Optimized Deployment of Telecom Field Teams across the Pakistan for better Telecom Service Performance: A Novel Technique

Abstract

Deployment of Telecom teams, comprising of engineers, technicians, installers etc for field services or trouble shootings of deployed telecom installations or circuits like VSAT, Radio towers, BTS sites and mobile towers at different geographical locations is always a challenging task for telecom companies. The objectives of the study were to evaluate the response time and distance to telecom sites by proposing new geo-graphical positions of field workforce and to compare the mean response time and mean distance to telecom sites of proposed geographical locations with the existing techniques. It was a novel experimental study in which k-means clustering algorithm was used for estimating geographical locations for deployment of teams. Mean distances of circuits, mean response time, mean areas of clusters and mean inter-centroid distances were calculated and independent t test was applied to determine the difference in these means of initially selected big cities and proposed locations using k-means algorithm. A significant difference was observed in mean response time, mean inter-centroid distance, mean areas of clusters and mean inter-centroid distances with p-values of 0.03, 0.03, 0.002 and 0.0001respectively. It is concluded that proposed geographical locations for team deployment may improve service quality and upsurge customer satisfaction in Telecommunication market.