MGE Underground Streamlines Call-Before-You-Dig Ticketing with New HCSS Marketplace Partner 811spotter

811spotter Greenlights Utilities for MGE Underground

Performing any excavation work comes with the risk that underground utilities exist. The hazard of digging into underground utilities can cause fires, explosions, flooding, electrical shocks, arcing or toxic inhalation – all of which can cause serious injury or death. Working with 811 to request information to locate sewer, telephone, fuel, electric, waterline, and other utilities is part of every contractor’s life. But the process can be cumbersome, and there isn’t a central system to capture all the information needed in one place.

MGE’s Manual Process Posed a Problem:

HCSS user, MGE Underground, is a utility infrastructure contractor based out of Paso Robles, CA. After experiencing rapid growth, the company began to struggle to keep up with the renewal timelines of the thousands of 811 tickets coming through their office. They needed to find a system that was built for how they worked to replace their complicated spreadsheets and time-consuming manual workflow of managing 811 emails, robocalls, and renewals.

“Our full-time people updating the spreadsheet and calling in for renewals just couldn’t keep up,” says Daniel Martin, Lead Project Manager, MGE Underground. “We had down days nearly every month where tickets expired because they missed the renewal date – putting our crew on standby and costing us thousands of dollars to keep them paid until work resumed.”

A Simple Solution:

“Nobody gets into the construction business to manage 811 tickets,” says Marc Krichman, CEO and Co-founder of 811spotter. ”People get into this business because they like to build stuff. 811spotter makes it radically easy to track, document, and communicate ticket information between office and field teams.”

811spotter is a contractor’s solution for automating all the details of your 811 tickets from the moment you create them through your state’s notification center. “811spotter is a software platform that makes it easy to track, document, and communicate 811 ticket information to the entire team,” says Marc. “We want to make this as dead simple as possible, so customers can get the information they need as fast as possible.”

When you create the ticket, a communication from your state’s 811 center is sent to you. 811spotter automatically reads that information, gathering all the necessary ticket information so you can view all your tickets in an office or mobile app, with unlimited users able to access the information.

“Many companies don’t have any control and central visibility of 811 tickets,” says Marc. “And that comes back to bite them time and time again when there’s damage. Sometimes they don’t even know whether they’re legal when the tickets expire. There are so many bad business outcomes that happen when the tickets aren’t managed correctly.”

On average, 811spotter manages 2,500 monthly tickets for MGE. The automated system does the equivalent work of three full-time employees, enabling MGE to allocate their scarce resource of people to do more important jobs. Advanced features allow MGE to see if they have all the information needed in order to proceed with the job, and whether there are yellow or red indicators on their ticket, which means some action is required.

HCSS Marketplace Partner

As an HCSS Marketplace Partner, 811spotter can organize 811 tickets with the cost codes in HeavyJob. “Integrating with 811spotter will help HCSS customers eliminate double entry by pulling jobs and cost codes from HeavyJob & your ERP to ensure your 811 tickets are tagged with consistent data to form a best-in-breed solution ,” says Rateb Almasri, Senior Product Manager of Partnerships. “With integration into Project Management and HeavyJob Mobile, we are working to bring 811spotter into HCSS’s dig permits log.”

More Than Just Compliance

811 ticketing is more complicated than just having the right paperwork to proceed with a job. By removing the complication or miscommunication involved in manually managing thousands of tickets, 811spotter gives users the ability to pre-plan the job, see potential hazards on a map view, and gives both the field and office visibility on the jobsite so that they can properly protect, support, de-energize or remove, and respect utilities.

For MGE Underground, 12,000 tickets were managed by 811spotter in one year, and they attribute this automation of their tickets to a dramatic improvement in their operational uptime.