The Challenge
T-Mobile and Sprint hired Calligo to merge 10,000+ stores using machine learning and create intelligible recommendations for stakeholders.
In April 2020, T-Mobile US and Sprint Corporation – two of the largest mobile network operators in the US – merged under the T-Mobile brand. They needed a data science consulting company and hired Calligo for their help in two key challenges:
Firstly, to use machine learning to combine two portfolios of over 10,000 stores that had, for years, been in tight competition and deliberately ensuring their locations overlapped, or dominated local markets.
Secondly, to present the findings intelligibly so senior stakeholders could immediately understand the recommendations and their impact before making informed decisions.
The Action
Calligo used machine learning to assess each store’s forecasts, costs, and knock-on effects, creating a final weighted score. Tableau dashboards allowed stakeholders to fine-tune recommendations.
Calligo used a modular approach to tackle the problem. Their data science team used a series of machine learning models to assess each existing and proposed store on things like:
- Forecasts
- Costs
- The knock-on effects of the store’s opening or closure
We combined each of these models into a wider model with additional store-specific data points such as remaining lease length, footfall, quality of real estate and brand awareness. This created a final weighted score for each of the 10,000 stores of 0-100.
Then the magic happened. We created intuitive Tableau dashboards that presented the scenarios and data strategy intelligibly, attractively, and most importantly, interactively. The team could make adjustments simply to show the commercial impact of any human changes.
This allowed stakeholders to fine-tune the recommendations and control the decision-making, while ensuring unquantifiable factors such as impact on staff and views on brand awareness and real estate quality were taken into account.
It was the perfect blend of human and machine intelligence.
Calligo’s dashboards and visualizations allowed our teams – most of whom had no analytical experience – to interact with some of the most advanced data science they would perhaps ever come across, and make strategic decisions simply and confidently.
Teams that can create models that are both mathematically precise and also commercially savvy are very rare, and it’s what Calligo specializes in.
Michael Boese
Senior Manager of Strategic Transformation at T-Mobile
The Impact
T-Mobile is on track to achieve post-merger financial objectives; projections for individual stores and regions were accurate or exceeded.
The five-year post-merger financial objectives are still in progress, but to date, nearly two years in, T-Mobile is very much on track to achieve them.
The projections of what would happen to the performance of the individual stores and the overall regions were either accurate or even better than expected.
Back