EC News DeskWhen MTN launched its telecom business in 1994, democracy had just come to South Africa after decades of apartheid. Global trading sanctions were lifted, opening opportunities for investment and economic growth.
Soon, MTN was operating in 24 countries, including some of the world’s riskiest places to do business. Today, its three largest markets are South Africa, Nigeria, and Iran, and expanding 5G services in Africa remains a company-wide focus. MTN currently serves 277 million telecom customers and is moving into the fintech market, managing a large mobile money unit with more than 60 million subscribers.
Where other providers choose to steer clear of the geopolitical risks in some of these markets, MTN sees opportunity. Their stated intent is to drive leading digital solutions for Africa’s progress.
“We’re bringing technology to a lot of places that have not traditionally been part of the economic map,” says Johan Pretorius, MTN’s General Manager of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).
As MTN grew, legacy systems and differing stages of technological development across their operations meant that reporting was not standardized, which hampered a holistic view across all markets.
“Because we were running with 22 separate ERPs and 22 separate business processes, it was quite difficult to measure the risks and manage the business performance from a group perspective,” Pretorius says.
The company sought to bring order to the entire enterprise, which included a focused drive towards standardization. “We wanted to make sure we were operating as one company and could leverage our scale,” Pretorius says.
Cloud provides standardization and connected planning
MTN decided to transform the company using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications for human resources, finance, and supply chain and operations.
One of the most powerful benefits for MTN has been the connected planning capabilities in Oracle Cloud EPM. Not only has this brought much better visibility and control to MTN’s sprawling enterprise’s units, markets, and functions, but it has also made the standardized data available to machine learning (ML) for predictive analysis.
The new capabilities have made MTN a more informed and agile organization. Leaders have substantially more accurate and contextualized data to consider different scenarios when making planning decisions. And they have more confidence in those scenarios because of the higher-quality data and automation. When large, global organizations pull data from multiple systems for planning, data quality suffers from manual-handling errors, format differences, and inconsistent timeliness. And—if you’re a company that has grown as quickly as MTN has—it might not even be possible to find all the data you need, let alone manage and standardize it.
Now, Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications automates that work at scale for MTN.
“The biggest transformation has been linking EPM with financials. It’s no longer a pure financial solution anymore, but it includes operations to assist with project planning and capital planning and human capital planning,” Pretorius says.
For example, MTN took the geospatial locations of all the cell phone towers in five of its largest markets and then overlaid population density in each of those markets. With that information, the telecom provider could do more detailed network planning.
“Now when we roll out a 5G expansion in a country, we would use the same fixed-asset categories and the same coding and the same accounts as you would for capturing the actuals,” Pretorius says.
With connected planning in Oracle Cloud EPM, MTN has moved into a new era of exploration because leaders have confidence that they’re making better decisions.
“If you’re looking for a full suite solution from warehouse management to human capital management all the way through to your EPM stack, there’s no other vendor on the market to look at,” Pretorius says.
