AssetOptics Helps Cross-border Telecommunications Firm Transtelco Keep the Conversation Going
Business Challenges
With nearly 2,200 miles of infrastructure, including specialized equipment assets distributed among remote sites along the U.S.-Mexico border and offices hundreds of miles away, effective asset management and maintenance was crucial to Transtelco’s ability to keep its telecommunications clients satisfied. If overlooked routine maintenance was to bring down a fiber optic link, the result could be a major service outage—and a customer relations nightmare.
Transtelco had attempted to delegate the tracking of maintenance schedules to the city managers, but there was no specific software mechanism to ensure sufficient follow-through. “Without structure, we were working more on corrective instead of preventive maintenance,” says Rolando Gutierrez, Transtelco’s regional infrastructure manager. “We needed to document and track our assets and maintenance; we needed something to remind us when to do a specific job, log it, and report on it.”
Solution
One of Transtelco’s executives identified AssetOptics EAM as a viable option. Its low, predictable cost, easy-to-learn-anduse interface, and web-based accessibility would be a perfect solution for Transtelco’s widely dispersed infrastructure managers.
With AssetOptics EAM, Transtelco’s infrastructure managers moved from “tracking tasks in Excel, or whatever worked for them,” says Gutierrez, to working within a consistent, comprehensive framework purpose-built to facilitate tracking and documenting of assets and related maintenance.
The subscription-based, per-seat pricing model enables optimum flexibility for Transtelco. And, because AssetOptics EAM integrates not only asset management and preventive maintenance modules but also work management, reporting and planning/scheduling, Transtelco can also manage the efforts of technicians working in the field. As a result, responsibility for data capture was shifted to the field technicians, freeing up their managers’ time and streamlining maintenance data collection. This made the process more precise, error free, and more efficient.
Results
“Mexicali and Cd. Juarez were the first two cities to come online with the solution. Now, Los Angeles, San Diego, El Centro, El Paso and Dallas are online,” Gutierrez says. “The transition was easy once we started using it. The technicians executing the tasks are very comfortable with it.”
AssetOptics EAM has enabled the company to setup preventive maintenance reminders throughout the operation. Each infrastructure manager is tasked with documenting and tracking assets and their maintenance schedules, and field technicians document their tasks and the parts involved with the work.
AssetOptics EAM also keeps tabs on every bit of work performed and the corresponding expenses, so, over time, any authorized individual can view or pull reports on the histories of one or more assets. Previously, this was information that the infrastructure manager for each city would have provided manually. “We’ve reduced the burden on the infrastructure manager and established a knowledge base,” Gutierrez notes.
Gutierrez also reports that Transtelco has found unanticipated uses for AssetOptics EAM. “We are now using it for every maintenance service, as well as for routine jobs even when they are not maintenance or service related.” The solution also facilitates synergistic savings, since Transtelco can now determine—and schedule to accommodate—when multiple assets in the same location will require maintenance.
“We have data centers or sites that are not in a city,” says Gutierrez. “We might have, at one site, a preventive maintenance reminder for a facility air conditioner and an oil change for a generator set. Now, we can organize them and do both jobs on the same trip to that remote location.”
In the future, Gutierrez says, AssetOptics EAM’s reporting features will help to determine replacement cycles by identifying assets with frequent corrective actions. He also plans to use reports to determine if work is being performed by field technicians as scheduled.
Of course, the biggest benefit in the solution lies in the increased customer satisfaction that Transtelco is achieving. “Since we’re working on preventive instead of corrective maintenance, the direct impact is the reduction in service outages for our clients,” Gutierrez notes. “We are very impressed with the versatility and results that we have achieved with AssetOptics EAM.”
Company Background
Transtelco is a privately held provider of last mile, voice, data and collocation solutions over next-generation fiber optics. Headquartered in Cd. Juarez, Mexico, the firm has approximately 70 employees and provides service for carriers and enterprises along the border extending from Southern California to the Texas Valley. For more information, visit www.transtelco.net.
