Back in 2016, Openreach was facing growing pressure from two directions at once - the customer base for its business networking services and Ofcom, the regulator which oversees the telecoms and ISP sector. The reason was a consequence of poor operational performance when installing ethernet, a key product line for larger businesses.
As Jason Teoh, head of business intelligence at Openreach’s fibre and network delivery division, recalls: “Our operational performance was not what we would expect or what our customers and Ofcom expected. We had poor lead times and an out-of-control work stack. We needed a way to understand where the problems were originating and to help operations get them back under control.”
One of the biggest issues it faced was with jobs that were taking over 140 working days - or nearly half a year - to complete. Teoh had a belief that better use of data and analytics could form a key part of the solution and help to transform the service being given to business customers.
“I realised the importance of equipping the operations team so they could adopt new ways of working and then have a strong story to tell their peers and other stakeholders, including how to use the tools to unblock bottlenecks,” he explained to DataIQ. “One of the things we found was that Excel was our analysts’ tool of choice, but it has limitations around how much data it can store and problems managing and sharing versions.”
A consultancy familiar with Qlik’s data analytics tool, Qlik Sense, suggested to Teoh it could have an impact within Openreach. “We recognised that we needed to do something different with data - Qlik offered a way to analyse and visualise things. It was the first time we had used it here,” he explains.
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