Our utilities monitoring customer story focuses around RAM Utilities, which provides wood utility pole inspection and treatment services, primarily servicing rural electric cooperatives in the upper Midwest. RAM is focused on providing personal service with extremely high accountability and responsiveness across the utilities space.
Inspections and workforce management for the electrical utilities sector.
Prior to Fulcrum, RAM’s data collection process centered around a custom offline web application run on iPod Touch devices paired with a Dual external GPS cradle. After investigating other platforms, like ArcPad and others, entry costs were too prohibitive and the learning curve too steep for the time window to get a solution in place. This offline web application served its purpose for several years, but later changes to iOS platform caused the web tool to become unreliable. RAM’s inspectors can collect upwards of 150 inspections per day, so time spent troubleshooting issues in the field translated directly to lost productivity and time.
Fulcrum’s App Designer has allowed RAM to define a basic template for their core collection activities, then to quickly extend that template to suit individual customer needs. Being able to bring existing customer information out into the field has increased the efficiency of inspection teams, and provides their customers with a way to field-check existing data. “We have always found Fulcrum staff to be responsive to our ideas for improvement and requests for support, when the need arises. Quite simply, we couldn’t be happier with Fulcrum. It is an indispensable part of our company.”
The easy-to-use offline maps and record storage allows for rapid deployment of map packages and the collection of data in even the most remote rural locations. Using the Fulcrum API, RAM also generates customized daily summary reports, which allow their inspectors to track progress, and incentivizes them to meet productivity goals.
