With a keen focus on an easy to use and cost-effective platform, Infozech has an impressive record of deploying IoT and telecom site management solutions for various telecom infrastructure companies and operators across the globe. Infozech manages over 150,000 tower sites, tracking over 42mn litres of fuel per year, reconciling bills worth US$228mn, and over 7.6mn individual assets. TowerXchange speaks to Infozech’s CEO, Ankur Lal to understand how Infozech’s solutions are generating value for the telecom industry in terms of revenue assurance, operational efficiency, and cost optimisation.
TowerXchange: Please introduce Infozech’s Telecom site management platform and what parameters it is able to manage and monitor?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
Monitoring tower sites from a centralised location is becoming increasingly difficult with growing networks, increasing opex and significant security threats. Poor maintenance of assets and non-visibility on energy consumption only add to the complexity. Profits are getting leaner and Site Licence Agreements (SLAs) tighter. Infozech’s end-to-end site management solution iTower is built on a unified platform that addresses tower infrastructure companies’ concerns.
Infozech has developed an enterprise-level solution – iTower for telecom tower infrastructure companies that incorporates complete tower site lifecycle management right from site acquisition to decommissioning of the towers. iTower expedites efficient operations, cost optimisation and revenue assurance for tower operators and managed service providers. It is a purpose-built solution designed with highly effective field management processes in mind. It unifies field forces by providing a flexible platform for users to collaborate and manage projects from one source while capturing detailed data and real-time site activity. iTower’s data validation layer helps reduce common data errors and omissions that stand in the way of efficient field operations. It also provides relevant insights for decision making and future planning through a dashboard.
The biggest concerns today in streamlining site operation are visibility of assets at sites, efficient field operations, security assurance, optimisation of energy consumption, accurate invoice generation and ensuring remote sites are still well-maintained. Infozech’s iTower manages and monitors all of these essentials to assist tower operators in achieving operational excellence, reducing opex and optimising capex.
TowerXchange: Please explain some of the challenges that tower owners face in collecting revenues from tenants and the role that your platform plays in addressing this.
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
For any telecom tower owner or manager to maintain and grow their business, billing and invoicing plays a vital role. It not only helps collect revenue but also maintains a dispute free relationship with tenants.
Telecom passive infrastructure companies receive large sums of money from their tenants for infrastructure management and energy consumption on a monthly basis. In India alone, this number is about US$310mn/month inclusive of leasing space on the tower as well as energy usage charges. With such large scale billing, there are bound to be inefficiencies in the billing protocol if handled manually or in excel or enterprise resource planning software. The inefficiencies in billing come up due to a number of reasons, including complex master service agreements (MSAs), multiple billing contracts with the same tenant on a different set of sites, unauthorised charging, or if sites are being invoiced based on incorrect asset data. Then there are human errors in calculations or errors due to a lack of accurate and reliable asset and energy data.
Telecom passive infrastructure companies receive large sums of money from their tenants for infrastructure management and energy consumption on a monthly basis. In India alone, this number is about US$310mn/month inclusive of leasing space on the tower as well as energy usage charges
Billing inefficiencies cause revenue loss and leakage which directly hits the business.
Infozech’s infrastructure and energy billing system (iBill) is a cloud based billing engine capable of processing thousands of records within a few minutes to generate accurate and precise bills.
iBill works on an efficient and economical cloud-based model eliminating all billing errors through data validation algorithms. The direct result is an overall increase in efficiency achieved by eliminating the recurrence of errors and an improvement in the quality of data in upstream and downstream systems. iBill supports different MSAs and contracts with minimal changes and a fast turnaround. Management gets better visibility of the revenue across the region.
iBill also has the provision of maintaining a record of historical data for reference purposes during dispute resolution for past transactions. Hence, the system not just fixes all errors but also brings transparency into the complete billing process.
Many big towercos with operations in multiple countries have different contracts and billing parameters and the goal to standardise their billing process across different countries, which iBill can help achieve.
TowerXchange: How is Infozech’s platform helping tower operators in taking a proactive approach to streamlining site operations?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
A competitive market constantly exerts pressure on tower operators to look for extra cost advantages; cost saved is profit earned!
iTower helps tower operators in optimising opex and in the right allocation of capex while enhancing the quality of site operations.
