Red Cube - Overview

©Tarantula
Contents
1 About Red Cube .................................................................................................................................... 3
About the framework .................................................................................................................................................. 4
2 Key benefits .......................................................................................................................................... 5
Site portfolio management .......................................................................................................................................... 5
Process and change management ............................................................................................................................... 5
Project management ................................................................................................................................................... 5
Asset management ...................................................................................................................................................... 6
Contract management ................................................................................................................................................. 6
Cash flow management ............................................................................................................................................... 6
Reporting and performance analysis ........................................................................................................................... 6
Real-time data capture with mobile workforce management..................................................................................... 7
Resource mobilization and work allocation ................................................................................................................. 7
Document management .............................................................................................................................................. 7
Integration with third-party systems ........................................................................................................................... 7
Secure login and authentication .................................................................................................................................. 7
Additional features ...................................................................................................................................................... 8
3 Red Cube Modules ................................................................................................................................ 9
Rollout Manager ........................................................................................................................................................ 10
Co-location Manager ................................................................................................................................................. 10
Lease Manager ........................................................................................................................................................... 11
Operations and Maintenance Manager ..................................................................................................................... 11
Site Access Manager .................................................................................................................................................. 12
Location Manager ...................................................................................................................................................... 12
Site Inventory Manager ............................................................................................................................................. 13
Billing Manager .......................................................................................................................................................... 13
Tower Acquisition Manager ....................................................................................................................................... 14
Management Reporting and Dashboards .................................................................................................................. 14
Field Force Solution.................................................................................................................................................... 15
4 Modular process library ...................................................................................................................... 16

2
1 About Red Cube

Tower companies and infrastructure owners today need to make accurate forecasts and faster decisions to
leverage growth opportunities and drive profitable commercial agreements with customers. To achieve this
and maximize cash flow, it is critical to have a single source of information within your tower business that
integrates operational processes with commercial reality.

Tarantula is the industry leader in providing intelligent and configurable telecom site management software.
Our in-depth industry knowledge stemming from years of experience in the field has helped us create an
innovative site-centric framework that supports over 350,000 towers in 20 countries across the globe.

Red Cube Enterprise is our flagship product for end-to-end telecom site management. It has been designed
to help tower infrastructure providers obtain a holistic view of site portfolios, manage revenue, control
costs, implement best practices for site lifecycle management, and make informed decisions to drive growth.
Automated business processes, efficient asset management, proactive response mechanisms, and
comprehensive reporting are key elements of the product, enabling it to make tower sites more productive
for infrastructure owners. The tool also offers a unified view of projects, inventory, and vendor assignment
through multi-functional business modules that are closely integrated with each other.

With over 30 best-practice tower processes available out of the box, Red Cube provides built-in industry
expertise. Minimal time to market is achieved through rapid deployment of these real-world processes,
which can be further enhanced through built-in configuration.

3
About the framework
Red Cube is built around the versatile CAPP (Contract, Asset, Project, Process) framework, which has been
designed to provide unified management, visibility, and control across distributed telecom infrastructure.
The framework offers an innovative mechanism to set up rule-based workflows for standardizing your
business processes. It helps you track the workflow progress through milestones, work queues, and
notifications. Moreover, the framework integrates the workflows with equipment rights and contractual
agreements, thus enabling a single source of truth across your business.

Process Project Asset Contract

Management Management Management Management

Know what is Know what is on

Know what is Know your rights
meant to and planned to
happening and obligations
happen be on the site

CAPP Framework: Integrated asset, activity and commercial management

The framework has been developed based on our customer feedback around the need for configuration,
with the ability to quickly adapt to the on-going changes required in enterprise processes and data areas.
This is a paradigm shift from typical compiled workflows, where data forms and workflows are hard-coded or
customised. In contrast, our framework enables our teams to configure the application to suit your needs,
thus reducing the time to implement changes as well as the total cost of ownership (TCO), as minimum
development is required.

The framework relies on key business objects such as workflows, data forms, milestones, and reports to
build a foundation for providing flexibility and scalability to our products. Leveraging the powerful
configuration management layer allows our delivery teams to add and manage process milestones, control
policies, service levels, and new types of workflow processes, quickly and on the fly.

Workflows Data forms Milestones Reports

4
2 Key benefits

Red Cube’s site-centric focus offers huge business benefits that can be applied across your site portfolio,
enabling you to gain instant insight into every area of your business operation.

