Cellular Provider Replaces Manual Processes With Advanced BI Solution

Cellular South, one of the largest privately held wireless communications providers in the United States, serves a large area of the Southeast, and has seen steady year-over-year growth since its founding in 1988. To make the move to the next provider tier, however, the aggressively expanding company needed a competitive edge – better and timelier operational data.

Cellular South tracked a number of key performance indicators, but the data was manually compiled from a variety of sources. This manual process made it difficult to look at the data historically and see trends. What’s more, the data took several days to compile at the end of the month.

The complicated compiling process required a large number of e-mails between department heads, all of whom did research within their transactional systems to provide the needed KPIs. Those KPIs then were inserted into several spreadsheets, and aggregated into a final "Operational Metrics" report for key marketing finance and technical executives. This tedious and error-prone process needed to be revamped to enable a faster, more useful view of monthly performance.

Dunn Solutions Group was selected to build a new enterprise data warehouse to compile the necessary data, and build/deliver the Operational Metrics report. The project team began by building a sophisticated data mart on Cellular South’s point-of-sale (POS) data.

This source alone provided extremely valuable insight to customer purchase history, which could be mined for KPIs. Another data mart was built to house data from their inventory and purchasing system (IPS), and conformed to the dimensions of the POS data mart to provide compound sales and inventory metrics. Finally, an existing customer billing data mart was upgraded and conformed so that customer service plans could be easily analyzed alongside the other sources.

Together, these sources – POS, inventory and billing – provide Cellular South with the ability to gauge the effectiveness of their various sales channels (telesales, kiosks, web, physical stores, etc.), as well as the popularity of various plans and devices.

Example metrics from these sources include...

  • Quantity, revenue and cost of goods sold (COGS) for phone sales, accessory sales, trade-in credits, coupon redemptions, repair center adjustments, activation fees and rebates
  • Customer wait time
  • Customer abandons
  • New customers
  • CSR efficiency (telesales and physical stores)
  • Inventory on-hand and on-order, and re-order points
  • Invoicing and purchase orders

Dunn Solutions Group's work at Cellular South continues with new data marts to include metrics on roaming, kiosk payments, equipment insurance, number portability, promotions, customer portal activity, extranet (WebTrends) statistics, third-party equipment-provider fulfillment and customer feedback.