ITD/ClickOnSite makes tower rollout and maintenance easier

ITD/ClickOnSite is a powerful suite of tools for managing tower rollout and maintenance, developed by people with experience on the ground. With experience going back to the 1990s and offices in Southern and Western Africa, ITD/ClickOnSite eliminates data silos and makes your data easier to work with. TowerXchange sat down with CEO Jerome Perret and asked him how his experience in the industry helped him design ClickOnSite and how they have balanced the complexity of the data with a simplicity of use.

TowerXchange: Can you please reintroduce ITD and your ClickOnSite product to TowerXchange readers, and tell us a bit about your background in telecoms?

Sure! Although we have been participating in TowerXchange events for some time, it’s always good to remind people of the ClickOnSite basics.

In the 1990s and 2000s the founders and management of ITD managed tower rollouts in Europe, Africa, Middle East and Asia. From that experience we saw how technology can make tower rollouts and maintenance of site infrastructure much more efficient. IT-Development SAS was founded, and ClickOnSite, our flagship product for managing infrastructure assets was created. As time goes on we continue to add layers of business logic for things like project management, reporting and search, atop the comprehensive database and document management system. And, of course, our APIs interface with companies’ other enterprise software.

TowerXchange: How has the ClickOnSite product evolved in the past year since we last spoke to ITD, what new capabilities does it have?

Our product dashboard is driven by features our customers tell us they need, combined with our extensive knowledge of the telecoms industry. For example, we made an integration for IFRS16 compliance months before it became a topic in the press because we knew from our industry experience that there will be a big need for it. 

We have added great functionality to ClickOnSite this past year, stuff that we are proud of from a technical standpoint, and excited about for the benefits they bring to companies and their staff. These include:

- ClickOnSite Mobile app

- Full-featured Project Management Office (integrated with BPM, task tracking + reporting)

- Executive dashboards

- Global search

- Lease contracts management (IFRS16)

- User usage analytics

- Simplified ClickOnSite user permissions management

Listing a lot of new features reminds me to mention that adding features to ClickOnSite does not add complexity - we do low-code development, which means we reduce the need for developer intervention in implementation or configuration with the customer. This makes implementations significantly faster, which of course means lower costs all around, and also makes for less headaches.

TowerXchange: Where are you currently present in Africa? How do you bring value to African MNOs and towercos?

The first ClickOnSite implementation was in Cameroon in 2005. Since then, ClickOnSite has grown to more than 12,000 users in 20 countries.

In Africa, we have customers across the continent, from North to South and East to West, English-speaking and French-speaking. Though ITD has an international reach, Africa remains a core focus for us; Africa is the region where we have the most customers and where we see our strongest growth. To support, and expand, our growth on the continent we have opened offices in Ivory Coast and in Johannesburg.

We explain our value proposition to telcos through our ROI calculator, which we have put together and refined over the years based on our experience in the industry. For any potential customer, we can enter various parameters from their business and it works out the Return On Investment they will achieve by using ClickOnSite.

TowerXchange: How do you ensure that your solution is correctly implemented and used optimally in the field? How dies your presence in Africa help your customers get the best from the service?

By nature, we are a company that believes in being close to our customers. Partners. From the start we are always engaged, listening to our customers’ issues and needs and understanding their operations so we can optimise ClickOnSite for them. When we implement ClickOnSite for a customer, we do much more than just make software work, we set the stage for the digital transformation of their processes and way of working.

A key reason that clients stay with ITD/ClickOnSite for years and years - our customer churn rate is negligible - is our emphasis on delivering excellent, hands-on service and support. This means engagement with the teams on-premise at our clients for training, knowledge transfer and skills transfer.

Specific to Africa, in addition to our France-based staff regularly travelling to customers on the continent, we have offices in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and Johannesburg, South Africa. The mission of our travels and subsidiaries is to bring ITD/ClickOnSite closer to our clients, allowing us to offer top service in terms of support, implementation and change management related to site infrastructure management and digital transformation of operations.

Additionally, we host ClickOnSite user workshops for customers to stay up-to-date with the latest features and to share best practices with each other.

All these activities are supported in Africa through our Abidjan and Johannesburg offices, and we will hire more project managers and key account managers. Additionally, we plan on opening training centers for telecoms professionals (ex. project managers, developers, BPMN).

TowerXchange: African infrastructure is generally poorer and workforces less skilled, how does your solution adapt to the difficult working environments that can be faced in Africa?

Providing active, engaged support, as we talked about, is great, of course, but equally important is that ClickOnSite is easy to use from the start. 

- In terms of user interface, ClickOnSite is intuitively designed; it can be used with minimal training. The interface on the screen is “responsive”, so it can be used on any device: PC, tablet or smartphone. And it is multilingual. (It is worth noting that the fact our staff speaks French natively makes communication with people in Africa who are more comfortable with French than English easy.)

- In terms of technology, as I mentioned earlier, we do low-code development, which means that 90% of needs for each client can be configured by a Business Analyst, rather than coded by a developer. This tactical, practical benefit is part of our strategic vision to make ClickOnSite low-impact to use and high-impact in delivering results.

