Katapult Engineering

When attachers have to pay for pre-existing violations, it's hard to encourage them to play by the rules. New attachers often incur enormous make ready costs bringing a pole up to spec, all because a previous attacher failed to meet safety standards. As a result, attachers are disincentivized to follow the make ready process. Maybe this means they avoid any poles that could present any possible issues. Maybe it means they don’t bother submitting an application at all. Instead of invoicing new attachers for violations that were dangerous long before they applied, pole owners and their engineering contractors can do some forensic work to find who might be responsible. The company filter in Katapult Pro Integrated Pole Loading is one way to evaluate who caused the pole to fail. Using filtering and other investigative work, teams can identify the cost causer and generate customized make ready invoices to assign costs to different parties.  Understanding pre-existing violations is less about who to invoice and more about ensuring new attachers aren’t charged for doing things the right way. While assessing cost causer is a start, it fails to address who should take on construction costs to fix violations quickly and have to recoup dollars later from violating attachers. It’s nuanced and takes a lot of wisdom to get right, but investigating who's at fault rewards good attachers, holds bad players accountable, and improves trust within the process. For more information on make ready features, shoot us an email at hello@katapultengineering.com. 

This just in—see what dropped today in the newest version of Katapult Pro.

Safety and speed tend to sit in tension with one another throughout the attachment process. But what if we could prioritize safety without slowing things down? Pole owners are first concerned with safety and reliability, and they’re always trying to ensure that telecom attachments aren’t jeopardizing the resiliency of the grid. Attachers, on the other hand, would prefer to simplify the process to fit their own workflows, and oftentimes application requests include the info that attachers value and fail to meet the pole owner’s requirements. The result is inconsistent submissions with varying degrees of information. Joint use departments have to sort through requests and send back unfinished applications. It’s a huge burden on top of overloaded teams. But you can relieve pressure and avoid bottlenecks using an application management portal. Application vetting and QC let your team set required application information and automatically check submissions for you. The ability to customize the application process and requirements lets your team facilitate clear and smooth processes to meet the standards you set.  It’s a win-win—utilities and their vendors get the deliverables they expect, the way they expect them, to their quality standards. Attachers and their vendors submit better applications using safe, consistent processes for better workflows and greater trust. The right tools should prioritize safety and reliability while relieving the burden on your team and keeping the application process flowing smoothly. If you’re looking for ways to improve application management and develop deeper trust within the industry, give us a shout at hello@katapultengineering.com.

Pole inspections are necessary to avoid safety and reliability issues. Check out how you can help improve the inspection process to protect poles.

Happy Labor Day! Hope you’re having a great day off and enjoying time with family. We’re grateful for all the hardworking folks who keep our communities connected and safe! 

It’s frustrating to have spotty internet and subpar speeds because providers keep passing your neighborhood by. It’s even more frustrating when they opt for over-served areas instead of the wide-open poles in your community. Take BEAD for example. While providers are encouraged to reach underserved communities, they still try to find the largest of these qualifying areas to get the highest ROI. As a result, even with public funding, small, underserved communities are still likely to be the last to receive high-speed, reliable internet. But we can actually create value and incentivize builds in these communities by collecting municipality pole inventories. For Katapult Pro users, the process is simple and straightforward—snap photos of the poles within your local municipality and note the current providers attached to the poles. You can create immense value by giving providers data they can leverage to find new areas to build while taking stock of potential competitors and predicting make ready costs. And broadband projects based on the data naturally create new opportunities for your team to provide engineering services. If you’re looking for ways to generate more work and provide greater value in your own backyard, shoot us a message and we can set up models within Katapult Pro to help you get started today.

Visibility is essential as we reach underserved communities. How do you make sure you have the right perspective? 

How do you define joint use health? There are a ton of measurables we can look for to determine if a project is on track (efficiency, outcomes, minimal mistakes, etc), but the ability to deliver on time is a pretty good indicator of the overall health of a pole attachments application process. A healthy joint use program meets deadlines and delivers on time. The FCC has defined what “on time” means, with standard timelines for small and large applications to help programs keep requests moving and still have time to ensure safety standards are met. While these concrete deadlines are great, utilities need workflows with FCC timelines built in to effectively keep projects on track. To help joint use programs consistently assess this, the Katapult Pro application management portal standard configuration also includes timeline tracking based on FCC timelines. Teams can review past projects and assess if previous deadlines were in compliance with the FCC’s timelines. There’s a fine line between being efficient and prioritizing speed over safety. We’re all well aware of this tension, with attachers pushing for faster timelines and pole owners protecting against cut corners. Better transparency and on-time delivery reduces tension and builds trust between utilities and attachers. Attachers can check the status of applications and utilities can protect their grid and have confidence that they’re meeting national regulations and demands. That’s the beauty of a public-facing portal—it’s transparent to keep applicants informed, it’s customizable to address the needs of the utility and match their workflow, and it streamlines the attachment request process to improve trust. Check out our beta timeline tracking dashboard below to see how we visualize application compliance. For more information on application management or FCC timelines, give us a shout at hello@katapultengineering.com!

The pole attachments process is so complicated that a request from a single attacher can be messy. But two attachers requesting the same pole? That’s even harder to get right. When overlapping attachment requests occur, the state of the pole depends a lot on how much time has passed since the first application. If both requests are submitted back to back, then both can simply be included in one plan. If a lot of time has passed, it’s safe to assume that construction has been finished and you can recollect data and start the process again. It’s the time in between that’s considered the danger zone. Enough time has gone by for the first request to be designed and handed off, but chances are construction isn’t yet finished. This makes the current state of the pole really hard to figure out. You could collect data in the morning and the pole could be different in the afternoon! It’s a mess and causes serious headaches. And ignoring overlapping attachments creates a huge safety issue and logistical nightmare. To help minimize this pain, our Engineering Services team uses Katapult Pro to solve overlapping application issues. When multiple requests are submitted within the danger zone, our team imports and calls make ready using the first request’s original engineering plan. So when a second request comes in, Plan 1 represents the existing condition of the pole with the moves highlighted in yellow. Designers can create Plan 2 based on those previous make ready moves. After a window of time has passed (we use twelve months as our timeframe), new requests go through a validation routine similar to the PCI workflow, where field crews confirm if construction for Plan 1 is finished according to the design. If everything matches, back office crews can use Plan 1 to create space for the second attachment request. As more providers jostle for space on the same poles, teams need to find good tools and leverage effective workflows to solve overlapping applications. Are you dealing with multiple attachment requests? Reach out to our configuration team at support@katapultengineering.com to set up the workflow for your team! 

How do you turn amateurs into experts? Make ready is really hard to learn quickly. So much of it is niche and constantly evolving as the industry changes and new practices become standard. Designers are working with deceptively difficult topics that demand a detailed understanding, not just an ability to follow rules and regulations. It’s hard to teach and onboarding tends to be slow, requiring hands-on learning. It can take months just getting new staff acquainted with basic violations and how to identify them. And when you’re an expert juggling multiple projects, your time is best spent teaching team members how to make strategic and cost-effective moves. We can’t automate make ready engineering—it requires a level of creativity and critical thinking that AI just can’t provide. But we can automate violation flagging based on clearances and standards you set. That way, even with no previous experience, new staff can walk in and begin providing value from day one. And you can spend your time explaining best practices, instead of pointing out every clearance issue. Katapult Pro Make Ready lets you import national clearances and adjust rules based on the pole owner’s standards. Auto-flagging lets you train new staff to design better solutions with minimum experience. Learn more at https://lnkd.in/dRwyYvc4.