CB Richard Ellis for Sprint
The Situation
The challenges include massive signal, physical network, and customer databases; the need to quickly analyze massive amounts of data by house-hold level geographic and under 1-mile grid resolution spatial analysis; the amount of time required to process the data and produce intelligent results; and the great complexity that has bogged down attempts to use conventional database and GIS solutions to serve these three business areas.
An industry-entrenched tool that has been used for years by all providers to satisfy quarterly FCC frequency population analyses requirements is very closely tied to a leading GIS mapping tool. Sprint used this mapping tool on a single, dedicated, dual-processor machine to generate a database of signal coverage at 1-mile grid resolution. This process required 45 hours to complete, and would often fail to complete. This tool used only coarse geographic boundaries for its analyses, like ZIP Code or block group, but lacked even centroid-derived accuracy. A primary shortcoming was an inability to load and process millions of network nodes, and overlay multiple geographies, such as, Sprint retail store trade areas, signal coverage/dropped calls, equipment locations, retail partner locations, and more than 54 million customer records. Earlier attempts to derive this information proved to be more complicated than Sprint's in-house database and geospatial mapping tools could handle in a timely manner.
The Solution
For Sprint Real Estate, Alteryx drivetime modules for each market can be accessed over the Web by managers optimizing the disposition of redundant assets, both in retail store development and network equipment deployments, i.e., the rooftops of their retail partners, like Walmart. Sprint Network division field people use Alteryx over the Web to monitor hourly and daily performance of network switches, seeing actual performance in terms of 1-mile gridded dropped calls areas within selectable radius from switch or transmission asset.
The [ROI] we get are in two different areas. The first one is in work process enablement and efficiencies, and the second is in decision-support.
- Charemon Tovar, Enterprise Real Estate Manager at CB Richard Ellis for Sprint
The Network group also uses Alteryx to generate population analyses on-demand at one hundred to one thousand times faster than the previous technology approach. ("Pops analysis" determines whether a minimum percentage of an area's population is being served by a provider in order to keep its FCC frequency allocation for that market.) The Alteryx drivetime engine is also used to quickly assess redundant network coverage following the Nextel acquisition.
The Results
Three Sprint divisions rely upon Alteryx for tools to increase retail sales, manage all corporate property (equipment & real estate), maintain exclusive markets via governmental reporting requirements, and minimize customer churn. These divisions, Sprint Real Estate, Sprint Retail (within Real Estate) and Sprint Network, use Alteryx solutions to do what has been very difficult or impossible to do in the past.
Alteryx has enabled Sprint to precisely target outages in near real-time for any market through a Web application, saving millions of dollars from network asset optimization, fewer service calls, and customer retention that produces higher profit revenue growth from an existing sales base. These Alteryx offerings have also enabled Sprint Real Estate and Retail to trim expenses from the elimination of redundant assets, optimization of network assets based on actual vs. theoretical performance, and more precise targeting of new customer bases and potential market expansion.