Tanzania

Creating a partnership with our partners

The opportunity

NEWL provides maintenance support for 965 of our sites in Tanzania, and has worked with Helios towers for four years.

Site visits were high due to a lack of coordinated activity and to issues not being fully closed out. There were instances of overresourcing in some areas, as well as a sense of ‘police & culprit’ rather than a joint effort, resulting in a lack of transparency.

The Six Sigma solution

Working closely with NEWL, we implemented our ‘One Team One Business’ approach, fundamentally shifting the culture to one of a joint enterprise. This was reinforced by moving four HT staff into NEWL’s offices, immediately boosting interaction and decisionmaking. Our people also attend daily Visual (i.e. face to face) Management meetings, where decisions, commitments and results are given on the spot.

We also sponsored Six Sigma training for selected NEWL staff, and introduced 1SVM (one site visit per month), enabled by the close synchronisation of planning and resource from both partners.

Results

• A major reduction in required site visits from 3.0 per month to 1.2
• Significant attendant savings in time, mileage and opex, particularly in fuel (reduction of fuel used on site visits by 40%)
• A 90% reduction in downtime penalties payable to HT, and therefore a significant improvement in rebates due to our end customer
• The average downtime of sites maintained by NEWL reduced by 54%
• Greater effectiveness of preventative maintenance, audited jointly by HT and NEWL
• Safety: closer coordination between our respective SHEQ departments, leading to cleaner, more environmentally compliant sites, with safer working conditions.