Telekom Romania modernizes its field service with Oracle Cloud
“This is an industry under big pressure, under big competition. You will not survive unless you are able to transform. ...Oracle’s value to us is that it enabled us to run these transformations.”
Business challenges
Telekom Romania, with 8.2 million customers and about €980 million in annual revenue, used to run its field service organization like an old-time taxi company, with dispatchers using phones to send out technicians. The telecom carrier needed to automate its business processes to increase efficiency.
COVID-19 presented a new challenge. Before the pandemic, each technician would meet in teams of 20 to 25 people every morning, then fan out to meet with a half dozen customers that day. Continuing with that model would have risked their health and safety. Telekom Romania needed to minimize technicians’ interaction with one another and with customers, while continuing to deliver quality service.
The implementation of Oracle Field Service is a huge step from both technological and cultural points of view, demonstrating the edge of Telekom Romania over the telecommunication market and the agility of the brand in innovating and implementing new and revolutionary services for its customers. Just like you see a taxi's location while waiting for it, any Telekom Romania customer will now be able to track a technician's location and the estimated time of arrival to the intervention's location. What we did together with Oracle was to create a supertight workforce management process, which is strongly automated.
Why Telekom Romania Chose Oracle
Results
Leveraging Oracle Field Service, Telekom Romania was able to cut its use of outside field service contractors by 60% in 2019 and projects a 75% reduction by the end of 2020.
Meanwhile, the carrier was able to meet a goal of fixing 70% of faults within 24 hours, while reducing costs by 40%.
Oracle Field Service also significantly reduces the need to manually route technicians, increasing efficiency and consistency across the country. Telecom Romania says it now routes 80% of calls nationwide automatically. Previously, manual routing was the norm in many parts of the country.
Automation helps Telekom Romania onboard new technicians and get them up to speed quickly, especially important in a tight job market. Technicians are issued tablets connected to Oracle Field Service, Google Maps, the telco’s database of customer addresses, and all of the other information they need to do their jobs. For new hires, automated processes delivered over the tablets replace a lot of face-to-face training.
Recently, Oracle Field Service enabled Telekom Romania to adapt its field service in the face of COVID-19. The carrier set up about 250 ad hoc offices, where teams could meet in groups of three to four people to receive their orders for the day. If there’s even a suspicion that someone in a group has been exposed to the virus, only those three or four people need to go into quarantine. Oracle Field Service distributes information on potential COVID-19 locations, based on public information and voluntary disclosures, so that technicians can protect themselves.