Major Telecom Company

The Company

The client, one of the world’s leading providers of wireline and wireless communications in the United States, needed to manage the merger of two major companies while optimizing the utilization of disparate resources and assets.

The Challenge

This company’s business managers needed a Field Services Management Analysis system to integrate, manage and report detailed information on vehicle and manpower utilization across the multi-company geographies. This required design and development of a high performance data collection and integration system that provided operation information on enterprise service support activities.

Major requirements included:

  • Meld data from multiple systems and regional hierarchies from two separate companies
  • Improve productivity of existing service support by effectively managing vehicle and manpower utilization
  • Track and analyze non-business usage of vehicles during business and off-business hours
  • Develop history of dispatch call length and drive time requirements to improve forecasting of vehicles and manpower needs
  • Leverage GPS locator capability to capture real-time vehicle locations that will allow management to reduce vehicle and technician downtime

The Solution

Development of this Field Services Management Analysis system presented several technological challenges. The system had to provide high-capacity storage and reporting of operational information from 14 different data sources. The GRT team managed and developed the data and security system architecture by building on the existing infrastructure. In addition to developing a new data warehouse and business intelligence interface, GRT also incorporated data feeds from existing systems. The user interface included such options as drop down menus, hot spot links, geographic drill-downs, “bread crumb” navigation, calendaring and collapsible/expandable tabling:

  • Built on existing architecture by incorporating data feeds from in place source systems
  • Developed new data warehouse to integrate data from multiple data sources
  • Designed and implemented user-friendly and flexible business intelligence front end
  • Incorporated GPS real-time feeds from over 16,000 vehicles
  • Technology environment was comprehensive and included: IBM pSeries (RS-6600), IBM AIX, IBM-DB2 EEE, Oracle 9i, XML, Java/JS2, C/C++, JMS, WebSphere, and DataStage

The Result

The company immediately realized measurable benefits in several key areas:

  • Data from two separate companies was successfully merged and appeared transparent to business users
  • Business user navigation and guided analysis was simplified with drop down menus, hot spot links, geographic drill-downs, “bread crumb” navigation, calendaring and collapsible/expandable tabling
  • Over 30 business tracking and analysis reports/screens allowed management to proactively manage the:
    • daily job history and site visitations for technicians
    • ability to display information on vehicle business and non-business usage
    • actual snapshot of pending customer demand activity
    • GPS real-time tracking capability allows management to continuously monitor technician and vehicle deployment