Opex optimisation can be achieved by streamlining site operations, which means the better sizing of both field force teams and central functions such as real time site monitoring, maintenance tracking, accurate billing and removal of non–valuable activities done by technicians.
About how Infozech platform is helping towercos in streamlining site operations, I am glad to tell that our site management system is already deployed with tower operators in Africa and they are delighted, realising savings and value through our system.
One of the leading telecom operators, operating and managing a portfolio of more than 6,000 towers in East Africa was facing challenges in capturing activities carried out by field operations staff which have a cost implication in a central database system. They were struggling in generating daily/weekly/monthly/yearly reports and dashboards for effective network operations management.
They didn’t have a clear visibility of all activities carried out at sites and therefore were not able to measure performance in terms of cost efficiency and SLA compliance by the contractors and MSPs. They didn’t have an automated system for trouble ticket creation from real time alarm systems or OSS data feeds. They wanted to take control of preventive maintenance management and energy management to optimise energy consumption and operational cost.
They aimed to install a robust and comprehensive solution to monitor, manage and analyse in a central database system all field activities which had a cost implication.
Infozech proposed solution was Site Cost Management System (SCMS) which is able to capture all the information on tasks being performed by field staff which has cost implications such as fuel filling, corrective maintenance, and preventive maintenance, spare part provision. Based on data captured through mobile application and a web portal, operational cost is calculated in the system on daily basis. It made all reports available for refuelling, preventive maintenance, spare parts and corrective maintenance and can be viewed daily/weekly/monthly/yearly. SCMS has a mobile application which enables the user to feed the refuelling information at the time of delivery. The mobile application can also work in standalone mode and store the captured filling data internally, which is especially useful in cases of no network or no data connectivity.
Our system also provides the option to capture a grid meter reading at the time of fuel filling and preventive maintenance activities. The user has to capture photographs before and after the activity along with the location and time stamp when the user performs and submits the checklist. The system can also auto-assign the ticket to a concerned user based on the mapping provided by an admin.
The system is able to schedule any type of preventive maintenance against a site and has a configurable checklist form, which can capture any kind of data at the time of conducting preventive maintenance on site. The system has an inbuilt AI which will reconcile data from contractors or MSPs and the report and highlight any variance.
Our customer received multi-dimensional benefits just after installing the system for four months. Our customer has noticed a significant saving in fuel consumptions after using the system without compromising on network uptime. Our customer mentioned that the automated PR creation process has improved TAT from 1 week per MSP to 5 minutes for 8 MSPs. Even their internal payment approval process cycle had reduced from 15 days to 2 days. Now they are able to track & manage 100% spare parts cost and usage on the SCMS portal.
We take care of our customers. One of our organisation’s core value is “customer delight”, we push ourselves really hard to achieve that.
TowerXchange: Why should tower owners look to use a complete end-to end site management system such as Infozech’s rather than developing an in-house system?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
Very good question. While looking for site management software solutions, tower operators often analyse the different scenarios to choose between outsourcing and in-house development. This strategic choice may have a significant impact on cost, quality and resource aspects of the telecom tower company. Thus more and more telecom tower companies prefer to choose IT outsourcing models rather than looking for specialists in-house. Subject matter expertise, access to exceptional capabilities and reduced costs are some of the major factors driving the IT outsourcing market.
Infozech’s platform and support teams are experienced enough to be key business enablers for tower operators rather than just a cost saving tool
If you consider market trends, the Global IT outsourcing market is expected to reach US$481bn by 2022 growing at a CAGR of 6.2%. To choose the right strategy on digitalisation of telecom site management, let me take you through multiple benefits of outsourcing IT infrastructure:
- Faster approach to high-quality software development resources
- Flexibility – specialised vendors like us are flexible to provide support in accordance with project schedule and needs
- Cost savings – outsourcing can help achieve a high level of productivity at reduced costs.
- Broader range of subject matter expertise – we have built industry expertise and on field experience by working with different customers in different geographies and at a different maturity levels. We can work as an extended arm.
- Solves capability issues and enables focus on core business functions
Infozech’s platform and support teams are experienced enough to be key business enablers for tower operators rather than just a cost saving tool. Infozech’s commitment to faster deployment and great quality to price ratio has helped us grow to the next level, becoming the right technology partner for telecom tower operators.
