, Siterra (An Accruent Product), SiteSee, Skipper International, Tarantula, TCC Industry and Engineering, ZTE
Key learnings
LEARNING 1: Most monitoring and management systems include the core asset register, co-location management, billing and access control functionality, with energy KPIs such as fuel consumption, DG runtime, temperature, solar usage and battery discharge critical where power services are provided.
LEARNING 2: While MNOs and towercos are acquiring RMS and SMS solutions from vendors, extensive customisation is often required, so a number of MNOs and towercos are choosing to develop their own solutions to better meet their requirements, particularly where integration is required with ERP and PMS.
LEARNING 3: The most common customisations are those demanded to meet specific analytics and reporting requirements.
LEARNING 4: There can be a disconnect between the RMS platform and the generation of trouble tickets / job tickets – often bridged manually.
LEARNING 5: Smaller towercos and MNOs often manage sites through Excel. Moving users away from their legacy spreadsheets to a new dedicated system can be a time consuming change management process.
LEARNING 6: Not all sites merit the same degree of remote monitoring nor access control.
LEARNING 7: Identifying and reducing fuel theft remains a significant motivation to invest in RMS – while sensor cord cutting remains a significant problem.
LEARNING 8: There continues to be a gap between the cost of RMS and the premium a towerco’s tenants are prepared to pay for the service, meaning the business case to invest in these solutions is more focused on delivering cost savings to the towerco itself.
LEARNING 9: The business intelligence generated by effective site intelligence is essential to equipment, supplier and staff evaluation, and can enable a culture of continuous improvement.
Executive summary
In order to sample the requirements of current and potential future buyers of site intelligence, such as remote monitoring systems (RMS) and site management systems (SMS), TowerXchange opened the working group by contrasting the experiences of three MNOs and three towercos from different geographies and of different scale.
Mobitel
Alongside Dialog, Mobitel is one of the two leading MNOs in Sri Lanka, where they operate of 4,000 points of service, including 2,000 of their own towers. 2G and 3G coverage is substantial, 4G rollout is in the relatively early stages; perhaps 25% complete.
In terms of remote monitoring and site management, Mobitel uses a Mobile app developed in-house to manage site activities. All internal and external stakeholders are required to use the system, which is critical to providing transparency as to their achievement of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The system includes access management, billing, rollout and co-location management functionality.
Why did Mobitel build rather than buy? “To meet our specific requirements, for example integration with our ERP system.”
Indosat Ooredoo
One of Indonesia’s leading MNOs, Indosat Ooredoo manages a network of 15,000 sites, 8,500 of which are owned, 6,500 leased.
The Indosat tower management team monitors their network with ‘TIMS,’ which includes the asset database, tenant billing and helpdesk functionality, with a mobile app for access control. Power is monitored by managed services partners, rather than by Indosat themselves.
One requirement identified was the need for the PMS to better share information with TIMS.
The solution was conceptualised internally, with vendor support to realise.
Mobilink
With the merger of Pakistani market leaders Mobilink with Warid, the company will manage 13,000 sites.
Monitoring sites is currently challenging, with a combination of in-house and outsourced solutions, for example to manage fuel security. Pilferage remains a problem, with concern that much theft originates within the supply chain. There are currently no alarms to manage fuel and batteries, with just DG on/off alarm notification.
“If we sell our towers, we’ll have an SLA with the towerco, which will transfer the challenge of resolving these inefficiencies to the towerco.”
edotco Bangladesh
edotco currently has 8,000 towers in Bangladesh, with a pathway to 10,000 in the coming years. edotco provides both tower and power in Bangladesh. RMS is very important in this operationally challenging market where adverse weather, with some sites prone to flooding, means it’s essential to know whether a site is up or down.
4,000 of edotco’s sites in Bangladesh have RMS. Critical performance measures reported to edotco’s NOC in Bangladesh include battery cell discharge, temperature, solar usage, pilferage and DG runtime. The platform is also used to managed first level field maintenance.
Myanmar Infrastructure Group (MIG)
MIG is a new towerco established in Myanmar in 2015 with just 100 towers. Like most startup towercos, site management is largely done through Excel; they don’t yet use a dedicated asset management system. As a result they have plenty of raw data, but little analysis. MIG recently brought it’s outsourced NOC in-house, making it the ‘heartbeat’ of the network.
MIG was recently sold to Shining Star, which has ambitious growth and investment plans for the business.
Indus Towers
The sheer scale of India’s Indus Towers was in marked contrast to MIG; operating over a thousand times as many sites!
Indus Towers recently refurbished their dual Tower Operating Centres (TOCs) – they have two for the purposes of redundancy. Within the TOCs, Indus Towers use a variety of software but “nothing off the shelf – we have co-developed lots of refinements to meet our needs. We haven’t found any holistic, complete solutions – too many vendors don’t understand our operating environment.” In response, Indus Towers has developed their own mobile app. Indus challenged vendors to visit their sites to really understand the operating conditions.
“We’ve yet to see a sustainable solution to the challenge of fuel theft,” said Indus Towers’ representative “cables are cut when RMS is installed, so it has proved ineffective. Fuel monitoring needs to be cordless.”
The cost of electromechanical access control solutions was difficult to justify across their entire 120,739 tower network.
