TELUS Rings Up Real-Time Operational BI

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	SNAPSHOT Organization: TELUS (www.telus.com) is the second largest telecommunications provider in Canada and the largest telecommunications provider in western Canada. Challenge: Centralize and optimize performance metrics, integrate disparate data sources, and simplify analysis activities to gain a cohesive view of field-service productivity. Strategy: Build a scorecard application that gathers field service information from various applications and data sources into an enterprise data warehouse and rolls the information up into manager-level key performance indicators (KPIs). Results: A Web-based scorecard tool that tracks and measures the effectiveness of 3,000 field personnel for 100 business managers, driving regional productivity gains of $1 million to $2 million per month. Information Builders Solution: WebFOCUS, iWay Software, Consulting.

Information Builders Technology Helps Leading Telco Boost Productivity by $1M-$2M per Month

As a leading telecommunications company in Canada, TELUS has amalgamated several large corporate entities to become the company it is today. With 25,000 employees coming together from multiple organizations, senior officers needed to centralize and optimize performance metrics to get a handle on employee productivity. Information Builders and iWay Software met that need with a business intelligence (BI) solution that tracks, measures, and reports on employee efficiency, accessing information from a variety of back-end applications and data sources.

"During the recent downturn in the telecommunications industry, our senior management has consistently emphasized the importance of internal operations improvements," explains Kevin Lam, manager of Business Performance at TELUS. "We needed a Web-based reporting solution to centralize productivity metrics and simplify analysis activities."

With help from Information Builders' Consulting, TELUS created an employee scorecard application that delivers substantial business value. "There was a large audience that had a serious need for this information, and now they have it," Lam continues. "Using iWay and WebFOCUS, information about our field forces is extracted from a wide variety of transactional systems and presented in a user friendly scorecard format. This solution has brought about significant changes at TELUS. Our business analysts use this scorecard information regularly. Managers are better informed, and employee performance has improved radically."

Feeling the Pinch

The genesis of TELUS' need to centralize information springs from a spate of mergers involving several independent companies. "Each of the firms which TELUS amalgamated had their own systems and processes," Lam says. "We found ourselves in a situation where we needed to access information from a lot of different systems."

TELUS also had a pressing need for a Web-based reporting solution. "Our business was growing," Lam continues. "In order to manage and drive operational efficiency, we knew we had to augment our reporting infrastructure. Information Builders offered an integrated solution that could access multiple data sources, enable a variety of reporting options, and construct Web-based self-service applications. These capabilities were just what we needed."

TELUS used technology from Information Builders and iWay Software to build a business intelligence application that tracks employee productivity for about 3,000 field service personnel. They selected WebFOCUS because of its strong Web reporting capabilities, mature information delivery environment, and intuitive dashboard interface. They selected iWay for its broad data access, integration, and ETL capabilities.

"We needed to get a handle on the productivity level of our individual field service employees so we could measure their output and, ultimately, drive efficiency," explains Lam. "If each employee was averaging 10 units of work per day, would it be possible to expect 10.5 units? Could we bring about a 5 percent productivity gain? We thought it was a reasonable assumption, but we needed business intelligence technology to track day-to-day performance and gauge our success."

Developing the Solution

Information Builders' Consulting worked with internal developers at TELUS to design, develop, test, and deploy the business intelligence solution. The entire BI infrastructure was created over a six-month period. "Information Builders played a major role in developing and deploying this solution," Lam says. "They provided a very high quality of service. That is one of the major reasons why this project was so successful."

