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Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM)

"Business Objects offers an interface that's so easy to use that no actual training is required. In fact, since the system has been activated, the number of calls to customer care has fallen, showing that dealers are able to obtain the information they need on their own."

Claudio Bocci, manager, data warehouse development sector, TIM

Challenge

Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) is Italy's market leader in the mobile communications sector. It is the third largest Italian company, with 37 million customers worldwide-of which nearly 24.6 million are from Italy. The TIM group and its associate companies operate in Europe and South America.

In the highly competitive mobile communications sector, companies achieve success by quickly understanding market requirements and trends. TIM's family plan and prepaid tariff initiative, and its constantly updated interactive services, have proved to be winning business decisions. But the company also needed to use consumer information to provide innovative services and intelligent pricing decisions to sustain and improve revenue.

TIM stored its consumer sales data on heterogeneous systems and used different methods to handle dealers and middlemen, analyze product sales, and manage its sales network. The company needed a unified data source to have complete and immediate information on sales progress in the various sectors.

Approach

In 2001, TIM partnered with Business Objects to create a complex data warehouse sales system to record all business transactions in the consumer world-from the sale of prepaid calling cards at stores to ATM credit top-ups-in one location.

TIM chose BusinessObjects^TM as the front-end system for its clients as well as the company's intranet to achieve an improved and easy-to-use interface. Project Sales DWH-comprising BusinessObjects, WebIntelligence®, and Set Analyzer® - was the first step in this direction. Aimed at making the company's relationships with its dealers more transparent, this initiative provided dealers with added value to ensure loyalty to the TIM brand. The Sales DWH system enabled middlemen to quickly access detailed information on their sales progress as well as the company's incentive schemes-data that was previously available only to TIM managers.

According to project managers Stefano Bottaro and Michele Spina, access to Sales DWH is currently reserved for TIM's master dealers or middlemen - those with a large business structure consisting of several retail outlets - and a network of sub-dealers. "We started with them because this is the most important segment, but we plan to extend the service in the future," says Spina.

Every TIM retail outlet was set up with an IT station that received automatic updates on new products and services every three months. This enabled retailers to manage sales operations by sending information to a data warehouse. Dealers could access information regarding their own networks by receiving updated data-sales figures, cancellations, and net purchases - every morning on their mobile phones. They could then drill down on data by connecting to the extranet and autonomously querying the system.  "We analyzed phone calls to the dealer help line and found that there were no problems reported regarding uses of the tool," says Bottaro, underscoring the system's easy-to-use interface.

Business Objects is currently developing a prototype for TIM, leveraging the new Broadcast Agent Publisher product. This prototype will prepare prepackaged reports (simple HTML tables) every time the data warehouse is updated. The system will also cut back wait times by lightening the data warehouse workload and simultaneously opening it up to the entire sales network.

Results

TIM is now able to analyze sales volumes by measuring the profitability of the various retail outlets, middlemen, and individual products. The extensive Business Objects partner base has enabled TIM to quickly and easily identify product customization options. By constantly monitoring the market and sales team incentives, the company has gained a significant competitive advantage.

With the data warehouse sales project near completion, TIM is considering two additional possibilities-first, to make geo-marketing elements part of the analysis parameters (for example, having information on population density, socio-demographic profiles, and locations of individual retail outlets) and second, to involve Business Objects on a global level to speed up data access.

The client response to the new system has been unanimously positive. Dealers appreciate having daily reports delivered via mobile phones. This enables quick access to essential information and the use of SMS (text messaging) for service communications. For TIM, it is important to ensure dealer satisfaction to strengthen its image at retail outlets. Additionally, real-time monitoring of the sales network activities at different levels of detail helps the company plan incentive policies for dealers.

"Following a significant initial investment, due to moving from heterogeneous platforms to a single multi-platform system, we are now recording a significant reduction in successive development costs and report times," concludes Bocci.

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Quick Facts

• Industry:
  Telecommunications
• Business pain:
  TIM stored all consumer sales data on three different systems and accessed them based on multiple criteria. Information retrieval was time- and labor-intensive.
• Why Business Objects?:
  Business Objects provided an open and scalable platform that could easily adapt to different, constantly evolving systems to ensure quick information retrieval with minimal resource constraints.