BT implemented an ideas management system called HEAT to improve its suggestion scheme. HEAT allows BT to track ideas more efficiently, provide regular status updates to employees, and increase the implementation rate from 10% to potentially 15%. It has resulted in over £400,000 paid out to employees for cost-saving and revenue-generating ideas in 2000 alone. Customer satisfaction has risen from 70% to 85% since implementing HEAT.

1. BACKGROUND
One of the world’s largest telecommunication
companies with a turnover in excess of £22
billion, BT operates out of the UK. Setting itself
the ambitious target of becoming a new wave,
global, communications company BT is
constantly re-evaluating its business and
increasingly taking advantage of the new
opportunities offered by Internet, multimedia,
mobility, data and integrated solutions.
HARVESTING IDEAS
Four years ago, Wright started the scheme to
help solve some of the challenges facing a small
part of the organisation. “We already had a
suggestion scheme, but it wasn’t active”, recalls
Wright. “The key difference was that I treated it
like a business –setting clear objectives,
implementing processes and procedures for
handling the ideas. We also had the unusual
premise that the idea donors are really our
customers and should be accorded that status.”
IDEA TRACKING
Recognising that the main function of the
department was to take a basic idea and track it
as it made the necessary rounds, Wright and his
team started looking at call centre technologies.
“It’s exactly the same principle and processes
you need to record things, pass them on for
action, monitor the progress and then feed back
to the customer”, says Roger Crombleholme,
Systems Support Manager, BT. HEAT was
chosen for its ease of customisation as well as its
powerful service level agreement (SLA)
procedures. “When an idea goes out for
evaluation we use the SLA function and
automated processes to monitor its progress.
Currently we are achieving around a 65%
success rate with replies being fed back within
our target 40-day period. If it’s going to take
longer to get a reply, then the escalation
procedures are there to make sure the customers
are informed of what is happening.”
Another problem is that many ideas have a
limited lifespan and have to be acted on quite
quickly if they are to benefit the business. “It’s
in this area of speed, that electronic systems
have come into their own. Not only do they
deliver us improved communication channels
but also we are now able to combat the problem
of timeliness that we had with our paper
based system.”
HUGE SAVINGS
The ideas generated so far have ranged from
technical solutions to the problems of managing
huge volumes of data traffic on the BT network
to practical ways of allowing rabbits on the
Madeley site to cross the boundary security
fence without setting off the alarm. “Ideas don’t
come for free”, explains Wright. “If we have a
good idea that saves us money or generates
additional income, then we are delighted to
reward the originator with 10% of the savings or
additional income up to a maximum of £30,000.”
Over £400,000 was paid out to employees in
Company Name
British Telecom
Industry
Telecoms
Annual Turnover
£22 billioin
Business Benefits
• Service Level Agreements
• Improved customer
satisfaction
• Operational savings
HEAT Saved British Telecom £97 MillionHEAT Saved British Telecom £97 Million
T E L E C O M S
FrontRange Solutions UK Ltd.
100 Longwater Avenue, GreenPark, Reading RG2 6GP
Tel: 0118 938 7400 Fax: 0118 938 7401
Email: info.uk@frontrange.com Web: www.frontrange.co.uk

2. 2000 alone. “It’s a great return on investment”,
says Wright, “and yet we know that we are only
scraping the surface.”
The performance and success of the division is
carefully monitored using a balanced scorecard.
“We monitor everything we can –from what we
are learning as an organisation, the financial
benefits of an idea, the number implemented, the
speed at which we respond to submitted ideas –
so that we know where to improve our processes.
Customer satisfaction levels are important too.
In the last three years satisfaction levels have
risen 15% to 85%, while the number of ideas
generated has doubled and yet the staff
processing them has reduced by 30%. “Our
electronic systems have made us more efficient in
the way we do our work. The next stage to
become more sophisticated with our targeting
when we canvas for ideas.”
A recent broad-focussed campaign –What’s
Bugging You –generated over 1,7000 ideas, while
other smaller campaigns may only generate 100
ideas. The spin-off from a recent request for
ideas for the Environmental group was that
awareness of the group’s internal campaign to
promote reuse and re-cycling went up
dramatically. “We measured the level of
awareness of the campaign before and after our
request for ideas. The other benefit was that we
also got a second wave of ideas into the system at
the end of the campaign.”
There may not be too many ideas that save BT
£65 million in investment costs as Manoj Chawla
did in 1997 when he suggested that data calls
should be taken off the network at an early stage
in order not to overload the voice network. The
resultant benefits also included the launch of new
services such as Surftime and BT Click. “Every
idea helps”, says Wright. “Now that we have
doubled the quantity of ideas, our target for next
year is to improve the quality of ideas by
providing incubating facilities to evaluate,
nurture, develop and refine those ideas so they
have a greater chance of success. Currently only
10% are implemented, next year we aim to push
that up to 15%.”
SELF-SERVICE
The next step is to make the system more
accessible to its customers by taking advantage of
the self-service components within HEAT. “We
are fine tuning this at the moment, so that people
can enter their ideas directly into the database or
simply look at the history of their ideas and see
what progress is being made”, explains
Crombleholme. “This facility is going to take our
customer service up another level.”
Wright and his team are also experimenting with
voice recognition technology so that eventually
people will be able to ring in their ideas and talk
straight into the HEAT system. “The technology
is there but we haven’t quite got it all hanging
together, but it won’t be long.”