Lean and Mean Strategy

Here is the interesting letter I received some time ago from Carrey Sandera on my question about cost savings opportunities for MNOs.

I would suggest the Lean and Mean strategy. The Lean and Mean strategy will turn many mobile operators business upside down. Mobile operators will move focus away from doing everything themselves, to instead letting external partners handle a great many of the tasks that mobile operators today consider as part of their core business. 

The most revolutionary and significant characteristic of the Lean and Mean strategy is that the mobile operator will stop marketing themselves as an independent brand and instead operate as a "carrier's carrier". The business model is based on renting network capacity to other mobile operators, MVNOs, SP’s etc. Customers will thereafter only be serviced by various types of wholesale customers via many different brands. For the mobile operator it is important to be able to attract the "correct" wholesale customers - in other words wholesale customers that can attract many consumers and generate high network traffic, as it will be these wholesale customers that will give the mobile operator a profitable business case. The "correct" wholesale customers could be wholesale customers that currently offer other telecom services in the form of IP telephony or cable TV etc. where mobile telephony would be an excellent supplement for them. 

For the mobile operator, the level of costs is very important when competing in attracting wholesale customers and outsourcing - and the use of partnerships - is an important part of the mobile operators’ business model and essential in the quest to achieve a more cost-effective operation. Tasks that previously were considered part of mobile operator's core competencies will increasingly be outsourced to external companies that will be able to handle these tasks more efficiently and at lower cost. This will be the case for e.g. the operation and service of the mobile network operators, where a number of mobile operators have already outsourced the daily operation of their network to other companies. 

Outsourcing is not new for mobile operators and has been used before to reduce costs or make costs variable. What is new is the business areas that the operators are choosing to outsource to minimize their costs. Many of the business areas that operators are focusing on are areas that most operators today perceive as part of their core business. This is why these business areas have traditionally not been taken into consideration as possible outsourcing areas. With the Lean and Mean strategy, mobile operators will attempt to ensure that the most possible fixed costs become variable, partly to better be able to adapt to changes in the market and partly to find cost savings. 

When using the Lean and Mean strategy, the mobile operator has no direct costs in connection with acquiring individual end-users, as those costs are maintained by the wholesale customers. The mobile operator will therefore have a positive accumulated cash flow on all customers from the first day and the mobile operator can achieve far better earnings as one of their most significant expenditure items (SAC) - that is up to 25% of many operators total costs - disappears. Alternatively operators can also utilise the saving to reduce the various network prices that their wholesale customers have to pay, to thereby hopefully attract more wholesale customers to use their network and thereby become more competitive and achieve a larger market share. 

When using the Lean and Mean strategy, the mobile operator only retains the most essential part of their business in-house, while the rest is outsourced to minimize costs. The essential parts of the operators business are: 
• License 
• Billing system 
• Network-centric services/platforms 

Other areas that are central to the operators business are: 
• Outsourcing 
• Wholesale customers 
• Network coverage 
• Telemetry 
• Add-on products 
• Hosting services 

Than using the Lean and Mean strategy will to try to significantly reduce their CAPEX compared to previously. Mobile operators will try to ensure that they do not bind capital in tangible assets like for example infrastructure, that the mobile operators traditionally have invested billions of Euro in. This will be a break with tradition as the investment in - and operation of - mobile infrastructure has up to now being considered as one of the mobile operators most important core competencies.

Cost saving proposals

I would like to begin my post from short introduction of macroeconomy influence on companies. Economists divide time periods into economic growth and economic downturn. Reasons and results could be different but companies strategies were determined long ago:

• Gain as big as possible market share during economic growth or market growth
• Gain maximum efficiency during financial downturn

The most cost effective player will spend extra funds on enhanced value proposal (for subscriber) and finally will get better financial results. In this post I'd like to tell about cost saving solutions which could bring additional efficiency and even revenues to MNOs.