Site portfolio management

Red Cube preserves business data by associating it with sites, projects, and assets. This leads to an intuitive
and user-friendly way to quickly access information about your tower sites with a few clicks of your mouse.
You can locate a site or candidate using a map-based search, through geographical coordinates, or even with
a quick text search. Instantly view a comprehensive summary of the site with rollout or upgrade project
status, lease data, maintenance and upkeep information, capital and operational expenses, asset inventory,
and more. Visual links between sites, projects, and child/parent projects help you to easily navigate through
interrelated data.

Process and change management

Red Cube provides a two-fold approach for managing your business processes. The tool offers an extensive
library of real-world, out-of-the-box process workflows designed to address key process areas, such as
rollout, inbound colocation, and operations, in the infrastructure lifecycle. Quickly adopt these processes to
achieve rapid process automation and accelerate time-to-market.

Red Cube also contains a configuration management layer that simplifies change management. A fully
integrated modelling environment for tweaking or creating workflows enables our team to adapt the
application to the dynamic changes that occur as your business changes to meet market requirements. Add
new milestones, change SLAs, and modify data forms to enable your business to quickly respond to market
trends.

Project management
Achieve operational efficiency by directly accessing your daily tasks from the application’s home page and
taking action on your pending tasks right away. You can gain better visibility of your projects through project
milestones with built-in support for visual Gantt charts. This enables you to instantly view the impact on your
entire business process whenever even a single milestone gets delayed. Built-in service level management
helps you to complete projects within defined timelines and with transparency, and gain the trust of your
customers. Moreover, you can use programme management to track multiple projects simultaneously,
control dependencies, and monitor collective growth across your portfolio.

Red Cube’s project management feature empowers every decision-maker in your business to track all
activities within a business process from start to finish. Automated workflows ensure that there is
transparent forecasting information between stakeholders and bottlenecks in the processes are quickly
highlighted.

5
Asset management
Maintain a complete top-down view of the site as well as project asset inventory with a logical structure and
categorization, facilitated through a standardized asset dictionary. You can view site and project assets
categorized according to their status and owner. Avoid downtime and penalties by tracking asset warranties
and scheduled maintenance with ease. A graphical representation of the tower infrastructure, asset
placement, and floor plans, give you a complete visualization of what equipment is on your site.

Red Cube offers a fully integrated site data model, which allows information on assets to be interlinked
across the rollout, co-location, lease, MLA price book, and operations and maintenance process areas. By
tracking customer assets from the rollout phase all the way to upgrades or decommissioning, you can
maintain an accurate, real-time asset register across your site portfolio and manage reserve capacity. Not
only that, since the asset information is linked with your commercial agreements, you can instantly realize
the value portfolio, analyse profitability, and minimize revenue leakage.

Contract management
Easily link the commercial value of your agreements with your tenants’ equipment rights to maximize your
revenue and minimize leakage from unlicensed equipment. With the CAPP framework providing an integral
connection between the equipment rights from commercial agreements with the physical status of installed
assets, you can optimize tower profitability. Keep your customer billing data accurate by tracking various
types of revenue streams, pass-through cost sharing, price variations and escalations, and volume discounts.

Cash flow management

Minimize operational costs and maximize earnings across your site portfolio while keeping track of your
ground rent roll. Red Cube provides a unique billing engine that automates calculations of tenancy rental
fees and ground rents to support accountability and transparency in billing. The flexible nature of the billing
mechanism allows different types billing models to be incorporated into the application.

Red Cube helps you capture infrastructure and pass-through costs to create invoices for all tenants in a
timely manner with a proper approval mechanism. Capital expenditure and operational expenses are
captured on sites, projects, and assets to help you quickly locate the most cash-intensive resources.
Profitability and revenue reports help to summarize your financial bottom line.

Reporting and performance analysis

Track and measure performance metrics of your portfolio, projects, and assets with ease and speed. Red
Cube provides the capability to run on-demand reports and dashboards with convenient filters for viewing
only business-relevant data. You can view historical trend reports spanning specific periods of time, drill
down into potential performance bottlenecks, and schedule automatic generation of reports to be emailed
to the relevant users. Red Cube also maintains historical reports of all site activities to track actions and
users through an audit trail.

6
Real-time data capture with mobile workforce management
Bridge the gap between system data and data in reality with our mobile workforce application for your field
staff. Optimise frequent site visits and achieve greater control over data quality through pre-defined
workflow-based approval and QA processes.

