It’s been a great year for improvements in ConSol…

At the beginning of 2018, our product team embarked upon a journey to bring ConSol Mobile to Android devices after an illuminating 18 months gaining valuable feedback from our iOS users. These meetings and observations left me impressed with the resourcefulness of telco construction companies, both large and small, in using available tools in new and creative ways. I was also struck by the need to reduce the administrative overhead of providing updates, evidence and claims to clients. On several occasions, we sat in users’ kitchens, which played equal part family area and office for looking after the books once the kids were asleep.

On the other side of the fence, prime contractors and network owners are being challenged to do more with less. Business operations evolve at a faster rate than ever as the implementation of NBN changes by technology and region. Business systems must achieve high levels of flexibility to continue to adapt to this challenge.

So, along came ConSol Mobile, the app designed entirely for field crews, and some other tools to support telco survey, design and construction work in Australia. These have been developed over the course of 2018 by our team of talented analysts, designers, developers and QA folk.

Building automated interfaces is now available to those with, and without, access to developers to create programmatic solutions for data synchronisation or integration with systems such as SAP, IBM Maximo, MS Dynamics and other business systems. ConSol’s Extended Gateway enables users to rapidly import new work orders into ConSol. ConSol will accept almost any formatted spreadsheet and can progress orders up to and including the issuing of work directly to field crews. For those with resources to create programmatic solutions, ConSol’s REST API offers a range of services to create, update and read elements of work orders. We’ve seen this used successfully to add job packs and new work orders, update the client and provide images and redline markups in realtime. This has created massive efficiencies for canny users.

ConSol Mobile is used by field crews to eliminate printing of job packs, capture watermarked images and provide real-time updates to clients. Our analysis has shown that field crews are saving at least 20 minutes with every job, are removing printing costs associated with job packs, and clients are happier as work updates are occurring up to 60% faster. This app is available on Apple and Android devices and has free and paid options. More on ConSol Mobile in another of our articles. If you want to get started, simply search for it in the Google Play or Apple App stores.

For those companies with sophisticated data analysis and reporting needs, the Datamart service provides access to all operational data and two hourly updates for your data warehouse. Over the course of 2018, we’ve continued to expand the available dataset and provide normalisation of events for easier representation in your reports.

There is a trend for project managers to issue more granular work orders that represent discrete tasks and geographical locations. This highlights the clear need to accurately identify the job status and enable clear associations between geo tagged evidence of the completed work and job site. Bulk order processing when issuing and accepting work, and claim and variation importers supports the user to achieve this efficiently. Automatic closure of projects ensures that further work does not occur under the project budget and acts as a trigger for end-client invoicing.