Realizing ROI with Telecom Inspection
Managing tower inventory is critical for tower owners who seek to generate revenue through new and existing carrier leases.
Tower owners run into challenges maintaining accurate inventory as carriers continue to upgrade and maintain their network assets. Oftentimes, perhaps through acquisitions or undocumented modifications, a current or fully accurate inventory of carrier equipment is not available. Globally, many tower owners find undocumented equipment on their towers and can even have difficulty identifying the owner. This is not the case in the U.S. as much, but it can be a challenge there too.
Another challenge is the expense of a tower climber – often the reason inventory management isn’t consistent is that it’s expensive and time-consuming to have a tower climber inventory a single tower, let alone multiple towers for an entire portfolio. This manual process for tower inspection leaves room for errors or discrepancies that are often not discovered until a new tenant is added or another tower maintenance is performed. These discrepancies waste time and lower profit margins preventing tower owners from the opportunity to optimize a return on investment.
Digital tower inventory management can be performed by robotics. Currently, the most common physical asset data capture is done using a drone pilot operator. Drone-captured data can replace virtually all climbs for discovery and inspection, such as mount mapping, appurtenance inventory, and conditional inspections. Using a drone pilot helps automate the tower inspection process – it’s less costly and 100% safer. This drone-captured data integrates with a digital twin software platform, providing precise analytics and a single source of consistent data. This is key to breaking down silos and utilizing data throughout an entire organization and by contractors or carrier tenants.
In addition to creating a catalyst for organizational automation, digital twin software analytics provide an efficient way to ensure lease compliance, support maintaining the condition of the tower and ground space, and simplifies adding more tenants to the tower. These digital options can also help telecom carriers make informed decisions about future investments in network infrastructure and equipment, which can directly impact not only revenue but competitiveness. And by analyzing inventory data with digital twin software, tower owners can optimize their digital tower inventory management, and telecom carriers can better understand their network performance, identify trends, and anticipate future needs.
Tower owners acquiring towers find that due diligence is often condensed to a 30 or 60-day window for verification of condition and availability of lease space. Often, only representative tower sites are examined and buyers have to make a judgment on a portfolio value without seeing every site. Digital tower analytics can be examined and assessed from a desktop in a fraction of the time it would take an owner or tower maintenance crew to visit each site. In a short window, all tower sites can be inspected by a drone, analyzed by a digital twin software platform, and available for buyers’ review. For sellers, having the data before the sale enhances the portfolio’s value by eliminating doubts about their tower’s status and condition – yielding a more attractive portfolio and accelerating the due diligence portion of the transaction.
Tower owners are seeing the benefit of having complete and accurate data on their towers, not only for their internal efficiency, sales acceleration, and revenue recapture but in making this data available to their carrier tenants, they save the carriers and their contractors a substantial amount of money by eliminating site visits, lowering engineering costs and minimizing change orders that arise from the unexpected site or tower conditions all the while ensuring the safety for the organization and its crews.
Digital tower inventory management is critical and effective for tower owners who want to drive safety, efficiency, and cost-effective practices to their organizations, their carrier tenants, and their contractors.
Learn more about using digital twin platforms for digital tower inventory management by contacting Pointivo at team@pointivo.com.
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