PEX Awards Finalist: Globe Telecom

The annual PEX Awards are just a few short weeks away, and with the finalists having been recently announced, now is be the perfect opportunity to highlight some of the projects that made it through to the final judging round!

The Awards, which take place at PEX Week Orlando in January, highlight some of the most ambitious, inventive and successful Process Excellence projects of the year. It’s our opportunity to celebrate the continued evolution of Process Excellence and the ingenuity of those who continue to push change forward.

This entry comes from Globe Telecoms, who have been shortlisted in the "Best Technology-Enabled Process Improvement Project" category.

Tell us about your project, why did you launch it?

At Globe, it is our mission to create a wonderful experience for our customers. With that in mind, the team endeavored to lower the number of service outages for our customers, the key was knowing the root cause. During our journey, we noticed that data network outages are not concentrated in a specific area/location nor vendor/model but rather are mostly due to thermal breakdown caused by the heat produced by the equipment.

There is scheduled preventive maintenance on this equipment but it doesn’t prevent an incident on equipment at high temperature, air flow blockage or dust accumulation would from occurring before the next scheduled maintenance.

The Temperature, Airflow and Dust Device (TADD) was created based on these specific findings. The detector was completed after weeks of research and experiment. By shifting the way we maintain our network equipment from preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance, TADD has effectively changed the way we do things for the benefit of our customers. Our genuine desire to provide wonderful service to our customers will always drive us to find ways of serving them better.

What were the key objectives? Did you have an end game in mind?

Our key objective is to reduce the outages caused in the Data Network facilities that affect the service we provide to our Enterprise clients; and shift the way we maintain our network equipment from preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance.

What were the key challenges you faced during the project? How did you overcome these?

As the project progressed, the team identified that not only dust accumulation affected the performance of our network elements but also high equipment temperature and airflow blockage – both of these were unforeseen.

From this, our key challenges were:

(1) Looking for an integrated device which will be capable in detecting temperature violation, airflow blockage, dust accumulation and would send notifications to the helpdesk and network operation.

(2) Integration of the said device with the existing wireline network elements M2M application.

(3) Production of device since there was no available device on the market which was capable in addressing the first two items.

We tasked a resident Globe engineer/inventor to help come up with a device that could detect Temperature, Airflow and Dust (TAD) violations on network equipment. We included our product team to engage with the M2M provider that would equip TAD to send notifications to Globe support teams.

Did any unforeseen benefits come out of the project?

The original objective of the project is to reduce Globe network outages caused by TAD violations but during the course of our journey, we realized that the solution can also be a potential revenue source for the company through deployment in other industries – for example BPOs for their mainframes and PBX, Banking and financials for their ATMs and servers, Global and local service providers to their network element, Manufacturing companies for their industrial machines, database and communication equipment for government offices and most importantly our household cooling system.

What’s next? Is the project ongoing or are you looking to the next one?

TAD device is currently on version 1.13 and with the on-going collaboration with our local semicon partner, it’s moving on to version 2.0 with added features such as with LCD display, configurable temperature and airflow setting, carrier-grade temp/airflow sensors, and most of all integrated M2M.

What does it mean to be selected as a finalist for a PEX Award?

Being a PEX Award finalist is a validation that Globe Telecom is on the right track in our quest to provide wonderful service by aligning our internal processes with the customer experience in mind.

What would your message be to others who’re looking to begin a PEX project or who are unsure where to start?

There are no small or big projects, as long as you put the customer’s experience at the heart of the process design.

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