How a leading national mobile operator in the Caribbean, part of a major regional telecom group, retired its Excel-based SIM tracking for a central, automated inventory platform: vendor ordering, approval-gated onboarding, range management and live stock visibility across every outlet on every island.
The national SIM inventory, every IMSI, ICCID and number range the operator owned, lived in shared Excel spreadsheets, maintained by hand, reconciled by memory, and disconnected from both the SIM vendor upstream and the sales outlets downstream.
Multiple copies, conflicting versions, manual edits: nobody could say with certainty which SIMs were available, allocated or already sold.
Orders to the third-party SIM vendor went by email; deliveries arrived as files handled ad hoc, with no approval trail before entering circulation.
IMSI and number ranges copied and pasted between sheets and consoles, so duplicates, overlaps and typos surfaced only when an activation failed.
A SIM was a row, not an asset, with no record of whether it was received, allocated, active, swapped or retired, and no history of how it got there.
Stock sent to outlets across the islands disappeared from view: stockouts discovered when a store ran dry, surpluses never rebalanced.
Periodic audits meant days of comparing spreadsheets against network and billing data, and the numbers never quite matched.
The Solution
One platform became the database of record for every SIM in the country. It manages the full lifecycle (ordered, received, available, allocated, active, swapped, retired) and connects the whole chain: vendor upstream, provisioning systems alongside, and every outlet downstream.
Governance
Governance across the chain: role-based access for warehouse, finance and outlet staff, approval gates on vendor onboarding and large transfers, and a complete audit history for every SIM from purchase order to retirement.
SIM purchase orders raised from the platform itself, with quantities, profiles and delivery tracked per order, end to end.
The vendor uploads SIM output files directly into the platform; nothing enters inventory until it clears an approval gate.
IMSI and number ranges validated on entry, deduplicated, and selected visually from the UI, with no copy-paste and no overlaps.
Every SIM carries a state and a history, with each allocation, activation, swap and retirement recorded automatically.
Stock allocated and transferred to outlets across every island, with balances, thresholds and replenishment managed centrally.
Inventory continuously reconciled against provisioning and billing state, with discrepancies flagged, not discovered at audit.
Each SIM moves through explicit states (ordered, received, available, allocated, active, swapped, retired), and every transition is recorded with who, when and why. Questions that once took days of spreadsheet archaeology ("where did this range go?") are now a lookup.
The inventory is not an island: as ranges are allocated, subscribers are provisioned into the underlying network and billing systems as part of processing. Inventory state and network state can no longer drift apart; the platform keeps them in lockstep by design.
In Depth
The platform closes the loop on both ends of the inventory: upstream, a governed vendor pipeline that controls what enters circulation; downstream, nationwide distribution that tracks every SIM to the outlet shelf it sits on.
Upstream · Vendor Pipeline
Order where the inventory lives. POs raised against real stock levels and forecast demand, not against a guess from a stale spreadsheet.
Structured vendor handover. The vendor delivers SIM output files into the platform itself, tied to the originating order, with no loose files in inboxes.
Approval before onboarding. Uploaded batches are validated and human-approved before a single SIM becomes available for allocation.
Validated on entry. Ranges checked for duplicates, overlaps and format errors at the door, so bad data is rejected, not discovered downstream.
Order-to-shelf traceability. Every SIM in circulation traces back to a purchase order, a delivery batch and an approval decision.
Downstream · National Distribution
Per-outlet stock levels. Real-time balances for every store and franchise across the archipelago, with no more calling around to find stock.
Transfers as transactions. Stock movements between warehouse and outlets recorded as governed transfers, not handwritten notes.
Thresholds & replenishment. Low-stock alerts and data-driven replenishment keep remote island outlets selling instead of waiting.
Shrinkage made visible. Discrepancies between allocated, sold and activated stock surface automatically, per outlet.
Planning on real data. Sales velocity per outlet and per island feeds vendor ordering, so the supply chain plans itself from evidence.
SIM inventory went from a liability that consumed admin effort and produced errors to a governed supply chain the operator can actually steer, with every SIM accounted for from the vendor's factory to a customer's phone.
| Dimension | Before: manual & spreadsheet-based | After: central & automated |
|---|---|---|
| System of record | Shared Excel files, conflicting copies | One central database with full lifecycle statesOrdered · received · available · allocated · active · swapped · retired |
| Vendor ordering | Email threads, untracked deliveries | In-platform POs with delivery and batch tracking |
| Stock onboarding | Ad hoc files loaded without checks | Approval-gated, validated vendor uploads |
| Range integrity | Duplicates and overlaps found at activation failure | Validated and deduplicated on entry, with ~95% fewer discrepancies |
| Outlet visibility | Unknown until a store ran out | Live per-outlet balances across every island |
| Reconciliation | Days of manual cross-checking per audit | Continuous, automatic, discrepancy-flagged |
| Admin effort | Constant spreadsheet upkeep and stock counts | ~70% less effort on tracking and reconciliation |
Spreadsheets
One database of record replaced every Excel copy in circulation.
Fewer discrepancies
Validation at entry, reconciliation running continuously.
National stock view
Every outlet on every island, visible in real time.
Less admin effort
Tracking, transfers and audits automated end to end.
An inventory that lived in spreadsheets, reconciled by memory and audited in panic, became a governed national supply chain, where every SIM traces from purchase order to outlet shelf to active subscriber.
Central lifecycle tracking, governed vendor ordering, approval-gated onboarding and live outlet visibility: one platform accounting for every SIM you own, wherever it sits.
Passive plant in GIS, active inventory in an M6-class system, faults in ServiceNow, plus spreadsheets from each acquired business. The POC ran on production data and turned known-inaccurate records into an actionable asset.
A network of hundreds of thousands of sites generating ~1.25 crore alarms a day, handled by static correlation rules and manual RCA. Six coordinated AI capabilities turned that flood into unique actionable incidents, without a single byte leaving the operator's estate.
Thousands of change requests a month across hundreds of change categories, assessed by checklist and delivered by hand. Seven coordinated flows turn each CR into a risk-scored, simulation-backed, auditable operational outcome.
Customer identity withheld by request and referred to throughout as a "leading national mobile operator in the Caribbean, part of a major regional telecom group." Improvement figures are indicative estimates reflecting the observed and expected outcomes of the automated SIM inventory deployment; exact results vary by stock volumes, outlet footprint and rollout phase. Internal system and vendor-integration specifics are intentionally generalised.
