Integrated forecasting & planning for strategic & operational telecom field service delivery

Providing quality telecommunications field services, be it new provision, maintenance or repair on existing equipment, is key to ensuring smooth-running of national telecommunications infrastructure. Central to this business requirement is the ability to forecast demand accurately at various timescales, based on which decision on resourcing and delivery could be made accordingly. In this paper, we report our experience in developing and deploying a telecom service production application that utilizes integrated forecasting and planning techniques. In particular, we demonstrate that when it comes to strategic and operational levels, different data mining and optimization methods can be applied to forecasting and planning respectively, to give best shots.