Information system supporting marketing research in Mobile TeleSystems

Mobile TeleSystems OJSC (MTS) is the largest mobile phone operator in Russia and the CIS. MTS services over 91.33 million subscribers (as of July 31, 2008). MTS provides mobile communications in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia and Belarus, the territory with a total population of more than 230 million. In 2007, MTS’ revenues grew 29% to $8.2 billion. According to Informa Telecoms & Media's World Cellular Information Service, MTS ranks as the 8th largest operator in the world by proportionate subscriptions at the end of 2007.

The situation
The important part of marketing activity of MTS is marketing research - the process of continuous gathering, analysis and estimation of the information; first of all, about the state of the telecommunication market. To make the researches efficient, MTS constantly needs up to date information about all changes in the market: requirements of consumers, parity of the prices and competition.
That is why MTS required the system which will make the work of marketers in the part of marketing research more efficient, that is make the processes of preparation of the information more manageable and transparent.  To reach this aim it was needed to make corporate database of marketing researches.

The solution
After examining the requirements f the customer, its infrastructure, internal rules and standards, Aplana made a proposal to realize the information system as a part of the corporate information portal. As a program platform of the application have been used IBM WebSphere Portal Server 6.0 and Oracle Server 10G.
A kernel of the solution is a specialized module on the work with electronic materials which provides the following basic functions:

• The description of electronic materials by means of the flexible mechanism of creation of patterns of various levels of complexity;
• Support of life cycle of electronic documents, including their preliminary coordination and agreement in system;
• Maintenance of effective teamwork of users with marketing materials;
• Convenient attributive and expanded search of materials;
• Notification of users on updatings in system via e-mail;
• Flexible differentiation of the users rights according to their functional roles, accessories to division, territories and other factors;
• Formation of various reports on activities associated with preparation and use of the marketing information.

During the project Aplana’s experts have developed effective for automation of the processes of the account and reuse of knowledge which give to users of the system the following opportunities:

• Operative search of information and experts on a concrete problem in all the variety of information resources, automatically identifying both structured, and unstructured data, without dependence from their format of their storage;
• Use not only the information stored in databases and text documents, but also employees’ expertise;
• Operative access to experts in a subject domain, and also operative information exchange and knowledge between colleagues;
• Gathering, analysis and accumulation of external experience of solution of industrial problems.

Result
As a result of the project the processes of collective work of the experts in marketing associated with preparation, account, search and analysis of the marketing information in various directions of activity were automated. The system provides teamwork of several hundreds employees of MTS, many of which are from various regions of the country and the near abroad. Automation of the processes has allowed to reach a necessary coordination of actions of all employees of marketing department of MTS, and also has given an opportunity of accumulation and repeated use of experience in solution of marketing problems.