Towards Operational Excellence and Smart Site Management

Access management is a critical process for infrastructure operators such as Cellnex, dealing with several challenges. Based on the dimension of our portfolio, it surely is not a surprise to reveal that hundreds of thousands of accesses per year are registered in Cellnex sites (Fig. 1). The traditional approach has been to use some sort of mechanical access system (such as physical keys), but this has a series of disadvantages:

• The frequent loss of keys impacts in the efficiency of the whole process and results in unnecessary trips and interactions with customers, landlords and technicians.
• It is difficult (if not impossible) to individually do the end-to-end tracing and control of each one of the accesses to the premises.
• Potential unwanted accesses triggered by the loss and also uncontrolled copy of physical keys, at the end, could have a direct impact in the security of the sites and might also impact in the health and safety legal obligations.

On top of that, a very common problem that arises in the sector (and in Cellnex in particular) is the lack of uniformity in the whole access procedure due to different site scenarios coming from multiple portfolio acquisitions. In other words, the traditional system:

• Prevents from creating an industrialized and homogenous procedure.
• Is generally speaking quite inefficient.
• In some cases, puts even at risk the SLAs committed with customers.

The diagnosis was clear and it was decided that some action needed to be taken so it was opted to move a step forward and looked for a Smart Access solution. Based on Cellnex expertise and market prospection, it was decided that migrating to Smart meant to acquire a keyless solution which allowed us to completely digitize the events triggered by the accesses to the premises (Fig. 2). This way both the issue of the traceability and the problems associated with the loss of keys could be solved, and at the same time the window of opportunity to rethink and reengineer the whole access procedure could be opened, gaining efficiency and homogeneity and avoiding manual interactions as much as possible.

Keyless solution providers have been selected and the access involves in one way or another the usage of a smartphone (or equivalent portable device) with digital keys sent to the technician's mobile app running on the phone. The mobile keys contain access rights which are managed remotely and in real time. These rights can be updated and cancelled as needs change to ensure that only the right people have access to the right places at the right time. Administration of several sites is conveniently consolidated into cloud-based software platforms, which ensures a 24/7 monitoring capability.

One of the solutions doesn't even make use of batteries, as the power needed to open the mechanism inside the padlock is triggered by the NFC in the mobile device. This has the additional advantage to reduce maintenance costs even more, since incidents linked with battery failures are avoided.

Cellnex is now in the middle of the deployment phase, installing the necessary devices in the 12-countries portfolio. The Smart Access solution is feasible to install (at least in a first batch) in most of Cellnex sites; and from this initial set of sites, around 43% of them have already been migrated. The plan is to complete the deployment in 2-3 years.

In parallel Cellnex is deploying its own OSS system. One module inside this OSS tool manages the access requests. Customers create these site access requests (SAR) by filling in the necessary information (Fig. 3):

• Who wants to access,
• Where and when,
• What are they going to do.

If the adequate conditions are met, the SAR is automatically approved; if not, some human interaction is needed to manually grant the access, having previously done a series of tasks.

By means of an API between our OSS and the Smart Access platform, basic information needed to grant the rights to the technicians to the selected locks (for a concrete timeframe) is sent. This way the whole process is, in some cases, completely automated, substantially reducing the response to customer petitions and therefore helping to achieve much more easily the contractual agreements (SLAs) and improving the overall service. Technical staff in operations is constantly supervising the whole process by means of dashboards and key indicators (KPIs) generated by capturing the access events so that abnormal behaviors, sites where the activity is above average or locks potentially left opened can be easily identified.

Cellnex is achieving with this Smart Access project an easier, faster and reliable way to manage access to sites. A mutual beneficial situation has been created, since Cellnex customers are taking advantage from the automation and quick response that this type of solution offers, and at the same time Cellnex, as infrastructure operator, has gained the ability to better control what is going on in their premises.

From business point of view, having an own model for managing access to infrastructure is critical to gain efficiency in operating the assets due to the fact that it is a very user intensive process.

On the other hand, in this process of transformation to Smart it is key to be accompanied with strong and proper partners and to choose an innovative and state-of-the-art solution that helps to achieve the initial goal of automation and cost reduction.

During the last years, several companies around the world have started similar projects, expanding the concept of Smart Access in the industry. These are very good news also for Cellnex, as extended use of this kind of solutions is reinforcing the profit obtained from the solution and accelerating its adoption.