TIPS lets Telecom count the cost of capital projects
Telecom's Technology and Capability Transformation group manages around 80% of Telecom’s capital investment. With such a complex planning environment, Telecom was struggling with the functionality of existing Excel-based planning tools. They called in Optimation to help them find a solution that would better meet their business needs, as well as being more stable and easier to use.
Telecom
Telecommunications: Application development, Managed Services
The group maintains an 18 month project level planning horizon, integrated with three year top-down outcome planning. They needed a system that could integrate top-down and bottom-up planning and enable transparent translation of strategy to execution. Telecom also wanted a user interface similar to Excel to minimise training requirements, and security that fit its existing network environment.
After consideration of a number of software packages, the best alternative was seen to be a robust, multi-tier database designed specifically for the team's planning requirements. We used an agile development approach to enable the rapid delivery of cost-effective results while maintaining close communication with Telecom's business users to ensure the development tightly matched business requirements.
The result is TIPS (Telecom Investment Planning System), a slick planning solution that allows the group's Investment and Programme Managers to easily track high-level planning and financial data for all new investment in Telecom's networks.
"The competence of Optimation's developers and their project management disciplines were excellent," said Nicola Sutich, Telecom Integrated Planning Manager.
"Optimation truly understood our requirements and were innovative in their solution design. All in all, their collaborative team-based approach enabled us to achieve an outstanding result which has delivered real business value."
Business benefits and outcomes:
- Ease of deployment and fast roll-out of new functionality
- Extensive history and auditing
- Rich client-side functionality
Excel-like grids provide highly flexible support for "slicing and dicing" data - sorting, filtering and grouping by user-defined criteria using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. The user-defined criteria can be stored and re-applied at the touch of a button. This approach combines the best of a traditional reporting tool with the power and flexibility of a highly interactive graphical interface.
- Import and Export, to and from Excel
- Data from SAP and other systems can be imported using Excel as an intermediate format.
- Built-in administration and security
TIPS is built on Microsoft .Net and SQL Server. It features a multi-tier architecture, with rich client-side functionality and an application server, all written in .Net. Development time was minimised by building the application server on Optimation's re-usable data access library.
Want to know more? Talk to our team.