Red Cube enables remote job allocation and data capture for site audits, trouble tickets, and health checks.
The tool is seamlessly linked with the mobile solution, which captures the latest data and equipment details
through geo-tagged images and simple forms, ensuring that your site data gets updated with the latest
information in real time. Red Cube supports out-of-the-box mobility integration with your business
processes, enabling site data capture at any stage of the process.

Resource mobilization and work allocation

Increase efficiency and reduce overtime or shortages with proper manpower and task allocation. Simplified
outsourcing of the project tasks is available by ensuring that the entire project information is stored in a
central system. You can change suppliers as and when required and accurately track their performance.

Document management
Maintain all your site photos, commercial agreements, regulatory documents, building permits, invoices, and
system-generated documents in a single location. Red Cube links all attachments to the site or projects so
that you can easily locate any document with a simple drill-down. A slideshow display of photos and videos
makes it easy for operations teams to visualize the site and keep track of installed equipment. SharePoint
integration ensures that you only need to maintain a single document management system for your
business-critical information.

Integration with third-party systems

Protect your investments in ERP or other legacy systems by easily linking them with Red Cube. The tool
provides open APIs and configurable interfaces with third-party enterprise software, such as SAP, Oracle,
Sage, or Amdocs, in your technology environment for instant collaboration.

Secure login and authentication

Control who can access your business data and to what degree. Red Cube provides a built-in set of user roles
based on the functional groups within your business. Role-based login with secure authentication controls
the type of data access provided to your internal and external users. Enable your admin users to assign users
with specific user roles through simple configuration.

7
Additional features
▪ Out-of-the-box multilingual capability to select the default language of your choice. Forms and
reports can be configured with the language of your choice.
▪ Multi-currency support for multi-region invoicing and contracts
▪ Cross-browser compatibility
▪ Superior user experience with an intuitive user interface
▪ Web application with 24x7 access, hosted and managed completely by Tarantula. We ensure that
you do not have to worry about investing in procurement and maintenance of database storage,
disaster recovery systems, and hardware upgrades.

8
3 Red Cube Modules

Tarantula Red Cube is a modular application, with specially designed components that help you manage the
complete lifecycle of a tower site with ease and efficiency.

9
 Rollout Manager

Tower companies need to manage capacity of geographically dispersed sites across their estate and be able
to forecast delivery with accuracy. They require comprehensive visibility on customer orders for the rollout
of new sites and on-going equipment upgrades. Managing this process involves multiple sub-contractors and
functional groups with time-critical pressures.

The Rollout Manager is one of the core applications of the platform and provides a comprehensive,
collaborative, and workflow-driven framework to plan, manage, track and complete rollout, upgrades, and
termination of sites on time and on budget.

▪ The Rollout Manager enables users to manage and complete multiple projects for different sites on
time, through effective monitoring of project milestones and tracking of site projects at each stage
with service level agreements.
▪ Effective vendor management is integrated into the module allowing you to control and instruct
vendors on project milestone activity with knowledge being stored centrally.
▪ Project inventory asset data can be linked directly from multiple customer orders and rollout
projects that connect to the central site inventory module, giving you a real-time view on when or
how an asset has been connected to a site.

Co-location Manager

Tower companies need to manage complex order and provisioning processes to maximize sharing of
network assets such as masts, cellular towers, cabinets, and site compounds between multiple tenants.
Complexity is added with the need to manage different types of property rights and access regimes, deal
with inventory that continually changes, and coordinate service providers and vendors, all while adhering to
strict service level agreements.

The inbound Co-Location Manager allows you to provision passive infrastructure for inbound co-location
through an integrated order and provisioning process. The application automates the business processes
involved in sharing site space and tracking orders while interlinking specific inventory and lease information
for a tower site.

▪ Inbound portal for all co-location requests

▪ Intuitive process for management of all orders
▪ Full provisions management and integrated workflow
▪ Workflow collaboration across the industry value chain

10
 Lease Manager

The Lease Manager allows you to efficiently manage a complex estate portfolio of assets with an integrated
workflow covering the property lease lifecycle. Areas such as tenant and ground rent leases, rent
escalations, revenue share, pass-through costs and other special payment arrangements are all managed on
a central platform connecting to the central site repository.

