Telent is a leading technology company with a UK-wide cable network field force. It maintains National Highways’ fibre network, providing the mission-critical communications that allow National Highways to control over 30,000 roadside devices and is currently delivering a major project to upgrade the network to the latest high bandwidth 10GE Transmission network technology.
What was the key challenge Telent faced before one.network?
“With the huge effort to roll out fibre across the UK, more telecoms companies than ever are looking to dig up the roads, constrained against the limited resources and skilled workers available. In addition, the combination of Brexit and Covid-19 has increased the cost and delivery of parts, creating long delays.
At Telent, we work with broadband providers such as City Fibre, Openreach and Gigaclear, to process, coordinate and submit permits for fibre build. We generally handle 80-100 permits a day from Openreach and processed 460 from City Fibre in February alone. Regularly, we found that these permits were being rejected because we didn’t have visibility of available road space; we would have to visit 3 or 4 different systems to find the information we needed for permit application, and this was very time consuming.
Our permit planning time was slow and only 52% of our permits were being accepted first time.
We needed a way to make organising and coordinating fibre works permits from multiple organisations simpler, easier and less time-consuming.”
Key Results
Over 30% increase in first-time permit approvals
speeding up the process and reducing the costs of submitting modifications to permits.
166% return on investment
eliminating the need for an extra head to deal with challenged permits and admin.
Reduced permit planning time
helping achieve team and company targets.
"one.network has provided an efficient one stop shop enabling quicker access to permit approvals, speeding up the overall process."
Head of Programme Management, Telent
How has one.network changed that and what results have you seen since implementing one.network?
“Now, one.network is our one stop shop for planning. We have embedded one.network into our workflows and now rely on it every day to coordinate fibre permit applications.
With access to 30+ data layers on one.network, including bus stops, traffic signals and Section 58 restrictions, we have all the information we need in a single environment. Rather than having to click between and look on four different systems, as well as contact several departments at Highway Authorities, we can get all the information we need on one.network. The data we now have available means we can easily identify bus stop numbers and traffic signals for road closure permits and look at the proximity of schools to works locations so we can ensure we determine appropriate enforcement times.
We can also look at current and future planned permits months in advance, so we can better coordinate works and organise collaborative working with other asset owners.
one.network has helped us reduce permit rejections and improve our relationships with authorities, as well as speed up efficiency for our clients. It’s been especially valuable during and post-pandemic, allowing us to self-source information and feed it back.
We’ve seen an over 30% increase in first-time permit approvals, bringing us closer to our targets and reducing costs from submitting modifications to permits. Overall, the platform has eliminated the need for an extra head to deal with challenged permits and admin and has given us a 166% return on investment. Another benefit we’ve unlocked since using one.network is that now we can see a full audit trail of who has carried out civil and digging work to roads. This is especially important if assets are damaged during works as it helps provide evidence back to the source. Now, if we are wrongly attributed penalties, because of faults, the audit trail on one.network proves that we were not a fault, helping save us time and money.”
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