Extract, transformation, and load (ETL) technology from iWay Software was used to gather field service information from applications such as Siebel, SAP, and Microsoft Access, and to combine data sources such as DB2, SAP BW, FOCUS, Informix, and various types of flat files into an enterprise data warehouse. Then, developers used WebFOCUS to create a self-service reporting and analysis solution that accesses data in the warehouse along with live data from production information systems. "The tools are easy to work with," says Lam. "Our business analysts were able to use them on their own soon after we brought in the software."

iWay works in the background to populate the data warehouse with current field service information. WebFOCUS accesses data from the warehouse and other sources, creates reports, and distributes information over the TELUS intranet. "iWay was important to us because the data required to build a holistic scorecard view resides on so many different types of transactional and database systems," Lam says. "We had to put together at least ten different data sources and consolidate it to the warehouse. iWay pulls all this back-end information together. We wanted to bring back consistent information without a lot of complexity. We've succeeded. Users see a seamless interface. The fields get filled in and the reports get written. They don't have to trouble themselves about where the data comes from."

Making a Difference on the Front Lines

About 100 business managers now receive scheduled performance reports by e-mail. This information is also available in a secure version on the company intranet. Authorized users can create their own reports and drill down into the data via an electronic scorecard interface. The reports measure employee performance for common field-service tasks such as the installation and repair of voice and data services. Each employee has a scorecard, and the data is automatically rolled up into manager-level scorecards to compare overall productivity against corporate and industry benchmarks.

"We use the scorecards both weekly and monthly to manage employee availability, gather utilization statistics, and encourage optimum performance," says Brian Meadows, a regional director for Customer Services Delivery at TELUS. "It's an excellent management tool. We've seen huge improvements since we starting measuring field-service performance in the first quarter of 2003."

Meadows is responsible for about 800 field services personnel on Vancouver Island and interior British Columbia. He and his management team are continually on the lookout for ways to improve productivity and effectively balance time spent in the field with administrative and training activities. WebFOCUS gives them feedback on whether the staff can complete jobs within allotted timeframes. Utilization statistics and estimated-versus-actuals comparisons help them zero in on performance issues and process issues.

"If the actuals are higher than the estimates for a particular job, we can drill down into the details to see if the performance data makes sense," Meadows explains. "It could mean we need to enforce training for a certain type of field service procedure, or it might simply be a case of travel delays when visiting customers in remote areas."

By tracking and propagating best practices, Meadows has seen order durations decrease two-tenths of an hour on a 1.8-hour job, which represents a productivity boost of 11 percent. TELUS has also seen a decrease in the number of jobs completed on time in this region. "When we started measuring employee performance, my team was completing jobs in less than the estimated amount of time about 3 percent of the time," he explains. "Now, we're coming in below estimates about 25 percent of the time."

TELUS does not use the system putatively, but rather to enforce positive behavior. "If one manager has absence rates of one percent and another manager has absence rates of three percent, we study the data to determine how we can share good behavior. This has dramatically improved our short-term absence rates. They used to be 4 or 5 percent, and now they stand at 1.6 percent."

Managers can access scorecard information using a Web browser, and output reports to Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF, and HTML formats. "The system enables managers to obtain the information they need," Lam says. "They can break down reports by day, week, month, and year. For example, they can create productivity reports, find out how much overtime their employees are clocking, and slice the data in many other precise ways."

Measuring the Payoff

Providing individual measures that can be rolled up drives accountability across the organization, improving employee efficiency and lending visibility to their contributions. According to Lam, this knowledge is driving regional productivity gains of $1 million to $2 million per month. Additionally, the scorecards give managers the data they need to engage employees in meaningful performance reviews, providing details for root cause analysis and helping the organization identify possible operational improvements. Data is readily available to compare team members to team averages and quality-of-service benchmarks. "The BI solution has brought about a change in our corporate culture," Lam says. "Managers use this information as part of their regular operations."

TELUS has been able to substantiate a very quick return on investment (ROI) for its purchase of BI technology. The project costs totaled just under $1 million, including outlays for hardware, software, licensing, and labor. "The solution paid for itself in a single month of productivity gains," says Lam. "We have demonstrated its ability to increase the efficiency and performance of our field service employees, provide superior information to managers and staff, and deliver better service to our customers."