From four tools to one: a telecoms infrastructure company in production

This is a summary of a Huskies deployment at a Greek telecoms infrastructure company that builds FTTH (fibre to the home) networks for a main contractor. The company's name is withheld until we have permission to publish it.

Before

The information for a single job was split across four tools:

• A spreadsheet with the job list, statuses and crew assignments
• A messaging app for photos from the field
• A second spreadsheet for measurements and invoicing
• Email for communication with the main contractor

The weekly KPI report for the main contractor was compiled by hand every Sunday evening from those four sources.

What was set up

• Jobs as records with the company's own fields: address, job type, phase, crew, quantities.
• A phase pipeline per job, with an appointment and a status for each phase.
• The mobile app for crews, with offline support and photos attached directly to the job.
• Aging rules: jobs idle for 15 and 30 days are pinned and the owner is notified.
• Automatic costing from recorded quantities.
• Saved reports, and a weekly KPI report sent automatically every Thursday.
• Import of the existing spreadsheets, with columns mapped to fields.

In production today

What we learned

Three things mattered more than any single feature.

1. Import first. Starting from the existing data meant the history didn't have to be re-entered.
2. The field side has to be shorter than the old way: open the job, take the photo, change the status.
3. The report comes last. It became automatic only once statuses and quantities were recorded in the field, at the time of the work.