Each of our depots keeps a small drawer of spare SIM cards. When a driver's phone breaks, a supervisor takes the SIM out of the broken phone, puts it into a spare and hands it back, and the driver is on the road again in ten minutes with the same number. Nobody in IT is involved, which is exactly why it works at six in the morning.
This spring our mobile supplier offered the next handset model for our drivers, and it has no SIM tray. The number lives on an eSIM, a profile downloaded onto a chip inside the phone. We ran a pilot with forty handsets at two depots for three months to see what would change.
The handsets were fine. The drawer was not. Four phones broke during the pilot, and in each case the number could not simply move to another phone. Someone with rights to our account on the network's business portal had to retire the old profile and issue a new one, which the driver then scanned onto the replacement from a code. Only two people had those rights, both in my team at head office and both working office hours. One driver waited a whole morning. On the other three occasions the depot sent the lorry out with a phone borrowed from the yard, and customers spent the day ringing a number the driver did not have.
There is a security side too. Moving a number becomes something anyone with portal access can do remotely, without touching the phone. That is convenient for us, and equally convenient for anyone who takes over that portal account, so the access has to be guarded like any other system that could redirect our sign in codes.
We have about a year before the older models stop being offered, and most of the work is about people rather than technology. Each depot will have two named supervisors with limited rights to reissue a profile, signing in with security keys, and every reissue will alert my team. The whole process will be rehearsed at every depot before the first new handset arrives.
I expect more of the small physical jobs that depots do for themselves to turn quietly into permissions in somebody's portal. When the card in the drawer disappears, decide who holds the right that replaces it before the first phone breaks.
– Serguey Shinder
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