- The ClickOnSite mobile app is super-easy to configure and use, without training. It is quick and easy to create new forms for any organisation or need. And it works off-line, too!

TowerXchange: You recently went through a new round of fundraising, what was the investment for and what will current and prospective customers notice changing?

In terms of product, ClickOnSite is full-featured and mature. This round of funding is focused on speed and scale of bringing ClickOnSite to customers. It will primarily be used to achieve:

- Proximity to customers and extend to new territories

- Grow our sales team 

- Increase the speed and quality of ClickOnSite implementations

We will reinforce and expand our local presence in Africa & South East Asia from our offices in Abidjan, Johannesburg and Ho Chi Minh City. Part of the effect will be higher visibility in the regions, but also continued top-notch customer support. We are investing in training programs for customers, and we are hiring managers with extensive experience.

We are putting special emphasis on growing our sales team to increase conversations with prospects about ClickOnSite. Simply put, we are adding people to let more companies than ever know how ClickOnSite will help them. Hopefully everyone in the industry - customers and prospects alike - will notice our raised profile.

TowerXchange: ITD targets both MNOs and towercos, and you offer your solution as both SaaS and on-premise, can you explain why your product is particularly well suited to the needs of your different customers?

MNOs and towercos that operate in different countries have different requirements per country. And sometimes they group countries by their level of requirements. The good thing is that ClickOnSite can be broken out into tenants: a company can have as many tenants as they need to cover different requirements, or they can use one tenant for the whole group.

On a related note, some customers prefer to have their enterprise applications hosted on-premise in their own IT environment. ClickOnSite can be hosted that way. Or it can be hosted full SaaS, or a hybrid of the two.

In other words, we can mix and match the hosting model to optimally fit the company’s needs, structure and constraints.

TowerXchange: Our Data Collection and Utilisation Working Groups have raised lots of ambitions for using data better, what concrete steps have you seen taken in making the passive telecom tower industry more data-driven?

We are strong believers in the power of data to inform and strengthen business decisions. ClickOnSite helps unlock the data related to towers so that MNOs and towercos can use the information to optimise their businesses.

One of the key ClickOnSite benefits that we highlight is that everyone from the office to the field works on one set of data in real-time. No silos, no copies over on someone’s hard drive. This accuracy and transparency is a big leap forward for MNOs and towercos compared to using Excel, or a database which is not updated in real-time.

That said, as has been commented by participants in the working group, the first task is actually having accurate passive infrastructure data. ClickOnSite makes it very easy to import existing data, or add them from the field, for example through the ClickOnSite Mobile app. Also, because ClickOnSite is interoperable with other enterprise software through APIs, information from multiple sources across an organisation can be combined. For example, infrastructure data together with remote monitoring system (RMS) data.

But to get very technical for a moment about accuracy, the underlying data model of ClickOnSite ensures that a standardised and single source of data is used in the system, and therefore across the company. There is no more need to try and decide which of two data points is the correct, or more recent, one.

The ClickOnSite reporting module makes it easy to create reports across multiple data points, and presents the results graphically. And ClickOnSite has dashboards to present KPIs (again, in real-time) at a glance.

While it is not commonly thought of when people talk about data analysis, we are excited about the data analysis behind ClickOnSite’s PMO (Project Management Office) module. Using this data and reporting, MNOs and towercos can analyse their processes and identify inefficiencies or optimisations in their workflows.

Circling back to the topic of the Data Collection and Utilisation Working Groups, we applaud TowerXchange for putting this group together. It is a vital topic for the industry. We are sharing our expertise and experience with MNOs and towercos, and in a forum that even includes our competitors, so that the whole industry benefits. Data collection and usage is a big, important topic to how MNOs and towercos run their businesses - this is just the start of a subject that will be very important in the coming years.

TowerXchange: Please sum up how you would differentiate your solution from your competitors?

Most site infrastructure solutions/tools on the market are either very simple (little more than a database) or overly complex: part of an ERP system (not even made for telecoms). Given our hands-on history rolling out and managing towers, we know what core functionalities MNOs and towercos need to streamline their work and remain efficient at scale. 

The differentiators boil down to three areas:

Technology

- Future-proof technology

- Low-code methodology which keeps costs low and speed high

Features

- Business logic layers that use the underlying data, for example BPM driving the workflow to automatically distribute tasks

- Reporting and data mining to use your data to make decisions

- Our CTO is a search expert: the search capabilities built into ClickOnSite are world-class

Service (Partnership)

- Buying a great tool like ClickOnSite is one thing, but easing adoption and usage of it by staff requires a unique skillset, and as “telecoms people making software for telecoms”, ITD is ideally situated to facilitate that within client organisations.

The last differentiator is time & money: we typically come in at about ½ the price of our competitors, and have it up and running much more quickly; on average in 2 months for a towerco.

Thanks for the chance to tell our story and about ClickOnSite to the TowerXchange community.