A leading Tier 1 Cable MSO was observing higher-than-expected-and projected project costs and needed to correlate actual costs to projected costs to understand the issues and better control budget overruns.
Fiber To The Home Data Analytics
The Problem
DTS Approach
- DTS developed an analytics framework to look for trends and identify outliers.
- Created data dictionary to map projected expenses to actual costs
- Both labor and material expenses included in data dictionary
- Focused initial review on projects with higher percentage overruns
- Initially, reviewed only completed projects
- Used analytics to drill down further on overruns by type of expense
- Further analysis included projects in flight to allow earlier feedback
- Held project reviews to understand the need for the extra expenses
- Took corrective action to stop unnecessary expenses
- Captured and shared lessons learned with the team

Client Benefits
- The client was able to identify expenses on spare materials that should not have been charged to the projects, leading to a development of a separate sparing program.
- The client found that on over 10% of the projects, funds were being used to provide temporary services not covered in the funding request.
- Overall, the client was able to understand what was actually being charged to the projects and better manage and control their expenses and close a 43% program variance.