TMF'S NEW BENCHMARK SERVICE HELPS OPERATORS MEASURE UP

As part of its mission to help network operators become lean, efficient and thereby more profitable, the TeleManagement Forum will officially announce next week at its biannual conference in Nice, France, a new benchmarking service for service providers.

The service, called the Lean Operations Metrics Report and Interactive Database, is the first to focus on gathering data on operational methods and procedures, which operators can use to measure their performance against other operators in certain categories. Long term, operators could use the data to measure themselves against non-telecom companies such as L.L. Bean or Amazon.com. The service is a key part of the TMF's Lean Operator Business Excellence Program.

“The idea is to come up with a balanced scorecard that provides dynamic tension between the major components of being a lean operator, which is being able to deliver good service with good customer satisfaction and with enough efficiency that you are profitable doing it,” said Tonia Graham, TMF vice chairman and program director.

The group, currently staffed by personnel from member companies such as Agilent Technologies, Amdocs, e*Tezeract, Lucent Technologies, Satyam and TTI Telecom, has defined 53 metrics that the forum will introduce next week at TeleManagement World. They will be used initially to measure operators in the areas of revenue and margins, customer experience and operational performance.

“This project has gotten more excitement around the place than I have seen in a long time,” said Keith Willetts, TMF chairman. “It seems to be touching on a new requirement in the industry.”

The Lean Operator concept has been the forum's mantra for several years, and Willetts said that operators that have applied its principles were now beginning to ask how they could tell when they were lean enough.

The TMF came up with the benchmarking service as a method for answering that question. The forum will collect operational performance and other data from operators worldwide, apply the metrics it has defined and allow access to the results using a subscription-based report series and interactive Web portal. Data gathering will begin in August, and the service and Web portal is slated to be available for the fourth quarter.

Agilent has been one of the early participants, using its service assurance expertise to help define the metrics and offer ways to gather data, particularly in the realm of measuring customer experience. Randy Custeau, marketing director of the operations support system group at Agilent, said that his company's shift to a customer-centric service assurance model can provide greater insight into the customer experience.

In addition to defining the metrics for measuring efficiency and customers' experience, the TMF has invested its own resources in developing a secure IT environment. The data that operators submit remains anonymous as they run their statistics against the profile of other companies, which also stay anonymous.

“If you don't have that, you could have the best metrics in the world, and no one would be comfortable putting their data in the database,” Graham said.

The TMF is putting out a call to operators for a limited number of charter members, which will act as a steering council for the on-going benchmark work.

“This reinforces what we have been saying for years, that how well you operate your business and how efficient you are has a direct bearing on how successful and profitable you are going to be,” said Jim Warner, president of the TMF.