1. Energy Consumption. Energy savings is a direct way for cost savings. You may find broad range of solutions for this purpose: PC terminals energy savings (as example http://www.greensnapper.fi/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,1/lang,en/ ), RAN energy saving with special antennas ( Ericsson activities http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/press/facts_figures/doc/energy_efficiency.pdf ) and even means of virtualization for data centers. Main task here is to find minimal CapEx for initial deployment.
2. Managed Services. Hosting and outsourcing are well know ways of decreasing expenditures and hence increasing revenues. In these cases operator doesn't spend on hardware, maintenance engineers, energy consumtion and many more. Managed services could bring world wide experience to MNOs additional services with minimal expenditures. For more detailed information have a look at http://www.gemalto.com/telecom/allynis/
3. Lean and Mean strategy. Detailed description could be found in separate post (http://rustelco.blogspot.com/2009/02/lean-and-mean-strategy.html).
4. RAN&IP sharing. Many MNOs from Europe and Americas share their RAN and IP networks. Well known fact - Russia is huge. It is very expensive to have own channels all over Russia. All MNOs from "Great Three" invested a lot into building their national channels. Some areas in Russia are very hard to make good coverage, as example Far East. Belorus Government as I think made very wise step. They require to share networks of MNOs. Really, it is foolish to have 3 antennas sites of 3 MNOs in one place. It is clear that there are hidden great cost savings through sharing.
5. Device-based self care (&call center optimizations). Main solution is to decrease number of call center calls and hence decrease call center expenditures (which are pretty big in MNOs budget) by implementing device-based self care product. This application is being launched in case of calling to MNOs self care IVR. Main relevant information is being received through GPRS channel (which is much more effective rather than IVR channels). Subscriber gets his account info, services management and even special services promotion on top of the application screen. You may find several interesting articles in Internet regarding SNAPin solution which was implemented in several European MNOs. Later this company was bought by Nuane and product now is called Nuance Mobile Care. 
6. Fraud Management&Revenue Assurance. Well known fact that 5%-15% of Income in Telecom are going to Fraud losses. So, implementation of such systems could bring 5%-15% of Income increase. Almost all big MNOs already have implemented such systems but small and middle MNOs remain fraud affected.
7. RAN optimization. There is niche of solutions for RAN optimization. Such solutions help Network Department managers to optimize their expenses on building and operating  mobile networks. Main cost savings are contained in using real data to determine low coverage areas and making decisions to deploy Femtocells, repeaters, or strategically placed new sites, maximising ROI with limited budget. Network issues could be discovered with real time Subscribers experience. This help to improve engineering efficiency in resolving customer complaints hence minimize OpEx. The end result is better quality RAN helps MNO to decrease churn. I would recommend looking at www.arieso.com and check their products for this area.
8. Mobile Internet data optimization. Gaining popularity unlimited data tariffs could bring a lot of head ache to MNOs. It is very desirable to prevent Subscibers from Not Fait Use of Mobile Broadband. As example, Camiant Multimedia Policy Engine was deployed in one of Vodafone countries. It helps to decrease bandwith of subscriber channel after breaching 2Gb monthly limit. Many Subscribers are using torrents which could eat very big portion of traffic. There are solutions helping to minimize torrents traffic (performing caching of such data). Another thing here is to compress Mobile Internet traffic (especially when it is unlimites). MNOs could find here direct cost savings on data transmission while Subscriber could experience faster web pages downloads.
9. Telecom Expense Management. Frankly speaking it is not directly for MNOs. This is for their corporate Subscribers which are very interested in cost savings too. They will find a way to decrease their telecom expenses but it will be better if their Operator provides them means of telecom expenses analysis. In this case MNO could gain additional money but not only loose on minimized expenditures from Enterprizes. More detailed information could be found on EZWim site (http://www.ezwim.com/) and their blog (http://www.telecomexpensemanagementblog.com/).

As always I'll be glad to get your thoughts and feedback.

Thanks,

Denis.