FTTH/FTTX projects have as a main difficulty the management of a large volume of activities and materials in the field. Thousands of boxes and for each one: photos, measurements, materials and coordinates, are a nightmare when it comes to getting the assignments to the field personnel and corroborating that everything is executed correctly. Real-time tracking of each activity improves the quality and speed of deployment, which is key to speeding up network rollout. These are usually projects where we will have many people in the field, hundreds or thousands of network elements to install or maintain, materials management and a deployment plan to fulfill.

Sytex allows the tracking of every activity in the field in real time, the tracking of materials from their arrival at the warehouse to their installation and the control of the information of the network and its interconnections. These processes are not only key for the installation stage, but will be very useful for the maintenance of the network for many years to come. Knowing who installed each box, the serial number of each installed element, its configuration and the maintenance performed will help us in day-to-day operations.

Application Ecosystem

Nowadays, it is very common in all types of projects to use specialized tools for different functions and establishing communication between them allows optimizing tasks and minimizing human error. In FTTH projects, usually a set of specialized tools is used for design, deployment, provisioning and maintenance.

Sytex can easily be coupled to this ecosystem of tools to add functionality to project management. Information exchange can be done through importers, DB views or dedicated APIs.

• Design: 3GIS, QGIS, Bentley, etc.    
• Field Survey: Sytex
• Field installation: Sytex
• Field certification: Sytex
• Procurement: Intrawave
• Maintenance/Ticket management: Sytex, Remedy
• Analytics and dashboards: Tableau, Power BI and others

Network inventory

All the assets that make up the FTTH network, such as CTO boxes, PFS, PFP, feeders, poles, splices, OLTs and POPs must be stored on a reliable basis in order to schedule activities on them.

Sytex allows to have a unique record of the entire network, the cloud storage avoids data loss and ensures real-time availability for the entire organization. Installation, certification and maintenance activities will be associated to network elements, each one identified with a unique code and detailed properties.

Survey, deployment and certification

A flexible tool such as forms in Sytex, allows us to create templates for any type of activity and then assign the forms in bulk to our resources. The form is received and completed from the APP in the field and then controlled in the office through the desktop version of Sytex. Also from the desktop, it will be possible to track a large volume of jobs through map views and reports. Additionally, we make project data available to connect to other reporting tools.

Forms for each activity

It is possible to create form templates for different operations and its use is very intuitive. The diverse number of question types to shape a document such as location, photos, videos, audios, text, QR code, NFC reading, among others, allows to contemplate multiple scenarios to record information.
A good template design will be essential to guide field staff in their tasks, they will be able to meet their objectives step by step without omitting details and move on to the next job. Finally, thanks to instant synchronization, we can control the work from the office to request corrections or evaluate progress.

Preventive and corrective maintenance

Field personnel receive maintenance assignments and report on the execution at the time. Management of multiple contractors, and in turn multiple users on each. Each network element is geolocated on the map allowing the user to take the closest assignments to his position. Sytex allows to control the execution of each activity and to store all the information that arises from the maintenance.

Summary

In FTTH and FTTX projects we will encounter different issues and changing dynamics, an agile tool like Sytex allows to define the work processes and make a very fast implementation. The simplicity and agility allows adjustments to be made during implementation to adapt to changes or improvements. In short, when designing the tool we sought a balance between control and agility so that all types of users can perform their tasks without adding difficulties and to ensure that everyone reports the information at the same point.