American Tower cuts customer cycle times by 40% with Oracle
Global real estate investment trust implements Oracle Analytics for a consolidated view of its data and to help transform how it makes decisions.
“Now we have 1,500 people looking at the same dashboards, getting the same 360-degree view of an asset, and making informed and consistent decisions time and time again.”
Business challenges
American Tower, one of the world’s largest Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), is a leading independent owner, operator, and developer of wireless and broadcast towers, with a global portfolio of approximately 213,000 communications sites in 23 countries across 6 continents.
As a global company, American Tower was using multiple distributed systems that weren’t connected. From data on IoT devices on towers in Uganda to information about leases in Massachusetts, the company wanted to bring all its far-flung data into a central platform where leaders could view it in real time to make better-informed decisions on key strategic deliverables, as well as day-to-day tactical operations.
Also, the organization’s various departments did not speak the same language and could not get the same view of assets or projects. While American Tower’s business had snowballed, tracking the performance of various departments had become a big challenge.
American Tower supports an extremely fast-paced industry. Its customers have very aggressive schedules to migrate to their 4G and 5G networks to support the high demand for wireless communication. The time required to process and deploy a telecommunications customer on a tower was a key business metric, and reducing that cycle time was a top priority.
The most unexpected part of the journey has been the demand that we see for analytics from our users. We knew it was going to be impactful. We hoped that it would change the business but what we didn’t see coming was how this program would drive so much deeper thought and innovation around how we operate. How quickly that happened has been unexpected.
Why American Tower Chose Oracle
American Tower had a successful long-term partnership with Oracle that it wanted to continue. In addition, Oracle provided a combination of a centrally managed and governed BI platform with federated self-service capabilities for key business users.
Results
After implementing Oracle Analytics, American Tower cut by 40% the time required to get customers up and running through streamlining processes, identifying weaknesses, and making better predictions about future business performance. The company is confident that it can reduce that time even more through applied intelligence programs and the continued work of the BI program.
Using Oracle Database, Oracle Data Integrator, and Oracle Golden Gate, American Tower now has an enterprise hub where employees can see all the company’s key business data in raw format in a global data lake. On top of that, the company curated an enterprise data warehouse, where it builds analytical models to understand high-level trends, make better forecasts, and implement an analytical approach to running the business.
With a network of BI developers working across the globe, American Tower can manage its architecture centrally while empowering regional teams to satisfy the needs of different markets and customers. Oracle Analytics has also allowed the company to swiftly respond to market conditions, potential acquisitions, and competitive threats. Now, the lines of business have an intuitive tool to manage contractor spend and study headcount, forecast sales, provide GAAP financial reporting, or even decide how to draft certain agreements. In addition, prescriptive analytics help the company save costs by suggesting repairs on key components or choosing to replace them based on historical spend and other characteristics.