Jahanzeb Taj

8/2/2019 Jahanzeb Taj

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Jahanzeb Taj, Vice President, Marketing at Mobilink,

understood the pressures, but it didn’t change the fact that

his side of the business needed those reports in the red-hotatmosphere of Pakistan’s 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 visibilityinto the interaction between primary sales and wholesaler,

wholesaler and retailer, and retailer and consumer.”

The sales and marketing teams asked the BI team if therewas 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 ensureretailers and consumers could acquire what they need on

the spot, thus increasing revenue, but also would createa 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 didn’t 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 ModelsIn 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 Pakistan’s 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 xamount 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 witha Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance. The appliance is used for more strategic,in-depth reporting that demands historical

data, thus freeing up the main data warehousefor more operational queries.2. By implementing Informatica’s data integration(ETL) solution, Mobilink improved dataloading time by 25%, enabling the in-depth,daily insights into sales activity that retaildirectors need when they arrive at workeach 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 Mobilink’s BI environment, leading to thecreation of its sales models, has had a positive, rippling

effect on many aspects of Mobilink’s business.

Increased Revenue, More SubscribersIn 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. Mobilink’s 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.

Here’s 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 understanding“Now 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 Mobilink’s

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 ProfitsEven 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 uptakesand 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 andcoverage 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; it’s 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 doa 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.”

Jahanzeb Taj

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