Despite the challenges, Indus Towers has maintained 99.95%+ uptime. The have found better ROI reducing use of air conditioning to reduce diesel consumption, rather than through RMS.
RMS Lite
Is the cost of a full suite of RMS functionality justified for every site?
“At remote sites, where we’re subject to a less stringent SLA, we might only need to know if the site is up or down,” said one towerco. “The importance of the site is defined by the operator.”
Customisation of RMS and SMS
Off the shelf solutions, it seems, rarely meet customer needs. “Some degree of co-development is usually necessary; where we identify and deliver specific analytics to sync with our reporting needs,” said one towerco.
“It’s more about how the sensor talks to us,” said another.
“Remote monitoring diesel consumption is only so useful – we need data on the source of fuel theft to take preventative measures,” added a third.
“Customised tools are unique products for each customer,” countered a vendor. “You have to expect it will take us time to develop.”
“We all have a fairly standard site layout, which in my opinion requires minimal change as far as RMS is concerned – how different are our requirements?” Asked a client-side participant. “How far away is a solution which incorporates all our standard designs and deployment requirements?”
“We need to leverage user communities like these TowerXchange working groups,” continued a client-side representative, “to clusterise requirements and make it easier for vendors to meet different needs, and to make it easier for us to consume RMS and SMS solutions.”
A lot of the customisation was less about deployment of sensors in the field, and more about developing graphical user interfaces to report as customers desired.
“You can’t expect us to have a user interface in native Burmese out of the box,” quipped one vendor. “But when we’ve customised once, we can incorporate languages and reporting options into future versions.”
“It all comes down to QFD: Quality, Function, Deployment – and understanding what the customer needs.”
Insights from the edotco RMS vendor briefing
edotco owns over 17,000 towers, and manages a total of over 25,000, across six Asian countries (Bangladesh, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Sri Lanka).
Remote monitoring, which edotco provides as part of the ‘echo’ service, is a critical component of edotco’s value proposition. Operational performance data is becoming as important business intelligence to tower investors as tenancy ratios – RMS is not ‘nice to have’ any more. Site management systems also play a critical role in the commercial functioning of the business, tracking the number of operational sites, new sites’ going live dates, co-locations, and tracking whether tenants are on time or behind paying rent.
The towerco business model calls for the deployment of substantial upfront capex, and return on that capital invested is defined by more than just how many tenancies can be added. As part of their vision to become the “world’s best towerco”, edotco has developed a sharp focus on operational excellence, reducing lifecycle costs, standardised and efficient processes, and innovative solutions – one of which is their echo monitoring service, managed from edotco’s state of the art NOC (“echo centre”) in Kuala Lumpur.
“Moving people away from spreadsheets is a challenge. It takes time and effort, and needs the support of vendors,” said edotco in their vendor briefing, hosted the day before the TowerXchange Meetup Asia 2016.
“When it comes to passive infrastructure monitoring, what gets measured, gets improved.”
While edotco have quickly become a best practice exemplar of site monitoring, they readily admit that not all sites need the same level of monitoring. Putting sensors on sites, and manually translating the data from those sensors into trouble tickets and actionable performance analyses, is an expensive business which eats into the DNA of a cost-conscious organisation. A proportion of the cost of RMS will find its way to the customer, so the business case for remote monitoring has to stack up if co-location is to remain compelling. This has motivated edotco to be “as transparent as possible” with their RMS, providing customers with access to echo to build trust.
Q&A at edotco’s vendor briefing highlighted a continuing gap between the cost of RMS, and the premium a towerco’s customers might be prepared to pay for the service, which means the business case to invest in RMS had to be self-sustaining based on the savings a towerco could make for itself.
There are two prongs to the business intelligence layer provided by edotco’s echo. The first is for customers, helping them understand the performance of their sites, and how they are behaving. The second is for edotco, providing insights for their redesign and O&M teams and helping them allocate resources. edotco is able to clusterise data, generating business intelligence to inform how they provide energy, at what cost, and how they improve energy efficiency to reduce those costs. edotco are able to learn which sites are most frequently down and, more importantly, why they are down, providing opportunities to implement continuous improvement. Similarly edotco can generate hard data to evaluate equipment, suppliers, contractors and their own staff.
Gathering industry requirements for RMS and SMS
If you are a buyer of RMS and SMS solutions, TowerXchange would like to know what values you want to monitor on most sites, what values are required only for hub and other priority sites, and what functionality does RMS and SMS provide that, frankly, you don’t really need? We would also like to understand your graphical user interface preferences and analytical requirements, specifically what customisations you might have asked for from your vendor or in-house solution developer?
Please email us to share your experiences at kosmotherly@towerxchange.com. Better still, please come along to a future TowerXchange Meetup and participate in one of our working groups!
Supporting insights from leading RMS, access control and site management system providers to towercos and MNOs in Asia
Abloy South East Asia: An integrated approach to telecom site security
Acsys: Enhanced security and operational efficiencies through improved access control
AIO Systems: The synergy between tamper proofing, energy efficiency and cloud services solutions
Infozech: Intelligent preparation and use of data for more proactive network management
Accruent: Accruent’s SaaS site management solution delivers for towercos
Tarantula: Tarantula provides the go-to product for all things shared infrastructure
