Telstra – Building A Better Operations Management Platform

One of the most satisfying parts of my job is to write about digital transformation and the extraordinary ways companies are using technology to solve real problems and create business opportunities. I also like highlighting the heroes who make it happen, hoping it will inspire others.

Two such heroes are Beba Brunt, executive for field services, and Aidan Walsh, principal for field onboard, transformation, execution and improvement at Telstra Group Limited, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. I was fortunate to speak with Brunt and Walsh about a recently completed project to improve field operations working with Infosys and Microsoft. What follows is a field workforce transformation story.

Beba Brunt, executive for field services, and Aidan Walsh, principal for field onboard, transformation, execution and improvement at Telstra Group Limited

The nature of the work has changed

Brunt leads a team of field technicians and support staff. Since joining the company twenty years ago, the nature of the work has fundamentally changed.

The change has been from a transactional to a project-management workflow and workforce—from high-volume transactional activities, such as repairing and installing phones, to more complicated project-based work, such as large fiber rollouts and Wi-Fi installations in stadiums. A new operations management platform was needed to enable a fast-growing portfolio of work executed for business and enterprise customers.

Strategic alignment was the easy step

Across many customer transformation stories, one of the most critical success factors is the alignment and support from the CEO on down. For Brunt, the message was simple. The team was at a crossroads because the work mix was changing rapidly; technological and cultural change was needed.

The new operational management platform needed to improve Telstra’s ability to manage and dispatch large work programs involving multiple technicians. On top of that, operations management with minimal manual human intervention, particularly in repetitive and non-creative activities, was required to achieve cost efficiencies at scale. Finally, the team needed better operations performance reporting and visibility to management for all the work in progress.

You need the right partners to pull this off

When you’re changing or upgrading enterprise software, you have to be pretty savvy internally, aided by experienced and responsive partners for integration and software. Infosys earned its place as the integration partner for this initiative based on a long history of working with Telstra and its depth of knowledge for this type of project.

To carry out this project, Telstra elected to leverage its existing investment in Microsoft Dynamics 365. For Telstra, it was vital to be able to optimize work by running the total daily workload in a myriad of ways to calculate the most optimal path in terms of customer and cost outcomes. Dynamics 365 enables Telstra to efficiently share data to a client server via optimal routes. Optimizing the data sharing mechanism has been instrumental in Telstra’s decision to continue with and upgrade to the latest version of Dynamics 365.

Nothing is greenfield; integration is hard

In these types of projects, the most profound challenge is integration. Telstra is a large business with a long history that has generated many complex custom solutions. That is probably a familiar scenario to many of you.

If Telstra had been a greenfield business, the implementation would have been much easier. Dynamics 365 is built to be easy to install in that context. But standing up new software of that scale for a company with many years of history and a fully built-out IT environment is a different prospect. Enabling disparate systems to communicate seamlessly upstream and downstream without human intervention is tricky from a technical perspective. Telstra put a focus on the employee element because change at any scale can be daunting to some people. That applied even more in this case because a significant component of the project required giving up control of programs—and therefore convincing people that machine optimization was more efficient than manual spreadsheets.

Modernizing the operations management platform

As mentioned earlier, Telstra had an existing investment in Dynamics 365, which was set to be upgraded with newer modules to provide a better set of repeatable flows and enable the quick execution of the new project with minimum bespoke features required.

The project involved building a seamless integrated solution using Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Field Service. Dynamics 365 Field Service enhanced Telstra’s scheduling capabilities by building a holistic end-to-end flow of work from project planning to dispatch to the field. Dynamics 365 Project Operations allows Telstra visibility across its project-centric business, allowing it to optimize resource utilization and accelerate project delivery.

The result is a comprehensive platform that can plan for non-transactional fixed-time and all-day project tasks, as well as optimize scheduling for field technicians through manual override and automation for over fifty business categories.

The first 160 days of operation

As of this writing, the system has been in production for 160 days, and it now has 300 active users. Walsh reports that results have been very satisfying, with 100,000 field tasks already issued to the workforce. The system has provided improved reporting visibility and control, a three-week reduction in time-to-market and a reduction of 30% in the manual tasks required to issue work orders to Telstra’s technicians.

Wrapping up

Consider this context: We are fourteen years into the public cloud, and yet 75% of enterprise data is still onsite and on devices. Project management still resides primarily in spreadsheets because it is a heavy lift to change that—even when everyone agrees that modern enterprise systems would handle the work better. In this case, the Telstra team saw that the business was evolving and knew that it needed visibility into effectiveness and cost efficiency so that it could turn on a dime quickly.

Built with Microsoft D365 and the Infosys Cobalt service offerings, Telstra led a successful transformation project.

I was at a recent Microsoft Dynamics 365 event where the company announced the infusion of  Microsoft Copilot capabilities into Dynamics 365 Project Operations, Finance and Supply Chain Management to improve day-to-day job functions and make them more intelligent, efficient and connected.

Companies cannot afford to miss out on either current optimization-driven transformation or the growing movement for AI-driven transformation. Sorry to sound dire, but if your data resides in spreadsheets, you will miss out on the AI wave of innovation, which would not bode well for future competitiveness.