What do you do when your annual pole attachment requests suddenly leap from 300 to 5,000?
This was the exact challenge facing Owen Electric Cooperative. Almost overnight, a flood of new federal broadband initiatives overwhelmed their manual, disconnected inspection processes.
Owen Electric’s engineering team was struggling with a fragmented mix of paper maps, clipboards, spreadsheets, and various disconnected apps that created massive bottlenecks. A single inspection setup took 10 to 12 hours of prep time, while a full job cycle for one request could last up to a month. Ultimately, such delays put federally mandated 30–45 day timelines at serious risk, and the team saw the process was unsustainable.
Owen Electric knew they couldn’t simply add staff to handle the new volume. Instead, they needed to fundamentally overhaul their process. Using the Fulcrum platform, they built their own single, streamlined pole attachment app tailored precisely to their joint use workflow.
The new app created in Fulcrum was “simple enough for everyone to use,” which led to immediate adoption by the entire team.
The transformation was immediate. Inspection setup time was slashed by an incredible 98%. Work that previously took 10 to 12 hours was now completed in just 10-15 minutes.
This solved the prep problem, but how did this new pole attachment app impact their field time? What was the final, per-pole time savings? And how did they ultimately scale capacity to handle a 10-17x increase in demand?
Download the free case study to see the complete transformation. See for yourself why their engineers call the new workflow the “best thing that’s happened in joint use”.
