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Jack Haddon
In the past couple of years, the telecom industry has entered a period of unprecedented growth and evolution as demand for ubiquitous connectivity becomes essential. The emergence of 5G has led to site densifications increasing the number of assets, increased pricing pressure, due to intensified competition, and challenging telecom tower companies for their returns on invested capital. With towerco assets spread over huge geographical areas, keeping track of all assets and their condition is a complex and challenging task. But if ignored, the failure of even a single piece of equipment can shut down site operations, causing the loss of thousands or even a million dollars.
Asset Management is emerging as a priority area for telecom infrastructure industry leaders. Traditionally telecom industries are constrained by a lack of visibility on assets making tracking ROI on assets even more difficult.
TowerXchange: What are the biggest challenges towercos face when it comes to capturing and storing asset data from their sites?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
Over the last few months, our business solutions and marketing team have been talking to several CXOs of the telecom industry across different geographies and have realized that their biggest challenge is “Asset Lifecycle Management” – Telecom infrastructure companies’ asset data have multiple images spread across different business functions (O&M, Finance, and other teams) and tracing them in real-time is far more challenging than ERP systems indicate. The absence of complete and accurate asset information leads to 20-30% of assets being untraced, and unaccounted for, which can impact an organization’s bottom line.
Assets follow a lifecycle – from acquisition to maintenance and operation, to decommissioning or replacement. Often for an organisation, maintaining a shared set of asset information at each stage of lifecycle – a single source of truth becomes challenging considering the volume and variety of asset information. This leads to duplication of data both within and across functions.
Other Business challenges that tower Infrastructure Enterprises face are:
TowerXchange: what is iAsset, can you briefly introduce its key features?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
iAsset is Infozech’s cloud-based asset lifecycle management solution that integrates, informs, and instructs. IoT-enabled iAsset works as a ‘single strategic system’ enabling organizations to transform their operations, digitally. It provides complete knowledge of “what you own and its true potential” which is considered the first step in developing a robust asset optimization strategy.
iAsset adds intelligence to automated workflows, real-time alerts, insights from data, dynamic edge control of assets, predictive maintenance, cross-domain analytics, and real-time visibility. Infozech’s asset management system helps strengthen the link between Operational Excellence and Financial gain by presenting real-time information on asset lifecycle.
Some of the key features of iAsset are
TowerXchange: What opportunities does having a “single source of the truth” data set open up in terms of interactions between different departments at a towerco?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
The Asset Repository is a single, centralised database that stores and tracks organisational assets physically and financially. It maintains the asset’s unique identifying information which can be shared across the organisation thus eliminating redundancy and inaccuracies in asset reporting. The repository houses a complete history of acquisition details, maintenance logs and cost history over an asset’s operational life.
iAsset adds value to the entire value chain of a telecom company by:
TowerXchange: How does a centralised asset database streamline the acquisition of towers from an MNO in a SLB transaction?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
In a traditional HOTO( handover takeover) SLB transaction, a sample of a few sites is audited and reconciled against FAR, a new approach taken by Infozech via its solution iAsset presents our highly customisable iAsset mobile application for due diligence activity. Its dynamic checklist captures more than 1000+ attributes of a site enabling the field personnel to scan, capture asset data, and store geo-tagged assets along with photos. Physical verification is scheduled for each and every site without an exception. Through this application, the back-office team successfully verifies the collected asset data during each site audit. Even the Finance team benefits from this data verification as they could reconcile the same against the fixed asset register (FAR) making the entire process transparent and reliable. All this leads to the creation of a “centralised asset data repository”
We empowered one of our customers in the MENA region to lead the way for the tower industry by deploying due diligence processes and helping them with digital handover. It covered structural, technical, operational, and asset audits with infra tagging for all assets available at sites taken over by our customer. The mutual goal was to analyse site conditions and create and maintain a central repository of sites as their Digital Twin.
Now they are reaping the benefits of the process and have gained real time control over site inventory. They can plan better for the scope of additional tenancies and revenue streams. The data available to them for advanced modeling and prototyping is highly reliable and they are now conducting improved predictive maintenance of sites and assets.
The goal of asset tracking is to provide full visibility into Asset Lifecycle and to allow an enterprise to locate and monitor key assets easily, prevent quality issues and detect theft.
TowerXchange: How can towercos ensure that the data stored is always timely and accurate? What processes are being implemented to ensure this is possible?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
The goal of asset tracking is to provide full visibility into Asset Lifecycle and to allow an enterprise to locate and monitor key assets easily, prevent quality issues and detect theft.
From the time asset is procured and sent to the warehouse, to it is deployed, maintained, repaired, discarded, etc all are tracked. One of the common challenges arises when an asset has been moved to an incorrect location.
The Asset Tracking Module of iAsset automatically timestamps the movement in the master database for any movement of assets at the site. This enables tracking life of the asset as it moves from one location to another and helps in the timely movement of assets driving business value creation, and end-to-end visibility into operations. Asset tracking enables Asset managers to assign assets to specific sites/locations. When another Asset Manager pulls up the database it’s immediately clear that the current asset has already been allocated elsewhere.
TowerXchange: How does iAsset help ensure energy efficiency at a tower site?
Ankur Lal, CEO, Infozech:
iAsset captures multiple attributes and aspects of an Assets from cradle to grave! Over an asset’s productive life, iAsset captures its make, configurations, performance, and maintenance logs including breakdowns, repairs etc. If interested functions look closely they get better visibility into critical asset attributes such as run hours, energy, and residual value, which enables accurate forecasting, outage management as well as insights for efficient energy management.
Business analytics produced on accurate asset data enables Towercos to drive excellence toward operational cost and energy efficiency, towercos can
This interview is published here.