The Need: The Field Management Services (FMS) organization at one of North America's largest phone company had many management challenges to address: they needed real-time cost management tools; they wanted to perform bottom-up & top-down reconciliation of workload/workforce/dollars to meet affordability requirements; they required variance reporting of actuals to plan, with data for fact-based action, and; they desired a decision support solution to link Dollars/Load/Efficiency/Cost/Affordability.

Bottom-line: FMS did not have a forecasting tool to effectively link work to be done, to work efficiency, to dollars and affordability, nor did they have any helpful reporting mechanisms.

The Work: 4-tel.com was asked to help. Our solution had to have the following attributes: it needed to leverage existing systems and databases; the solution had to focus on proactive cost management, and; we needed to deliver a cost optimization tool that identified specific cost reduction opportunities for the client to focus on.

Working in collaboration with a core client team, we successfully linked all relevant client databases into FORTUNE and produced an array of standard reports (approx. 20 different reports to date) that detailed to management on a weekly basis exactly how well they were tracking to plan. We also introduced a set of Dashboard measures, or indicators, on operational performance against forecasts and benchmarks, complete with drill-down capability to the field technician level.

The Outcome: The client is ecstatic with the handling of the project, and with the deliverables achieved to date. We are currently working on designing, building, and successfully installing a Forecasting module that is linked to the actual results reporting module.