Telekom Research and Development wins two awards at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2019

The company bagged trophies in the IoT - Utilities and AI - Telecommunications categories.

Telekom Research and Development (TM R&D) took home two awards for IoT - Utilities and AI - Telecommunications at the recently concluded Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards.

The inaugural awards event honours enterprises that take risks and lead the charge in developing groundbreaking projects, digital services, reimagined strategies, and technological initiatives

Revolutionising IoT for TM Access (RITA) is a project through which TM R&D provides water management solutions characterised by visibility, control, and situational awareness in near real time.

RITA is an agnostic platform for Internet of Water solution that supports various types of IoT devices, system designs, budgets, and geographical situations. With its backend connected to an in-house IoT hosting platform, RITA offers an end-to-end smart water integration that optimises repair and replacement of ageing infrastructure, improves non-revenue water management, and enhances response to weather-related issues such as water quality and level.

At present, RITA is being deployed not only in water distribution plants but also consumer homes and businesses. This application enables water utility operators to have greater control in maintenance and monitoring, thereby improving overall cost and efficiency.

Through the RITA web portal or mobile application, water utility operators can gain insights into water supply parameters and consumption, user behaviour, and environmental readings. RITA’s edge/fog-computing feature allows smart and quick response to issues that necessitate instant decision-making and low-latency response.

Being aligned to Malaysia’s Smart City framework, which emphasises sustainability, RITA has a flexible core system that can be deployed in other areas such as SCADA IoT applications and smart street lighting. Current RITA users include state water operators in Melaka and Selangor.

Another award-winning project for TM R&D is its Intelligent Network Diagnostic & Expert Advisory System for Service Desk (IDEAS+), which develops a one-stop advisory platform for TM’s contact centre.

Using machine-learning algorithms (specifically, k-nearest neighbour and naive Bayes), IDEAS+ assists call centre agents in efficiently troubleshooting and resolving various issues. The objectives of the project are as follows: (1) increasing productivity by reducing average handling time by the fourth quarter of 2019 and (2) cutting operational costs by avoiding calls to call centres and repeating truck rolls.

Since the project launch in August 2018, the IDEAS system has had more than 100 classifications and obtained real-time data such as customer information, billing, inventory, and network equipment and performance.

The private-cloud-based IDEAS+ consists of a three-tier architecture (web, application, and database) system with high availability.

The project implements agile-scrum methodology to improve the speed, quality, and predictability of software development, as well as to ensure adaptability to change. Agile-scrum also facilitates contact centre feedback and the release of improvements on every sprint.

By conducting iterative development, solutions and requirements evolve through collaboration between self-organising cross-functional teams. The system uses the RHEL 7.3 guest operating system; Python, Java, and JavaScript programming languages; and MariaDB database. The system is also able to feed the advisories to any external systems through RESTful API, which supports XML and JSON media/application type.

As an innovation hub for Telekom Malaysia (TM), TM R&D has conducted research and development since the early 1980s, and was incorporated as a company in 2001. The company supports TM’s vision—to make life easier for a better Malaysia. Its present role includes contributing towards TM’s digital strategy as it enters the field of value-added digital and smart services, including customer experience, process optimisation and new business opportunities.

Watch the interview below to know more about their winning projects:

The Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review, was held on 3 December 2019 at Shangri-La Hotel, Kuala Lumpur.

This year's nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Alvin SH Gan, Executive Director, Partner, and Head of IT Enabled Transformation (ITeT) at KPMG Malaysia; Yoon Hoong Hoh, Partner, ASEAN Digital Assurance Leader, and Head of Diversified, Technology and Communications Group at Ernst & Young; Justin Ong, Partner and FSI Financial and Regulatory Risk Leader at Deloitte Asia Pacific; Hari Iyerm, Executive Director of Advisory at BDO Kuala Lumpur.

If you would like to join the 2020 awards and be acclaimed for your company’s exceptional technology innovations, please email [email protected]