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A digital twin is a promising concept for the tower and telecom companies which when adopted can help them face the grand challenges in terms of site and asset visibility, financial (Opex and Capex) planning, operational efficiency, resource optimisation and productivity.

Presently, if a customer wants to deploy more assets on a site, the network design team plans site visits for the managed service provider. The Managed Service Provider (MSP) has to fill a hardcopy checklist for the high-level design which is extremely time-consuming, post which the data is manually fed into excel sheets. After the design is created and shared with the customer or the network build, a shopping list is prepared and shared with the procurement team. Before the data is fed into ERP, there is usually a long process for request validation. This is just one of the operating blocks impacting the success of the business.

Insights gathered through Digital Twin:

With digital twin, the network design team gains more visibility into the tower structure type, the weight load, power load, effective projected area, as well as tower section configuration. Whereas, the procurement team gains more insight into the number of un-utilized assets, idle assets, procurement history, supplier history, stock in warehouse and repair centre as well as assets nearing their service time. Similarly, a digital twin helps Tower and Telecom companies effectively handle the energy management gaps by bringing more transparency through real-time energy data and analysing the same to optimize energy management challenges.

Extensive site and asset environment view:

Digital twin offers Towercos and Telcos a comprehensive, real-time and reliable 360-degree view into their site and asset environment. Businesses can view tenant consumption details, financial information such as rental charges per tenant, land rent, energy costs, monitor assets, report stranded, missing and stolen assets quickly and take necessary actions. Through combination of human and machine intelligence, technologies and analytics, companies can now have passive infrastructure details, monitor location and site conditions, track tower company’s service and maintenance histories remotely by collecting data points, some images and documents.

The benefits reaped:

• Monitors grid, fuel, battery and renewable energy consumption in real-time to manage and track energy consumption optimally and save operational costs.
• Prediction of procurement cycles saves almost 15-20% of CAPEX.
• Budget based to need based transformation is observed in the procurement process.
• Instead of making new investments, the idle or un-utilized assets tracked through digital twin can be redeployed, thus saving huge OPEX.
• Create great value by building healthier customer relationships and collaborations with timely vendor payments.

There is a lot to explore on the opportunities telecom and tower companies can leverage with the insights gathered by embracing digital twin technology. To find out how your organisation can accelerate the digital twin implementation, watch our webinar on “Use cases of digital twin in telecom and tower business.” Reach out to us at pooja.pawar@infozech.com to access our on-demand webinar.