CIO — In the old days, when telecommunications companies held a monopoly on local and long-distance service, lost business wasn’t a major concern. But when the competitive barriers came down in the late ’90s, customer retention became a huge issue. That’s when PacBell developed its Equipment Capacity Optimization Systems (ECOSystems), a homegrown suite of network capacity management tools first developed and deployed in 1997. ECOSystems allows engineers to automatically detect and respond to network capacity shortages with its data analysis and visualization functions. And with this fast, accurate data, SBC Communications?which acquired PacBell in 1998 and began rolling out ECOSystems throughout the parent company in 1999?now has faster network capacity management, improved customer service capability, and new metrics and business intelligence to measure network capacity and plan expansion.

For Noah Yates, the value of ECOSystems is more straightforward; as the 31-year veteran tells it, ECOSystems has given him his life back.

Before 1997, if Yates, a network engineer at SBC’s PacBell subsidiary in San Diego, wanted to know when the telephone company’s network capacity was near exhaustion, he had to do it manually. In technical terms, this meant pulling data from several different legacy systems and compiling it into demand versus capacity charts, which he would then pore over in an attempt to determine equipment utilization, network capacity and future demands. "It meant six and a half hours in the office on a Saturday, eating lunch at my desk, with no phone calls or interruptions," Yates says. And even then, because the information was anything but real-time, the data might be hopelessly outdated by the time Yates finished analyzing it. "We were exhausting [network] capacity without even knowing it," he says. Sometimes these shortages weren’t discovered until Yates and his colleagues tried to fill customer orders for new lines or services. Then the engineers would have to place rush orders for new equipment installations, which cost the company 25 percent to 35 percent more in operating expenses than planned expansion, or customers would walk.

To SBC executives who have deployed ECOSystems throughout the company’s four subsidiaries in 13 states, the project’s biggest measurable success is that it’s taken an all-day task for engineers and diminished it to under 10 minutes. "We have better, faster tools, which give us better predictability," says Andy Geisse, vice president of enterprise software solutions, the IT group at SBC’s PacBell offices in San Ramon, Calif. Christopher Rice, senior vice president of SBC’s network planning and engineering group at SBC headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, notes the IT and business collaboration that resulted in ECOSystems. "I’ve never been more impressed by IT folks [collaborating] with engineers," Rice says.

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