Fiber crews move 30,000 feet a week. Locates have to keep up.

It depends on the state and on who you are working for. Michigan is excavator submission, so we submit our own tickets, and that is what we prefer. Some GCs and some network owners manage tickets themselves and simply tell you which areas are ready to go. When that happens you lose the ability to forecast. You cannot see which tickets are clear, you cannot plan where crews go next week, and you are at their mercy. Submitting your own is the difference between planning and waiting.

In order, and slowly. We give as much advance notice as we can and start by trying to work it out, usually one or two phone calls. Retransmitting is not step one, because a retransmit lands on their system and we would rather come to a resolution first. If the calls produce nothing, we start a round of retransmits. If a locator is on site we hold off. If they do not show, or the footage that was promised does not appear, we put in another round. By about the third round we start tracking internally: when the locator arrived, when he left, how many tickets he closed. That becomes a documented loss report if we need to present one. You cannot do this in every market and you have to be wise about how many rigs you put where, but these companies are contracted by the utility to prevent damages, and there is a standard they are supposed to hit.

The crew photographs the destroyed markings against the ticket right there, and the office retransmits as destroyed marks. It is a normal part of running an active route rather than an exception. The thing that makes it fast is not the software on its own, it is having a working relationship with the locators plus a system that carries the evidence for you.

You have to see it before the crew is standing on it. When a section is flagged as an abnormal operating condition or the ticket is not ready, the foreman sees that 300 feet on the map, jumps it, and comes back later. The bigger version of the same thing is the daily map review, where we decide whether a crew has enough cleared work for tomorrow or gets reassigned to a different market. Between the two, we have basically eliminated our wait cost.

No. You keep submitting through your state's one-call system. What Quick811 replaces is everything after that. Our old office process was a KMZ copy-pasted out of the one-call platform: submit the ticket, redraw the polygon, paste in the ticket number, then check positive response one ticket at a time or keep an eye on an inbox. Lots of steps, lots of back and forth. That is the part we automated.