Irrawaddy Green Towers – Telecom infrastructure in Myanmar
Odoo-based vertical for Tower Companies
In Case StudiesAbout
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
Customer
Irrawaddy Green Towers
Industry
Telecom
Employees
350+
No. of users
70
Go-live date
May 2014
Implementation project
Dedicated team over 3 years
Elie Haddad, CFO |
"I have saved hundreds of thousands with this system, not to say millions..."
The apps we implemented

Sales

Inventory

Accounting

Purchase

Human
Resources