The module is interlinked with the rollout, co-location, inventory, and billing modules providing an end-to-
end view of leases across the different operations areas of the business:

▪ Customer lease management

▪ Integrated workflow for all core process areas such as lease renewal, amendment, and termination
▪ Asset management validation of lease rights with actual on-site equipment
▪ Reporting on tenants with maximum revenue and landlords charging maximum rent
▪ Revenue linkage with Master Lease Agreement (MLA) mapping

Operations and Maintenance Manager

Tower companies require real-time information on the health of their network assets as well as the ability to
own and manage operational activities. They typically outsource their operations management to multiple
third party vendors. The challenge is to own and manage knowledge so the activities can be strategically
planned and reduction of operational costs can be achieved.

The Operations and Maintenance (O&M) manager application enables smart management of infrastructure
health. It provides visibility and control over all ongoing operations, maintenance activities, and assets, and
operational costs. The application enables automated management and tracking of all onsite operations,
energy management and maintenance schedules of onsite infrastructure. The application allows
collaboration of internal and external users, to effectively plan, manage and monitor preventive as well as
condition-based maintenance activities, that minimize O&M costs while optimizing resource utilization and
improving service quality.

▪ Streamlined management of critical field operational processes

▪ Monitoring and management of site maintenance schedules for all equipment
▪ Integrated view of all trouble tickets linked with all sites and equipment

11
 Site Access Manager

Telecom infrastructure owners need to plan and manage a wide range of maintenance and inspection
activities on every site. These activities are generally undertaken by multiple contractors and vendors.
Allowing access to external personnel without proper approvals or qualifications presents a serious risk to
the assets and accountability of the tower company. Moreover, since multiple stakeholders are involved in
the operations and maintenance activities on a site, site-wise planning becomes critical for the continued
operations.

The Site Access Manager module helps management teams to precisely plan access to each of the sites
under their purview. It also helps in maintaining a common repository of contractors and personnel, with
their contact information as well as qualifying documents. When scheduling site access, operations teams
can verify the accreditation status for each site visitor before approving the access to the site. This
systematic approach allows only authorized and time-bound access to sites and eliminates the possibility of
any security issues that might arise on the site portfolio.

▪ Plan, approve, and monitor all the maintenance, repairs and inspection activities for your site
portfolio, from a central console with integrated booking schedules.
▪ Maintain a central repository to save all information pertaining to the contractors and personnel
that visit the site.
▪ Make use of the integrated approval process and verify the accreditations of site visitors before
granting access to a site for an activity.
▪ Keep track of who is on your site, for how long, and for what reason. Every site visit by external
personnel is recorded.
▪ Maintain documentation to keep track of activities on the site. Every site access request is created
with supporting documentation for scope of work, safe work method statement, and method of
procedure.
▪ Track routine site access visits for maintenance and upkeep activities. Track non-routine visits for
fault fixes and emergency activities with additional level of control through an approval step.

Location Manager

The Location Manager provides a GIS-enabled visualization to display content-rich sites and infrastructure
information in just a few clicks. It helps you visualize your sites on maps based on different types of status
and activity, providing various business units with quick access to the portfolio. The module enables you to
collate, manage, plot, and generate reports on all infrastructure and site information in a web-based, search-
enabled, real-time format. The increased visibility of the entire portfolio enables you to maximize revenue
through sales, rentals, and sharing.

12
 Site Inventory Manager

Tower companies require a real-time capacity view of their geographically dispersed sites. The complexity of
site-level inventory needs to be linked with the ongoing change constantly occurring in the estate. Site
inventory needs to be linked directly with lease rights to ensure that revenue is not lost.

With Site Inventory Manager, you can understand where business assets are located and what inventory sits
at a site. It has assets pre-integrated from the process areas of site rollout and co-location into a central
repository, allowing you to understand the capacity of a site. This is in turn links to the lease rights granted
at a site level, allowing you to view actual site inventory versus site lease rights.

▪ Configurable hierarchy view of assets

▪ Seamless integration with external third-party systems such as finance, SCM, or ERP
▪ Active or passive inventory for sites
▪ Visibility of infrastructure capacity with active and passive site assets
▪ Graphical representation of site infrastructure with drill-down capability

Billing Manager

Tower companies need to manage complex master lease agreements and tenant leases with multiple types
of opex costs and revenue streams, often with different rules for individual leases. Optimising these multiple
flows of cost is not only critical in projecting cash flow, but also in recovering and correctly billing each
tenant for rent and pass-through costs.

