Ethernet to the Cell Tracking Tool The prototype that grew, and grew and grew!

Ethernet to the Cell Joint effort between the Wholesale Customer Care, Emerging Markets Mobility, Network Planning & Engineering, and Worldwide Project Management organizations. 100 people tracking installations at thousands of sites tracking over 80 data points for each site using 44 spreadsheets.

Initial Request Maintain tracking data –upload from user-defined Excel spreadsheets –web-based entry and editing, with lockout –rollback changes –administer authorized users Produce management reports –user-defined reports

Ethernet to the Cell Market List User defined upload NM CNL UpdatesUser defined upload User defined report CrossLATAUser defined report

User Classes (roles) Not all users have a role Some roles can only modify certain fields Some fields can only be modified by certain roles Certain fields generally invisible, but accessible only by this role

Notes fields retain history Some fields are designated as notes. –Retain old information –Updates add information –Annotated with user name and date

Multiple Tools All have similar functionality, but different fields. –Non-Mobility –Mobility –Planning –In Franchise

Computed fields Some fields are computed from others. But only sometimes, depending on values of another field. But only if this field is blank.

Automated Uploads Scrape data from other websites using web automation tools. Use web automation to send scraped data to a user-defined upload.

Scheduled Reports Run user-defined reports at regular intervals and send via –run by cron –I built a web interface to modify crontab Definition

Automated reports Complicated example: –Scrape a website to get a list of sites. –Find all the sites that are on the list exactly twice. –Get some fields for the site from the ETTC tool. –Report contains information from the two rows scraped from the list and from the ETTC tool. –people were spending hours trying to do this in Excel every day.

Find out who changed a field Search rollbacks for a change Add additional tracking mechanism for updates via web interface

Triggers For some fields, trigger additions to another field with the attuid or date. For some fields, trigger an entry in a Notes fields with the old and new values (and the date and attuid of the change).

Buckets New field called bucket –starts at 1 for a new record –after a set of fields are populated, the bucket value is advanced

Bucket worklists Sites in each bucket have an attuid entered by a coach indicating who should work this site and bucket. Need a web page to assign agents to sites. Need a web page where an agent can view all records assigned to her.

Notes field cleanup Users were downloading spreadsheets, making changes and then uploading the updated spreadsheet Caused notes field to be duplicated Needed to detect this and eliminate the duplicates _x005F_x005F_x005F_x005F_x005F_x005F_x00 5F_x005F_x005F_x005F_x005F_x005F_x005F

MNO sites treated differently Mobility and Planning databases Records with POR Year >= 2011 or SEPE = Y are different Completely different field permissions for roles

Auto- fields Some fields trigger sending when they are changed.

Mobility and Planning share data Copy changed fields between the two databases Some fields one way, some both ways MNO sites are different

Restrictions for date fields Some dates have fixed minimum values (like 1/1/2008) Some dates have maximum of today Some dates have maximum of the next business day after today.

UNI fields appear multiple times Customer Quantity field determines number of instances Example In uploads, additional fields are specified by UNI_2, UNI_3, etc.

Statistics 55,000 cell sites –originally 9, fields –originally users – originally 100

Testimonials This team has been working 12 – 14 hour days and is now able to start cutting back. Notification of C&E deferring a site had been communicated through Plan of Record reports release every 3 to 6 weeks. From Feb 2011 to July 2011, it was estimated that this gap in communication to Mobility and Planning teams cost $3 million. Within days of this discussion, we implemented daily automation to manage this notification. This database has allowed me to get back to being a project manager. I had been a data and reports manager struggling to manage my projects Thank you, Jill Ross.