Return on Investment (roi) for Multi-Technology son juan Ramiro, Mark Austin and Khalid Hamied

7.3.7.2. Lower Workload through Automation

These OPEX savings are straightforward to calculate. The computation is based on the number of man-hours that are required to carry out the aforementioned capacity planning tasks, the nominal cost per man-hour and the number of man-hours (if any) that are required in order to operate the corresponding SON functionality. Note that some SON functionalities, especially in the Self-Planning domain, are automatic and not always autonomous, i.e. some human intervention may be needed in order to initiate the processes. These OPEX savings can be summarized as follows:
CFOPEX,auto(i) =
(7.12)
= Cost_Man-hour * (Effort_Manual(i) − Effort_SON(i) )
where CF_OPEX,auto(i) is the differential cash flow component during year i due to automation; Cost_Man-hour is the monetary cost per man-hour; Effort_Manual(i) is that number of man-hours required to carry out the aforementioned manual capacity planning tasks during year i; and Effort_SON(i) is the equivalent number for the case in which a perfect SON function is available to carry out the capacity planning process in an automated manner.

7.3.8. Sample Scenario and ROI

7.3.8.1. ROI Calculation

The assumptions for this sample calculation are presented in Table 7.1. The assumed traffic growth profile is illustrated in Figure 7.11 for both voice and traffic, and the overall amount of carriers that are required (at network level) to serve all the offered traffic is depicted in Figure 7.12. As can be seen, this number grows steadily when traffic increases.
Let us start considering the ideal, error-free capacity planning process. The assumptions in Table 7.1 indicate that the network is initially equipped with 60000 carriers (10000 sites × 3 sectors/site × 2 carriers/sector). However, as shown in Figure 7.12, during the first year a total amount of 60166 carriers are required and therefore 166 additional ones need to be added. The number of incremental carrier expansions that are required every year to cope with the

66000.0
65000.0
64000.0
63000.0
62000.0
61000.0
60000.0
59000.0
58000.0
57000.0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Year