When telecoms perform truck rolls and dispatch a site engineer for troubleshooting it adds a large expense in terms of operational costs. In these site visits, the company needs to bear the travel time of the technician, mileage cost, and the services costs which can increase the overall operational costs to a great extent.

Here we will discuss how telecoms can deliver high customer satisfaction while reducing operational costs.

Why Truck Rolls are Challenging?

Truck rolls are challenging for telecoms for many reasons. In the latest telecom systems, the company needs only a power alarm or some basic alarm to indicate a fault at the site and perform a truck roll operation to troubleshoot the site. In some cases, only a single visit happens to be sufficient to clear the alarm. But in other cases, additional visits are required to resolve the issue. So, each additional visit will add an expense to the operational costs of the company.

Sometimes, it also happens that no fault appears on-site and the company has to bear the expense for a non-productive truck roll for no reason. This is usually known as No Fault Found (NFF) dispatch. The telecom operators can avoid NFF dispatches by actively investing in data, such as Gisual’s outage intelligence. Most of the time though, telecoms find out this information through antiquated and expensive processes.

Another challenge associated with truck rolls:

• Safety risks when dispatching on-call and after-hours crews during extreme weather events. Unfortunate accidents are more likely to occur during these extraordinarily dangerous truck rolls.
• Sometimes, telecoms will perform multiple truck rolls on the same problem, causing a compounding labor expense. This is known as a “re-dispatch”
• Re-dispatches typically occur when a dispatch technician requires additional support from a cable crew.
• Such situations can be avoided by utilizing powerful business intelligence tools that 1) quickly identify issues, 2) provide intel on the approver resources that are required

Sometimes, telecoms incur significant truck roll expense when dispatching on inexperienced technician, failing to account for specific conditions in the service area or the absence of the right tools. Such situations can be avoided by efficiently managing truck rolls and resolving issues remotely.

How to Optimize Truck Roll Operations?

Truck rolls are a cost of doing business in telecom. Even if telecoms consider truck rolls as the last resort to fix the fault on-site, it’s a large percentage of expenses related to the operation. Therefore, the best way is to optimize the truck roll operation by implementing an automated solution on the site that will provide remote situational awareness.

Many telecom companies adopt automated site monitoring systems that can provide more visibility and remote access to the site to ensure the proper functioning of the overall network. Such systems can also assist the operators to resolve the issue directly from NOC.

To optimize truck roll operations using an automated site monitoring system, the telecoms should consider the following features available in the system:

Interfacing and Remote Configuration Capabilities

The automated site monitoring system should be capable of interfacing with all the underlying power, security, and subsystems. This way, it will provide the data from the telecom site to the web interface through which the site can be configured remotely.

Centralized Remote Access

An automated system should be a central place to connect the underlying controllers and manage the site remotely. Through a centralized system, it will predict a truck roll more accurately, saving from NFF dispatches and reducing the costs for wasted truck rolls.

Gisual Outage Intelligence

20% of non-productive truck rolls are a result of off-network outages. Our outage intelligence data proactively diagnoses and correlates off-network outages.

Built-in Intelligence and Reboot System

An AI-based automation system can also provide a direct reboot option for the telecom system. It can either be performed directly from the NOC or even autonomously by the device itself. With built-in intelligence, the system can detect the alarm and attempt to clear the alarm by rebooting the network.

Summary

The cost of non-productive truck rolls impacts telecoms of all sizes and it’s a key metric that all should track. The issue with truck rolls is that they are very effective at finding the answer, however they are equally as expensive and inefficient to operations. Figuring out ways to cut down on wasted truck rolls is a great path to reducing operating costs and increasing customer satisfaction.