A simpler, smarter, better way to build the UK’s digital backbone

Openreach runs the UK’s digital network, connecting homes and businesses across the nation via its super-fast broadband. Charged with leading the national rollout of fibre optic broadband, Openreach set a bold ambition—to connect 25 million homes by 2026.

To deliver on this ambitious goal, Openreach partnered with Accenture to implement the award-winning "Simpler, Smarter, Better" program. Working together to put data at the core of decision-making processes, Openreach and Accenture delivered simpler, more sustainable operations, smarter desk functions and better insights for the business.

The result? A massive saving of more than £700 million over three years, reinvested into fibre to fund this once-in-a-lifetime build, improved field productivity by 23% and enabled Openreach to deliver over 13 million fibre connections to date. 

Simpler, smarter, better

Every single day, the 12,000 dedicated people that make up Openreach’s Fibre and Network Delivery organization tackle complex engineering problems to connect customers. However, disjointed processes, legacy IT systems and a heavy reliance on regional knowledge hindered their efficiency. 

Recognizing the need for change, Openreach partnered with Accenture to deploy NextGen tools and processes, putting data-led decision making at the heart of everything to drive efficiency and productivity improvement at the heart of everything. Leveraging Accenture’s experience in delivering cost reduction programs, Simpler, Smarter, Better created a simplified desk function and a smarter field force empowered with new tools to improve productivity as well as deliver better certainty to customers.

Over 70 initiatives were delivered by the program, including machine learning algorithms to improve forecasting, customer journey analytics to unlock value and a field force improvement for about 6,000 engineers, to get skilled people into suitable jobs at the right time.

Empowering engineers, enhancing efficiency

Co-creating changes with end-users, the Simpler, Smarter, Better program delivered sustainable and measurable savings while improving the working lives of the field force engineers. Working together to design solutions, we delivered multi-skilling for thousands of engineers, simplified planning processes to get jobs to the field more quickly and enabled greater ownership within the teams to deliver on time. 

These initiatives delivered over £700m of cost savings while improving quality of service, allowing investment into ultra-fast fibre.

Accelerating the rollout of Fibre

To deliver 25m connections, Openreach initiated a large-scale capital program, that at peak would need to deliver ~10,000 new connections per day.

Together, Accenture and Openreach designed and created a build program that could both accelerate Fibre Build roll-out and guarantee build targets. A Fibre Data Layer was created, providing a single source of truth that gave Openreach end-to-end visibility and control across the organization. Operations were improved by designing and building a full suite of delivery orchestration dashboards and new forecasting tools that could proactively identify risks. An ‘Insight to Action’ team was set-up to improve rapid decision making.

As a result, Openreach has seen a 33% reduction in delivery cycle times and an 83% increase in homes passed per week. Openreach is now reaping the benefits of being Simpler, Smarter, and Better, and are set-up for a successful future.