Innovative integrated communications infrastructure services leader edotco leverages data to focus on four areas: real-time efficient operations; advanced analytics; predictive capabilities and future proofing the company. In this exclusive interview, Director of Group Strategy Gayan Koralage describes the tools they use the collect data, the analyses and insights derived from that data, and the operational and commercial KPIs edotco measure.
TowerXchange: How would you summarise edotco’s current data strategy, both operational and commercial performance data?
Gayan Koralage, Director, Group Strategy, edotco Group:
Innovation is at the core of our operations, and we have embarked on a strategy that comprises of four focus areas, namely real-time efficient operations; advanced analytics; predictive capabilities and future proofing the company.
This model places a great emphasis on data collection and usage, to drive business efficiencies and operational excellence, enabling us to benefit from smart process automation, advanced data analytics and applications. Our current strategy is aimed at ensuring we receive the most accurate real-time data from our tower assets, further enabling us to drive a business that ensures our operational teams benefit from insights gathered and customers get the best out of the partnership, resulting in a shift from reactive orders to a proactive demand generation model.
TowerXchange: What tools do you use to collect data?
Gayan Koralage, Director, Group Strategy, edotco Group:
We have adopted a variety of initiatives and tools across our business that enables our operations systems to be leaner, agile and more cost-effective. Some of the more notable projects are:
Drones: To conduct site surveys, network inspection alongside assessment for preventive maintenance and revenue assurance. The use of drones’ results in faster data collation and report generation, reducing the turnaround time for reports by 35%.
echo RMS: Monitors real-time batteries, rectifiers and generator sets to make sure they are in good working condition. These assets are equipped with sensors that helps us manage our maintenance scheduling.
easi: An asset management platform to help us keep track of our inventory and workforce (our field technicians), ensuring what we have in reality matches what we have in our databases. Currently both echo and easi each have mobile applications, and we plan to merge them next year, along with the workforce asset management system on one cloud-based platform for optimised results.
RAPID: Usage of smart process automation built into our financial system.
TowerXchange: What tools do you use to analyse and visualise data?
Gayan Koralage, Director, Group Strategy, edotco Group:
We use tools such as Power BI, MapInfo and, available functions in Microsoft Excel.
The use of drones’ results in faster data collation and report generation, reducing the turnaround time for reports by 35%
Power BI transforms our data into rich visuals for better visualisation. We’re able to use such visuals and share insights organisation-wide, enabling our teams with the necessary to work more efficiently. As for MapInfo, it is a geographic information system (GIS) software that we use for mapping and location analysis for our tower sites. It helps us visualise, analyse, and interpret data to understand certain patterns and trends.
TowerXchange: How do you translate data into actionable insights? What kind of reports and ‘what if’ scenarios are you able to run?
Gayan Koralage, Director, Group Strategy, edotco Group:
We have a few examples of extremely useful achievable and automated insights, including:
Long-tail analysis: Derived from data gathered, this analysis helps us identify sites with prolonged power outage issues. As such, we can escalate it to the local operations teams to put the necessary precautionary measures in place. In addition to that, by analysing the data, we are able identify the cause of an incident (i.e. failure of equipment, faulty) hence determining the best way to overcome or avoid an issue.
Monitor diesel readings: Having a thorough view of the diesel readings without being onsite helps us identify generator set inefficiencies and also, detect or prevent theft.
Avoid overbilling: We are able to show a comparison of our AC meter readings against utilities charges. This enables both edotco and the relevant utilities company to study and understand energy billings within a certain site better.
Revenue assurance: Comparison of energy usage at site against our asset register to detect equipment that was installed without permission or not updated in our internal system.
Monitoring of temperature: Real-time temperature reading to reduce energy consumption at site or avoid damaging equipment due to high temperatures.
TowerXchange: What are the most important KPIs you are measuring and managing in terms of operational performance? And can you share some success stories?
Gayan Koralage, Director, Group Strategy, edotco Group:
Our most important KPI is uptime. Aside from that, we also look into mean time to repair (MTTR); percentage of sites with theft, vandalism and accidents; site delivery according to service level agreements (SLAs) and percentage of green or hybrid sites among others.
Externally, the above KPIs give us the ability to meet the needs of our customers while internally, it helps us to be more competitive from the perspective of cost, time and quality in terms of the ability to meet and surpass our service level agreements (SLAs). Some of the successes we have attained over the past years include:
- Maintaining energy up time in Bangladesh despite deteriorating grid conditions.
- Over 600 sites with renewable energy, resulting in approximately 25% carbon reduction.
- The construction of more than ten bamboo structures in Bangladesh, the equivalent of 70% carbon reduction per site.
- A 30% reduction of theft, vandalism and other safety risks through the usage of edotco’s smart padlocks and easi asset lifecycle management.
TowerXchange: What are the most important KPIs you are measuring and managing in terms of commercial performance? And can you share some success stories?
Gayan Koralage, Director, Group Strategy, edotco Group:
In terms of commercial performance, there are many KPIs we benchmark against however, tenancy ratio of sites alongside lease fee per tenant per site is the most important measure of our commercial performance.
edotco’s portfolio of towers has a 1.60 tenancy ratio, while the global average is between 1.6 and 2.0. Our tenancy ratio grew from 1.5 in 2017 to 1.60 as of 3Q last year – this is a clear indication of our growth across all six markets we are in.
TowerXchange: Please sum up your personal view of where we are as a communications infrastructure industry today in terms of collecting and utilising big data – and what we should strive to achieve in the future.
Gayan Koralage, Director, Group Strategy, edotco Group:
Businesses across all industries need to innovate or risk being left behind. Based on my observations, the communications infrastructure industry has not been adopting big data analytics as quick as they should. Driving value more for customers requires towercos to deepen their presence in the telecoms value chain. This means developing the right competencies and capabilities. Moving forward, we need to be able manage an end-to-end telecoms network autonomously with the use of RPA, AI, machine learning and so forth. Reducing the reaction or response time to a sub-millisecond range is crucial in the era of 5G where low latency and high availability are key. Even more so, order generation needs to move beyond reactive to proactive – informing customers where sites need to be built with a ready catalogue of structures and location partners for them when they do decide to build.
