Rostelecom is the largest digital services provider in Russia with 42.3 million subscribers and a backbone digital network running to a total length of 500,000 km. The telecom giant leverages MPP BI and Greenplum DB to drive performance of hundreds of its regional offices across the country with fast, interactive financial dashboards.
Regional offices are responsible for network operation and development. On October 1, 2017 Rostelecom started a project nicknamed “The owner of the territory”. The idea was that a head of a regional office is not only an engineer, but an owner of the business. These business heads manage their territory and should be involved in growing the territory’s profitability.
To provide heads with relevant financial data Rostelecom prepared a big amount of monthly analytics on profits from operations, profits from rent, losses, client base, subscriptions and churn. At the start reports were designed manually in Excel. Each time it took about 4 days for an analyst to edit megabytes of data from various sources, calculate analytical parameters and set up appropriate diagrams. The process often caused errors and confusion in data which led to multiple data verifications and re-work. On top of that it was very hard to drill-down in Excel. Before very long, the business heads were simply not using these limited Excel reports. So Rostelecom turned to BI.
With a powerful combination of MPP BI and Greenplum DB Rostelecom were able to build a consistent analytical solution to track its financial metrics. Rostelecom is enjoying rapid response times to its data queries even as their data volumes grow over time. Using Greenplum DB Rostelecom has built an integrated storage view of business data from over 130 regional offices and across more than 17 corporate data sources. MPP BI keeps data centric logic very close to data and uses Greenplum to process complex queries pushing them down to the database and visualizing the results for a business user. MPP BI stores only meta-data locally. All analytical data remain in Greenplum DB. In this way, MPP BI reports always present accurate business information to help drive profitability.
Analytics environment
MPP BI enables simple and clear analytics not only for analysts in the finance division, but also for decision makers on-site. Rostelecom has designed custom visual dashboards to help heads easily see their scores among the others and sense their areas for growth, which direct a head from finding positions of his regional office in a corporate rating to analyzing his growing areas. This brings complete transparency into revenue and costs, and the profitability of any office against the others. With a vast array of information at his fingertips, he can drill down any number selecting a location, a contract or any other analytical parameter, going deeper into the report to obtain precise required information.
Dashboards
Rostelecom underlines the transformative impact of MPP BI on the whole or their business process. With company-wide ratings heads of the regional offices now have an easy way to drive increased profitability, as nobody wants to be the last. They also have quick access to robust analytics combining high-level information, calculated analytical parameters and transactional data that simply couldn’t be supported using Excel. Moreover, by automating their report generation process, Rostelecom is freeing up the time of analysts to help increase their business value.