“Be as a tower firmly set; shakes not its top for any blast that blows.” – Dante Alighieri
Mumbai is not only the financial capital of India, but also one of the largest metros in the world. While the Mumbai local is often termed as the lifeline of Mumbai, over the years, mobile communication has become the lifeline of the city.
Indus Towers, with its widespread network servicing all major telecom operators, ensures that Mumbaikars don't face even a minute of network downtime. Even a minute of downtime in a busy metro like Mumbai can lead to thousands of call-drops and internet disconnections, leading to massive customer dissatisfaction.
In our journey as an organization towards challenging the Deming Prize. One major area that needed to be worked on was Policy Deployment of organizational objectives right from the top till the field level. One such organizational objective is to ensure by 2021 we have 99% of towers running at 100% uptime. In other words, telecom equipment installed on our towers should not stop functioning due to infrastructural issues for even a single minute at 99% of our towers. Automation was at the heart of ensuring such high quality performance, since it is not feasible to have personnel monitoring our thousands of sites 24x7.
Mumbai is known nationally for its excellent operations performance, hence with time the focus shifted towards acquiring new sites. This led to lowering in operations performance and despite a complete operations hierarchy; there was no awareness of how much problem the team was sitting with.
It was at this juncture that it was decided by the Circle COO, Process Excellence Mentor and the circle automation manager that a project needs to be driven which will deploy the operations goals of the circle, right to the last level of Field Support Engineers (FSEs), that will help achieve not only the circle's targets but also their individual targets so that they do not get penalized for lack of knowledge of targets.
A scorecard was created to assess the performance level against each parameter for each FSE and wherever there was a shortfall, the FSEs were encouraged to take up QCC projects to do RCA and solve the field problems. The common repository of RCAs and solutions would then form the basis for replication in case such problems arise in areas of other FSEs.
The project was reviewed along with the Circle COO and was also reviewed by national Operations & Maintenance Head and National Process Excellence Head. The results were very encouraging as there was phenomenal improvement across all parameters and for almost all FSEs. The circle automation score zoomed from a mere 68% to 86% within 3 months, ensuring the field employees achieved most of their targets which directly affect their performance linked incentives. The project witnessed complete teamwork, of 35 FSEs along with the Management Team, and continues to remain sustained.
Lessons Learned
- The team learnt a valuable lesson to take data-centric team-based decisions and Daily Work Management
- Not to take success for granted
- Importance of addressing the root causes
- Benefit of sharing best practices instead of reinventing the wheel every time