Some of the most devastating issues that telecommunications carriers encounter today are results of poor data integrity. Simply put, data integrity measures the overall accuracy, completeness, and consistency of data. In an industry that is constantly growing and innovating, data integrity can seem dry and many companies fail to understand its vast importance as a result. Important indeed, data integrity is the foundation of the network. Data integrity gaps can lead to alarming overspending, unplanned network downtime, and increased mean time to repair (MTTR), and it can hinder your company’s future if it not corrected.
It is surprisingly common for carriers to be billed for circuits and facilities they no longer utilize, and these bills certainly add up. The Axcent team is highly skilled when it comes to finding unused circuits that quietly drain money. On a previous data integrity project, Axcent Networks assisted a carrier in finding recognized actual savings of over $1,000,000 in monthly recurring charges (MRC) alone.
Unused circuit expenses aside, poor data also leads to unplanned network outages and increased MTTR, and these network issues cost the world’s mobile operators an average of 1.5% of their annual revenues, or around $15 billion each year. If crews work to restore service but inaccurate data prevents them from knowing where circuits are located and how they’re connected, they can’t troubleshoot the problems they need to fix. If you encounter these issues, you can lose inordinate amounts of money and aggravate, or even alienate, your subscribers.
Data integrity gaps that occur due to data migration errors or unsuccessful system integration efforts are also very common. The consequences go far beyond the surface; poor data has a ripple effect. Any time your company changes systems and has to migrate existing data to the new platform, there is risk involved (e.g. lost or misplaced data). If your data migrates perfectly but you had bad data to start with, you will continue to suffer until your data quality improves. If your data won’t map properly, you will end up regretting the time and money spent changing systems with no results.
The final primary consequence of data integrity gaps is another ripple effect that can hurt your future. Capacity management and network planning can be impossible to perfect without great data. Both concepts depend on accurate knowledge of both the network and the service that relies on it; after all, if you aren’t quite sure about where you are, how can you plan for where you want to be? Carriers who fail to improve their data integrity often end up spending unnecessary capital trying to fix other, less pressing network issues.
Most companies are founded on good intentions and strong effort, but operating with bad data negates all of that. If you truly want the best data integrity, you have to make a commitment to achieving it. You can’t simply buy an app and have all your data issues disappear. Carriers don’t typically have time or resources to perfect their data integrity alone, but Axcent Networks specializes in data integrity services. Team Axcent applies custom data analytics to discover root causes of operational process issues, preventing further discrepancies. Our software engineers have developed custom, in-house tools to accurately compare your engineering database against billing databases; in short, we pinpoint and correct discrepancies to save you money. We helped one carrier customer decommission a large legacy network and disconnect over 65,000 circuits, which saved them over $50 million in annual network expenses. Our hands-on approach does not just apply a quick-fix in the heat of an outage, but also enables new, better-defined standards and processes to be put in place for a more robust, reliable network for the future.
