LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management

LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management (MPM) is designed to reduce the effort for all stakeholders in the change management and maintenance process. Its ease of use and enhanced automation make it possible to uphold and optimize SLA’s and KPI’s. For example, the automatic compliance check validates operational issues and/or network changes against authorized permits. The user will be notified if an operational issue and/or a network change causes an already authorized permit to become non-compliant.

Change management is a comprehensive, delicate, complicated and costly process. LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management helps telecom operators to reduce costs, increase their gross margin, and to stay (more) competitive. For example, optimized processes, more efficient internal staff and a reduction in third party involvement will result in tangible cost reductions.

Change Management requires the cells on a site to stop transmitting a signal in order to guarantee the safety of the field engineer. Many mobile network operators have outsourced parts of the change management and maintenance process to 3rd parties. Besides a direct entry point for attackers of cell sites, this makes mobile operators more vulnerable to indirect attacks via bribery or extortion of that contracted 3rd party. LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management enforces a multilevel security layer which not only reduces the chance of an attack, but also drastically limits the severity of an attack to a point where a (direct or indirect) attack is no longer beneficial.  

LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management ensures that a field engineer can perform their assigned task safely while maintaining a cell tower or cell site. During the change, the site is constantly monitored by LIMA MPM to ensure the safety of the field engineer. Safety checks prevent a site from becoming operational while the engineer is executing the change.

Unsuccessful changes need to be performed again at a later stage. Repeating activities like re-authorization of the change reduce the efficiency. The automatic validation and compliance check in LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management will identify invalid and non-compliant changes (now or in the future). The operational part of the change management process only allows authorized permits, which reduces unsuccessful changes due to operational issues or due to unauthorized changes.

In large and complicated processes, involving multiple actors and departments can result in non-complaint activities that are performed without operator consent. With LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management the mobile operator regains control, ensuring that every stakeholder needs to follow the compliance rules and all activities are completed according to the quality standards of the MNO. 

Technological evolution and increasing customer demands have pushed  the MNOs to improve and expand their network. For example, the network expansion with 5G will force the mobile network operators to either improve their efficiency and/or they will need to expand their organization in order to cope with the workload increase, due to the high density of cells. LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management improves the efficiency of all the stakeholders and due to its advanced automation, the operator is not forced to expand their organization. 

Operational errors are unpredictable by nature. Determining and mitigating the impact is almost always on short notice and quite stressful. The resulting operational errors have led to many unsuccessful changes. The corresponding rescheduling of these changes increases costs and effort. With LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management the solution determines the impact of a operational error and makes the information available to all the stakeholders.  

In the past brand reputation damage has been caused by cells that were not restored properly, which have led to customer complaints to the mobile network operator. Also, MNOs who are not compliant with government regulations receive reprimands or even in some cases a fine. LIMA Maintenance and Permit Management validation rules enforce that changes are not only compliant to government regulations and internal quality standards, but also reduce the impact of maintenance on cells to a minimum resulting in better availability of the services to the customers.