1.

What are the factors that drove Bharti Airtel towards adopting data warehousing and business intelligence
initiative?

• Indian telecom industry was getting very competitive with many local and multi national players entering the market. The
changing regulatory requirements along with the exponential growth of Bharti Airtel in its subscriber base called for improved
services and higher customer satisfaction.
• The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for Bharti Airtel , although higher than the industry average, was declining year over year.
Also the company was facing an increasing debt.
• The market became more customer centric than product centric. The future growth drivers for telecom players in India would be
new technology, new services like 3G,BWA and better devices.
• The company had to understand customer’s needs in order to take pro-active decisions and remain competitive in the market.
Decision making requires a subject oriented view rather than a transactional view. DW and BI helps the company address these
issues and challenges.
• Bharti Airtel maintained various transaction data in databases across business units and lines of business. Transaction
processing systems provided transactional view of operations and processes such as customer invoicing, stock control, complaint
resolutions, bill payments. Although it helped improved the company’s operational efficiency but it could not help the
management get a subject oriented view of the business such as customer, product and sales.
• The architecture Bharti Airtel had been using to maintain the transactional data was decentralised and was spread across several
databases across several lines of businesses. The company was not able to provide centralized customer services and common
brand experience anywhere in India.
 2. What functionalities of BI has Bharti Airtel been using? What were the objectives of using BI?

• The BI system at integrated information across all the important sources of information. The system acted as a single platform
supporting various analytics required for decision support.
• The BI systems analyzed Call detail data, Network data, Customer data and Billing data generated by the MSC and CRM modules
• The data generated at MSC contained information originating and termination phone numbers, call duration, roaming locations,
timestamps and strings that uniquely identifies the device or a software (maintenance and performance monitoring), customer
data and billing data

• The objectives of using BI were –

 To provide and integrated view of the business, market and customer thus enabling the company to offer customized and
relevant products to its customers
 Provide predictive modeling and data mining, empowering the company to take informed business decisions which in turn
bring value to business
 to present information in different forms as required by various categories of department users at different levels of the
hierarchy
 Enable managers to get a unified view of the customer, product and sales
3. Do you consider implementation of the business intelligence at Bharti Airtel is successful? Justify.

• The implementation of business intelligence has largely been successful for Bharti Airtel as it has helped improved the quality
of services and customer experience.
• BI has helped Bharti Airtel target customer groups where specific products can be sold to them driving up its profitability
• The sales have increased year over year from 16.7 cr in 2003 to 41600 cr in 2012
• The adoption of BI however has increased the operating expenses for Bharti Airtel, but the proportional increase in sales has
led to decreased operating expense to sales ratio from 2.2 in 2003 to 0.66 in 2012.
• During the years 2003-04, the operating expenses incurred were higher than the revenue earned. This ratio changed
drastically after Bharti implemented IBM Cognos as their BI system in 2004 as part of their outsourcing deal with IBM
 4. How is the customer value chain enabled by data warehousing and business intelligence systems?

• Over the past few years, the telecom industry has become more and more competitive and with increasing competition comes its
own set of challenges such as churn, quality of service & customer growth.
• In order to survive in this competitive world retaining the customer base is of key importance and that can only be achieved by
taking proactive decisions in order to fulfil all your customer’s key needs. This is where data warehousing and business
intelligence comes into play in enabling the customer value chain for resolving the issues and challenges.
• Data warehousing system helps in making use of analytics, OLAP and other reporting tools in order to generate valuable insights
from the integrated data across various transaction systems.
• Data warehousing helps in effective decision making by integrating existing data present in disparate systems thereby avoiding
problems such as duplication of data, system failure inconsistency etc.
• Data warehousing helps in identifying the various anomalies, deviations in business processes present in system.
• The BI solution which is integrated into the company’s core business processes helps in providing the right knowledge to the
right person at the right time which thereby enables management across network operations, line of business, call centre and
corporate to understand customers and their behaviour, plan monitor and visualize performance.
• Business Intelligence systems helps in consolidating & analysing data which thereby enables enterprise users to monitor
business activity take informed decisions.
• BI helps in presenting information in different forms as required by various categories of departments at various levels.
• The predictive modelling and data mining feature of BI helps the company to make informed decision which in turn enable huge
customer value.
5. What are the challenges and constraints Bharti Airtel is facing or would be facing in future with reference to BI?

• Big data and its management can be the upcoming challenge which the company can face. In addition to
structured data, the company has to also mine the unstructured form of data like video, voice, emails and
online reviews.
• The study and analysis of feedbacks available in non-English Indian languages. 
• Inability of traditional BI to perform complex analysis of data that are in terabyte and petabyte at CDR level on
a real time basis. Traditionally such big data are analysed by sampling and summarizing, which lead to loss of
information and also it needs significantly high processing time. 
• In future the company is planning to apply real time BI and prediction. Thus the focus of DW and BI must shift
from querying and reporting based on past to predictive analysis and advanced analytical tools to enhance
proactive decision-making. 
• Lack of fully integration of customer facing applications , manual intervention and practice of manipulating call
drop and customer service data are also an important issue to address because these lead to poor quality of BI
output.