Within the Telecommunications industry globally, there are various regulations and standards that must be met to ensure regulatory compliance and best practices. Regulatory compliance often rests on the ability to pull relevant and accurate data related to the network and its use. Without the right software in place, providing this data to regulating authorities can be a real challenge and one that requires a significant amount of time and resources. However, if you have the right technology in place, like Adapt IT Telecoms Advanced Analytics solution, ensuring regulatory compliance is an effortless process, as was the case for Vodacom Tanzania. We examine the challenges this Mobile Network Operator (MNO) experienced regarding regulatory tax compliance and how Advanced Analytics solved these challenges.
MNO Tax Compliance Challenges in Tanzania
Vodacom Tanzania Public Limited Company is Tanzania’s leading MNO and mobile financial services provider, with the fastest nationwide data network and the largest mobile money network in the country. With over 12.6 million customers, they provide a wide range of services for consumers and enterprises, including voice, data, messaging, financial services and enterprise solutions.
In Tanzania, MNOs are required to have a Tax Monitoring System (TMS) in place to ensure compliance with the Tanzania Revenue Authority’s tax regulations. This system provides this regulatory body with up-to-date usage and billing data for tax purposes. The TMS that Vodacom was utilising was a legacy system and could no longer keep up with the large volume of data needing to be analysed. This led to several challenges that heavily impacted the business’s ability to remain compliant with the regulations that the Tanzania Revenue Authority set out. These challenges included the following:
- Excessive downtime – with the volumes of data continuing to increase, the legacy Tax Monitoring System consistently had failures, leading to system downtime.Â
- Added expenditure – with increased downtime came the need for Vodacom Tanzania’s team to continuously and manually monitor the system and data. The costs of which heavily impacted the business.Â
- Lack of data accuracy – these system failures often resulted in a loss of mediated data which meant that data needed to be continuously reindexed. This usually meant that there was a lack of data accuracy and stability.Â
- The need for support – the Vodacom team required additional added support in managing the system and accessing the data and analytics. This resulted in a significant amount of time wasted and costs incurred.Â
As a solution to these challenges, Adapt IT Telecoms suggested developing a customised Advanced Analytics solution that utilised the innovative CDRlive technology.
The Implementation of Advanced Analytics powered by CDRlive for Vodacom Tanzania
Adapt IT Telecoms collaborated with Vodacom Tanzania to create a customised Tax Monitoring System that would provide Vodacom Tanzania with the data needed for tax compliance by the Tanzania Revenue Authority.Â
The implementation began with the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process, a data integration tool that gathers data from multiple data sources to be consolidated. The ETL software was used to inject Vodacom’s mediated data during this process. The data was then loaded through CDRlive into a data warehouse. While in the data warehouse, the data is indexed, partitioned and structured for performance. It must be noted that the previous legacy system did not have a data warehouse which made accessing data incredibly difficult.Â
The Adapt IT Telecoms team then implemented over 40 transactional and aggregated Application Program Interfaces (APIs), allowing Vodacom Tanzania to access specific data sets and analytics in record time. For example, when the Vodacom Tanzanian team puts a data request into the system, they will receive 30 000 records in under four seconds.Â
The Vodacom Tanzanian team can submit their data requests on an easy-to-use platform with several data security measures to prevent unauthorised access. This ensures data security and safety and makes sure that the data is only accessible by those that have authorisation.
The CDRlive solution has made retrieving the necessary information, data and analytics for tax regulatory compliance much more manageable.Â
The Benefits and Positive Outcomes of This Implementation
Since implementing CDRlive, Vodacom Tanzania has seen several positive business outcomes derive from this solution. These benefits include:Â
- 99% uptime of the system.Â
- 99% accuracy of data.Â
- 5 to 10 years of data retention as opposed to 60 days previously.
- Full data governance and traceability with the ability to go into the data warehouse and investigate data.
- Full visibility of the process through reporting.Â
- Enhanced flexibility and easy-to-use platform.Â
- Savings on costs, resources and time as the team can focus on other essential tasks.
- Enhanced revenue assurance.
- Possibility to further expand the solution, allowing for the ingestion and aggregation of additional data streams.
This solution has assisted Vodacom Tanzania in mitigating several challenges regarding regulatory compliance, data accuracy, and optimal performance resulting in time and resource savings.Â
The Power of Advanced Analytics in Ensuring Tax Compliance for Telcos
Globally countries have varying regulatory compliance rules and regulations for Telcos. The power of Advanced Analytics lies in the ability to pull accurate, relevant and required data required for auditing and regulatory compliance reporting.
What makes CDRlive such an innovative software is the ability to utilise this technology to develop and customise solutions based on an MNO’s unique requirements to ensure compliance.
Over and above, this Adapt IT Telecoms Advanced Analytics solution powered by CDRlive can:
- Provide scalability to accommodate future growth and increase data volumes without compromising performance.
- Assist in ensuring compliance with industry regulations and standards related to various regulatory needs through compliance reporting and audit trails.
- Offer full customisation to align with your MNO compliance, regulatory needs, and processes.
- Enhance transparency by providing a complete view of all consolidated network data and information for full traceability. This makes further investigations into tax compliance issues or problems that much faster.
- Seamlessly integrates into your existing IT infrastructure.Â
Conclusion
For Telcos, Advanced Analytics are the key to ensuring regulatory compliance across varying global standards and regulations required within the Telecommunication industry. When an Advanced Analytics solution is built on innovative and customised technology, it will enable a Telco to effortlessly pull the data needed for auditing, reporting and regulatory compliance requirements. Vodacom Tanzania is just one of the many examples of how Adapt IT Telecoms customised their Advanced Analytics solutions to suit a customer’s specific needs, and the results speak for themselves.Â
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I’m the Advanced Analytics Solution Stream Owner at Adapt IT Telecoms. With my years of experience in the ICT industry, I have gained skills in various areas including Sales, Strategy, Professional Services, Management, Cloud, and Digital Transformation. My team and I specialise in providing niche large data solutions to markets such as mobile network, education, and regulatory. As the Solution Stream Owner, I’m responsible for ensuring that we deliver top-notch services and innovative solutions to our clients. My journey in this field started as a technical engineer and over the years, I have moved into pre-sales, business development, consulting, analytics, commercial, and operations management. This has given me a diverse set of skills, which allows me to have conversations that lead to innovative solutions. What I’m most passionate about is the integration between software and people, both within society and organisations. It’s a challenge, but one that I find extremely rewarding. I’m committed to ensuring that we continue to provide cutting-edge solutions that help our clients stay ahead of the competition.
