Operators benefit from sixfold improvement in network issue discovery and resolution
London, 21 December 2007 – Actix, the leaders in Network Status Management systems, today announced that evidence from its initial deployments indicate a sixfold productivity increase in radio engineering operations for mature network operators.
Studies carried out by Actix with more than a dozen large network operators in all three major world regions have reveal that radio access network experts are productive for just 3.5 hours per day on average, meaning more than half the average working day is wasted.
This enormously ineffective process is largely due to uncoordinated systems and antiquated engineering processes. Actix NSM solutions automate the process of network issue discovery and resolution, ensuring that high value tasks are addressed first, and non-impact tasks are eliminated. This leaves the staff free to address issues which require their expertise, like innovation.
“27 percent of all mobile carrier operational expense is spent on running the Radio Access Network post-launch, and the more mature mobile markets are under severe margin pressure from a wide range of angles – shareholders, customers, competitors and regulators. In response, many networks look to cut costs by reducing headcount, but this is a short term quick fix, as the huge workload of managing network quality won’t go away – and is in fact likely to increase as new networks, new devices and new services are rolled out,” said Chris Larmour, CMO at Actix. “Technology has to allow people to handle more work in less time, and Actix is leading the field in enabling engineers to spend more time fixing engineering issues, and less time shunting data and scrabbling through multiple databases to find pieces of the puzzle.”
“27 percent of all operational expense is a huge figure – equivalent to literally billions of dollars for major carriers – but quite typically operators invest disproportionately more money in improving fashionable areas such as billing, and only make it marginally more effective, instead of investing in areas where there is a more immediate and more valuable ROI. Through improved Network Status Management, Actix can deliver a sixfold improvement in an area that hits at one of the major drivers of a carrier’s annual costs.” continued Larmour.
Actix NSM solutions are primarily suitable for tier one carriers in mature markets, and provide large, direct cost benefits for this segment. Recent business cases developed with customers have shown ROIs of $250,000,000 dollars of direct OPEX savings over five years. Other efficiency improvements from NSM include halving the time required for the typical daily tasks for a radio network engineer, and reducing the time needed to gather and process typical quarterly KPI reports from 84 days to just 3.