Irth Solutions and UTTO Announce Partnership to Create the Most Secure and Accurate Locate Process Available For the Underground Utility Industry
Improvements in an Organization’s Locate Services Enhance Resiliency, Reliability and Safety of Utilities, Oil/Gas, Telecommunications and Construction Operations.
COLUMBUS, OHIO, UNITED STATES – Irth Solutions, a leading provider of cloud-based solutions that improve the resiliency of critical infrastructure, including its flagship 811 ticket management system, and UTTO, an innovator that is redefining locate best practices for 811 workforces, today announced a unique partnership. This partnership gives organizations the highest level of locate and mark accuracy. This visibility into the locate process helps improve locate and marking of underground utilities. Improvements in an organization’s locate services enhance resiliency, reliability and safety of utilities, oil/gas, telecommunications and construction operations.
UTTO Inc., whose company name is derived from a Greek term for under/beneath and Italian for help, offers technology specifically for the underground utility industry to improve the quality of locate and marks as well as the education and training of their damage prevention workforce. Proper data analysis and recording from the field and training of 811 technicians are crucial for avoiding asset damage. This gives organizations valuable insights to help them improve their overall damage prevention program and avoid costly damages.
“Our partnership with Irth Solutions creates an industry first that enables 811 ticket management systems for utilities to protect underground assets and preserve safety using our Locate Assurance® data-driven model,” said Annie Burns, Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances for UTTO.
The partnership with UTTO helps utilities understand how individual technicians are performing and the risks associated with each locate, reducing damages of critical infrastructure due to poor training or individual lone wolf techniques and processes. Organizations who use this technology can also leverage Locate Assurance to motivate and incentivize the entire field workforce. This visibility helps drive change, improves safety, and reduces damage and potential damages. Here’s how UTTO technology works:
- Locate technicians are trained using UTTO’s Virtual Locate Training Simulator.
- The “in-office” simulator can illustrate and teach solutions to locate scenarios in a “safe to fail” environment, tricky scenarios that a line locator encounters daily and can be land mines to avoid.
- You can be assured that trained and certified technicians go out in the field to locate and mark underground assets with scientific performance assessments.
- In the real world, Locate Assurance technology inside the locate device enables the same metrics as trained in the Simulator to be viewed every day, giving supervisors and auditors visibility into their field operations that never existed.
- Before closing an 811 ticket and leaving the site, the performance score will be presented to the field technician and allow them to relocate if company standards are not met, ensuring company best practices are followed and used at every locate.
Prior to UTTO’s technology, there was no way to capture this valuable locate data. The data:
- Improves the precision and accuracy of locate and mark operations.
- If used for surveying and mapping, it qualifies the GPS points being captured.
- Helps organizations optimize field resources with real-time field-visit analytics to understand who is deployed where.
- Identifies technician training gaps that can be closed by using UTTO’s Virtual Locate Training Simulator.
UTTO technology combined with Irth Solution’s UtiliSphere provides the most powerful, efficient 811 ticket management platform to help companies improve safety, comply with regulations and efficiently protect assets, workers and service. When a locator tech performs a locate with a UTTO-approved device, data is captured and the locate is scored and recorded in the UtiliSphere platform.
“Our partnership with UTTO provides amazing data that had never been accessed. Organizations with this insight can train best-practice locate skills, improve field operations and ultimately achieve absolute damage avoidance to critical infrastructure,” said Trent Peugh, President and CRO of
Irth Solutions. “Using a UTTO-compliant device is going to be an industry best practice to ensure your facilities are properly located and marked and your technicians are adequately trained. When used with our UtiliSphere platform, your damage prevention program is managed in one robust system that will protect assets, improve safety, and save time and money.”
Learn more about Irth Solutions.
Learn more about UTTO.
About irth Solutions
irth Solutions, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, is the leading provider of cloud-based asset protection solutions to improve resilience of critical asset infrastructure, including their flagship 811 ticket management solution. Clients have trusted irth Solutions for decades to manage and reduce risk, decrease costs, increase revenue opportunities and ensure regulatory compliance. Artificial intelligence and analytics power additional insights for early detection of emerging problems. irth Solutions has helped hundreds of customers execute the work that is most important to their success in a world where safety, resilience and reliability are paramount.
About UTTO
UTTO Inc. is a pioneering hardware and software company serving the underground infrastructure and damage prevention industry. The company has developed an integrated cloud platform consisting of advanced connected locating and mapping devices, VR training/certification technology, and on-site performance tracking and analytics tools. The company operates three divisions; UTTO Training, UTTO Locate Assurance® and UTTO Mapping. With subsidiary company IPEG Corp, it has an operational presence in the U.S and U.K.
Contact:
Joshua Fuller
Irth Solutions
+1 614-784-8000
jfuller@irthsolutions.com