They may not be hauling up cages of crabs from the deep or trucking across the frozen wilderness, but compared to most of us, wireless contractor field crews and tower techs have dangerous jobs. And there are a lot more wireless contractor personnel out there – doing work with far more economic impact – than there are crab-boat crews and ice-road truckers.
Wireless contractors already take safety seriously. But a new breed of cloud-based systems is enabling new ways to boost it further. Deployment operations management solutions were developed to better manage and execute high-volume critical-infrastructure deployments, and they’ve found enthusiastic adherents among some of the world’s top telecom, solar, and EV-charging companies.
Deployment operations management solutions combine project, site, and asset management capabilities across thousands of distributed locations and offer dedicated capabilities such as project templates, sophisticated dashboards and reporting, contractor portals, forms, and offline mobile apps for technicians in the field. They standardize highly repeatable workflows while localizing for specific jurisdictions and sites based on permitting needs, priority, materials required, and other factors.
That these solutions drive productivity is well known. Less obvious has been their role in improving contractor safety, which they do in several important ways.
1) The safest tower climb is the one avoided
Tower climbs are part of a wireless contractor’s job. But integrated planning and tracking can help make sure that each tower climb counts.
If standardized templates can, for example, delineate to the tower tech exactly what measurements and photographs at what angles need to be taken for project closeout, he can take those measurements and capture those images on the same climb during which he did the work. Eliminate additional climbs and you eliminate exposure to the risks associated with that climb. When you’re talking about thousands or tens of thousands of job sites, what may seem like a trivial risk reduction has genuine real-world safety impact.
2) Less time in the field means less risk
A wrinkle on the above idea is how deployment operations management systems’ ability to drive standardization throughout many job sites can enable more consistent field processes and the proactive management of project dependencies. That involves aligning project teams and the resources they need so that your people, equipment, and hardware are dispatched at the right place and at the right time. . Also, the improved planning these solutions enable can help ensure that the permitting process syncs with project planning. With the installation of, say, a small cell, doing so can reduce traffic controls – and the time that the staff for whom those traffic controls are in place must spend in the-right of-way. More broadly, sharper planning and execution through digitized processes help crews get it right the first time, reducing rework and time on the job site. Again, enhanced safety is a derivative – but very real – benefit.
3) The right person for the right job is often the safer choice
Cloud-based deployment operations management solutions track employee skills, experience, certifications, training, and, critically, past performance. Performance tracking extends to safety-related data that wireless contractors can share with clients and their own vendors. Having a central repository and robust reporting of safety-related metrics provides real-time access to data that keep stakeholders continually engaged in worker safety and ways to improve it. That enhances accountability across the board.
4) Usability impacts safety
All of the above depend on usability. That applies not only in the office, but perhaps more importantly in the field. Enabling mobile access and updates to job site workflow templates – and doing so in a way that field crews consider a help rather than a burden – is essential to reaping the gains that digitalization can bring. Put another way, if they don’t use it, it won’t help you or them. That access needs to be online and offline, because the rural tower your building isn’t giving you four bars just yet.
The power of deployment operations management solutions derives from having one data model in the cloud that delivers a clear view of a wireless contractor’s full scope of operations. Having one holistic system to manage sites, assets, field work, and many other functions brings clarity to operations, efficiency to deployments, and safer environments for those doing the hard work in the field.
