Major Telecom Provider Enhances Efficiency With Automated Reporting Suite
Customer's Challenge
A Top 3 US Telecom Provider required a faster method to ensure their license areas met FCC regulations for cell coverage percentages, replacing their previous slow, manual process, which risked hefty non-compliance penalties. The complexity of their geospatial data analysis highlighted the need for a scalable, efficient reporting solution.
phData's Solution
phData developed Alteryx workflows that streamlined data consolidation from multiple sources into one, improving efficiency by 90% and automated daily updates, leading to the creation of a Tableau dashboard that helps users identify non-compliant licenses for timely resolution.
Results
The combined automated reporting suite saves the radio engineering team 10-20 hours per week on average. Previously, radio engineers would have to manually run a report once or twice a week, which would take 10 hours each time to run in order to identify non-compliant licenses.Â
Because of the length of this process, engineers weren’t always working with fresh data. Now, this process has been automated with the Alteryx workflow that runs every day, ensuring that the team is always working with the freshest data to get the insights they need.
This data can lead to actionable insights to turn on additional cell towers and provide additional coverage to millions of people in counties across the country, in addition to saving the company millions of dollars of potential fines from the FCC.Â
The Full Story
A Top 3 US Telecommunications Provider was growing fast and gaining customers. With the rise and rollout of 5G, there were many new license areas that needed to be covered with cell service.Â
A lot of new data was getting collected that the radio engineering team needed to sift through to determine whether the company was meeting compliance standards set by the FCC.Â
The process for determining whether or not a license area was in compliance was arduous due to the complexity of geospatial data used for analysis. The incumbent process took 10+ hours for each manual run, and the company risked having licenses fall out of compliance before it could pick up on them.
Why phData?
Our main point of contact at the company was familiar with some phData employees through his experience at various Tableau User Groups. Through those connections, he was familiar with our work and knew what we were capable of. He decided to work with phData to support his need to automate various processes in the radio engineering team.
Automating Reporting with Alteryx & Tableau​
The Major Telecom Provider reached out to phData to seek a way to automate their reporting, optimize processes, and ultimately reduce the time to insights in order to provide the best coverage possible.
The phData team created a two-part solution with Alteryx workflows and Tableau dashboards.
- The Alteryx Workflows were used to combine data from disparate sources, transform the data into a format ready for analytics, and finally, output the data.Â
- The Tableau Dashboards then used the Alteryx outputs to create user-friendly dashboards that allowed the team to discover insights and find answers to questions easily.
Alteryx Workflows
The phData team built many Alteryx workflows to update, modernize, and automate existing manual practices. The workflows replaced the previous process that had existed for 25 years and was built mostly in MS Access and VBA scripts.Â
A common theme with these workflows was optimization, especially for geospatial processing. The workflow shown below initially took nearly 10 hours to complete; today, it runs in a little over an hour.
The workflow combines tables from the client’s internal database and an automated feed from the FCC database. This data contains geospatial information for all license areas, including the associated population and compliance data. The end result of this data is then used for the following Tableau dashboards.
Tableau Dashboards
The phData team built many Alteryx workflows to update, modernize, and automate existing manual practices. The workflows replaced the previous process that had existed for 25 years and was built mostly in MS Access and VBA scripts.Â
A common theme with these workflows was optimization, especially for geospatial processing. The workflow shown below initially took nearly 10 hours to complete; today, it runs in a little over an hour.
The workflow combines tables from the client’s internal database and an automated feed from the FCC database. This data contains geospatial information for all license areas, including the associated population and compliance data. The end result of this data is then used for the following Tableau dashboards.
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