Irrawaddy Green Towers – Telecom infrastructure in Myanmar

About

Irrawaddy Green Tower is a tower company, established in Myanmar at the beginning of 2014, when the country opened its economy and several major international telecom operators started their operations in the country.

A tower company is a company which builds towers, put an antenna on top, and rent the service to mobile telecom operators.

The project

The activity of IGT is highly specific and the operations involve a succession of steps unlike any other business: finding the land where the towers can be built, renting the land, building the tower, installing an antenna on top of the tower, monitoring the usage, and renting the service to the clients.

Choosing the proper software solution was challenging:

• No existing fully integrated vertical solution adapted to the activity.

• Availability of existing specific services ("best of breed") covering some sections of the activity (like tower construction, energy consumption monitoring).

To cover entirely the operations, IGT needed to integrate these services with an application that would allow to glue together these specific services with all the non-specific sections of the operation. The options for that were:

• Using a proprietary ERP solution (like SAP) and integrate it with the specific services, but integrating such a solution with the specific services would have been complex and expensive.

• Developing from scratch, but this would have been a long and expensive process.

Odoo was the ideal solution:

• Availability out of the box of all the non-specific features.

• Easy to integrate with third-party services.

• No expensive license costs.

Ultimately Odoo was selected as the enterprise platform, and the project was a success.

Main features and customizations

• Integration with 2 external applications:

• • Tarantula, used for construction management

  • RMS, used for energy consumption monitoring

  
  

• Customizations and optimizations on the standard Odoo modules:

• • purchases

  • inventory

  • human resources

  • payroll

  • accounting

  
  

• Development of very specific modules:

• • customer billing based on complex framework contracts

  • maintenance management

  • rental management

  
  

• Cost accounting per tower

The main challenges

The company was setup with the intention to grow very quickly since the very beginning, a bit like a startup of an unusual size. The head count reached several hundreds in a few months. To make things even more challenging, the project started since the very beginning of the operation, so that in addition to this steep growth curve, the processes had to be defined (and adjusted/iterated) on the flow during the first months.

This is why this project involved a large part of consulting, with one of our senior consultant having to fly on-site frequently.

Some figures

• Investment of 65 millions of USD
  

• Objective of 1500 towers over the first 3 years

• Go-live after 10 months