The Billing Manager automates the rent roll for each landlord through ground lease management and billing
for each tenant by interlinking directly with information captured from the master lease agreement and
tenant lease.

▪ Centralised invoice generation and payment management for customers, landlords, and vendors
▪ Automated site-specific bill and rent management with centralised billing and interface with ERP
systems.
▪ Configurable multiple revenue streams to generate instant bill runs with built-in approvals.

13
 Tower Acquisition Manager

The tower acquisition manager fills an industry need that has been created due to numerous network
operators disposing off their tower assets to a tower company in a portfolio sale. The module provides a
simple mechanism to manage the various activities during tower purchase such as exhaustive data capture
and migration, creation and novation of MLAs and leases, comprehensive field audits, and regulatory
compliance checklists. Compliance documents are managed through Red Cube’s document management
system and a multi-pronged approval mechanism is provided for acceptance. An overview of the current
status of the purchase process for each site or region is provided through various configurable reports and
dashboards.

▪ Deploy a step-by-step approach to plan, approve, and track all tower acquisition activities
▪ Exhaustive data collection during all stages of the process helps in detailed evaluation of tower
acquisition parameters
▪ Preserve overall governance of the process by ensuring that all regulatory requirements are
accounted for.
▪ Keep track of acquired assets and verify that the site is ready for deployment through
comprehensive site audits supported by the Tarantula Mobility solution.

Management Reporting and Dashboards

The Reporting Manager helps your senior management teams to measure, monitor and manage the overall
performance of the site business. The module provides a self-service reporting engine, allowing you to
generate on-demand graphical and tabular reports using a web browser.

▪ Configurable and automated report generation

▪ Filter and export data to Microsoft Excel
▪ User-configurable dashboards to collect and display relevant data from a single console
▪ Report scheduling to ensure you receive the correct data for analysis

14
 Field Force Solution

Tracking and managing field staff and capturing site data across your geographically dispersed estates
remains a challenge for telecom operators and tower companies. Whether it is equipment repair work or
field surveys, your business cannot afford delays and inefficient field operations.

Instant work order assignment using the Field Force Solution allows you to share the right information with
your field staff immediately, wherever they are. Your field staff can capture all the necessary information
along with geo-tagged photos, signatures, and date and time stamp as the proof of completed work.
Integration of the mobile app with the Red Cube web application along with configuration of process forms
ensures that data captured at the site integrates completely with the central data repository.

15
4 Modular process library

The key to achieving predictable and repeatable results in your business is standardization and automation
of critical business processes. Through our experience and insight into the telecom infrastructure industry,
we have created a library of telecom business processes that include new rollouts, site sharing, site
upgrades, site inventory management, field mobility, and many more.

The Red Cube modules are designed specially to cater to a specific function within the business framework
of tower companies. The modules are equipped with a set of pre-configured workflow processes that are
based on best-practice solutions from the industry.

Rollout Manager Co-Location Manager

▪ Build to Suit – Acquisition ▪ Inbound Co-location
▪ Build to Suit – Construction ▪ Upgrade Equipment
▪ Rollout RFI Checklist* ▪ Terminate Co-location
▪ Upgrade Site
▪ Terminate Site
▪ Rollout Programme
Lease Manager Billing Manager
▪ Tenant Lease ▪ MLA
▪ Ground Lease ▪ Infrastructure Invoice
▪ Pass-through Cost Invoice
Tower Acquisition Manager Site Access Manager
▪ Transfer ground lease ▪ Routine Site Access
▪ Transfer tenant lease ▪ Non-routine site Access
▪ Regulatory approval checklist
▪ Tower purchase asset audit
▪ Tower purchase acceptance
Operations and Maintenance Manager Field Force Manager
▪ Asset Audit* ▪ Quality Checklist*
▪ Asset Reconciliation ▪ Rollout RFI Checklist*
▪ Punch Point* ▪ Asset Audit*
▪ Barcode Audit* ▪ Barcode Audit*
▪ Site Photo Audit* ▪ Site Photo Audit*
▪ Quality Checklist* ▪ Health and Safety Audit*
▪ Trouble Ticket* ▪ Trouble Ticket*
▪ Preventive Maintenance
▪ Health and Safety*
▪ Diesel Generator Programme
▪ Electricity Bill Programme
▪ Outage Reconciliation Programme

*Note: Some of the processes appear under more than one module of Red Cube as they apply to multiple cross-
functional areas of the tower company business.

16