Jahanzeb Taj, Vice President, Marketing at Mobilink, understood the pressures, but it didnt change the fact that

his side of the business needed those reports in the red-hot atmosphere of Pakistans cellular market. Each and every day, we need tools that help us increase revenues, he says. Problem Our biggest issue in 2009 was we had no real visibility into the interaction between primary sales and wholesaler, wholesaler and retailer, and retailer and consumer. The sales and marketing teams asked the BI team if there was a way to create a dashboard that would give them the insight they needed to keep stock (pre-paid scratch cards, SIM cards, and electronic top-up capabilities) where it needed to be in the market. Doing so, would not just ensure retailers and consumers could acquire what they need on the spot, thus increasing revenue, but also would create a more efficient sales operation that would have the right number of people servicing the right number of retailers with the right amount of stock each and every day. Problem it was difficult to control where the stock was going and we didnt have key performance indicators (KPIs) for salespeople, says Taj.
We needed to give business users a way to take control of their own information, says Rao. In order to do that, they needed the right context for their queries to make the stories applicable to the needs of the business. The concept, of course, makes sense, but making it a reality in an organization that has 32,500 salespeople serving 200,000 retailers, who serve 32,000,000 customers, with data entering the warehouse from eleven disparate systems would prove to be a significant challenge proposed solution

Creating the Sales Models

In recognition of those intense demands, Mobilink thoughtfully planned and implemented a multi-stage process that it hoped would truly meet the needs of business users today and be flexible and scalable enough to adapt to new insights and the continuing change within Pakistans cellular phone industry. It set as its first priority the creation of the type of self-service sales information models that Taj and

his team believed would unearth insights needed to win the battle for subscribers and maintain industry leadership. For each information model, we created small teams of representatives from the business units and from IT, says Rao. And we created a methodology for designing the models Before creating the sales models where the teams defined every entity, every object, and the outcomes they needed. Rao calls this a very top down business design, with only one goal: the user experience. Get them the right information in a way that they can use it. For three or four months these teams examined needs and grouped them into categories of information. They defined metrics, analysis needed, and the necessary elements for drag and drop analysis. For example, an unused retailer is somebody who has run out of stock, says Rao. But what causes that? Is it impacted by region? Technology, such as an automatic refill versus a manual process? We needed to define an outcome, such as understanding how many retailers are running out of stock at 4:00 in the evening or why we have x amount of unserved retailers. Then, once we define all the outcomes, define hierarchies of information, define rules around them for building the information, then go about building metrics: numbers per week, per region that enable us to compare something like all distribution officers on a particular metric. Mobilink took two important technical steps. 1. It enhanced its Teradata foundation with a Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance. The appliance is used for more strategic, in-depth reporting that demands historical data, thus freeing up the main data warehouse for more operational queries. 2. By implementing Informaticas data integration (ETL) solution, Mobilink improved data loading time by 25%, enabling the in-depth, daily insights into sales activity that retail directors need when they arrive at work each morning.

We needed to give business users a way to take control of their own information.
Ehtisham Rao, Director of Business Intelligence and Billing

Business Impact The evolution of Mobilinks BI environment, leading to the creation of its sales models, has had a positive, rippling effect on many aspects of Mobilinks business. Increased Revenue, More Subscribers
In a market where 98% of users have a prepaid plan, the most important short-term impact has been on such things as prepaid sales balances. Mobilinks primary sales force and wholesalers try to optimize those balances by keeping

retailers properly stocked with SIM cards, scratch cards, and electronic top-up capability. Heres the difference. In the past, retail directors (regional sales and development directors) for those sales teams could only see which retailers had been served on a weekly basis. The sales plans scheduled retailer visits and staffing reflected that somewhat limited understandingNow they get all the details they need on a daily basis, says Afzal. The retail director comes in at 9 am and has a pre-built report that shows all served and unserved retailers from the previous day. In a drag and drop environment, he can then identify specific retailers and associate them with historical information, as far back as a month. There are also other dimensions and measures on the side, so that by 10 am the director has complete details on the previous day and can decide how he wants to proceed After using our model, we took corrective measures that enabled us to bring the deviation down to 50%, says Afzal. We improved both the plans, and adherence to the plans. Along the same lines, what Taj calls move-around sales which means crossing into other sales territories to quickly get rid of stock had begun to negatively affect overall sales targets and the permanent journey plans All of these factors have translated into real-world business improvements that contribute substantially to Mobilinks ongoing competitive advantage. > Mobilink has improved stock availability at retailers, by increasing the number of served retailers (those receiving stock each day) by 5% and reducing non-served retailers by 3%.The company has unearthed potential areas of growth and previously anemic markets with upside potential, leading to an increase in the number of active retailers those maintaining and selling Mobilink products by another 5%. Through BI we are able to pinpoint with precision the customer groups that have healthy communication trends and can act as a green field for revenue enhancement activities, says Rao. These customers are then targeted with upselling and cross selling campaigns. > Since the implementation of the sales models, there has been an increase of 2% in subscriber recharges.

Lower Costs, More Efficiency, Improved Profits

Even as revenues have grown, Mobilink has been able to use the sales models to improve its cost management capabilities and efficiencies and, so, drive stronger profits. Putting the models in the hands of our business analysts has unearthed a number of cost improvement initiatives simply by asking questions that dive into different directions and open new areas, says Afzal. One cost management

effort has been to right size the sales force in each region; another is creating more efficient and targeted marketing campaigns. For example, the sales models revealed that a significant portion of subscribers have calling circles that are limited to four unique numbers. Such information helps Mobilink streamline its offerings and marketing efforts. Analytics enable the commercial team to judge the quality of sales in a variety of ways, which has a direct impact on the operational and marketing costs in terms of which new acquisition campaigns are value based and which are bleeding the system, says Rao. Notably, new customer acquisition is up by 4% since the advent of the sales models, and the profitability of those new sales has improved by 4%. says Rao. Our high value customers are handled with more experienced customer service representatives and their queue time is less than any regular customer. Similarly, we pitch different marketing offers to our customers based on their previous uptakes and behaviors. > The self-service nature of the sales models has freed the BI team to pursue more strategic initiatives. For example, we were supposed to be developing a dashboard for high-level strategic planning, but the workload kept delaying us and conditions kept changing, says Afzal The models have also improved network planning through a better understanding of network element performance. BI, with its cell level traffic analysis, has added tremendous value in our network expansion and coverage projects, says Rao. > By bringing inventory and sales information together, the company can allocate its inventory more efficiently, ensuring retailers and subscribers can get what they need, when they need it. The BI team gave us a wonderful sales model that has made a major contribution to our 2-3% growth in sales. I can quickly and easily find out what kind of stock the retailer has and what kind of stock a salesperson is supposed to deliver that day and what kind of stock the retailer will have at the end of the day; its all there

Reports that used to take weeks to develop, now are available in hours, says Ahmed. The change is tremendous; we have almost anything we want. When we want to do a new pricing offer, we can pull down specific information about customers. We can understand why an offer did better in area A than area B. The amount of analysis is

extremely sophisticated.