It’s almost unfathomable that the companies which provide our homes and businesses with the latest fibre broadband rely on pen and paper to keep tabs on their infrastructure.
Every day, these telecoms companies, as well as water and energy providers, send thousands of engineers out into the field to install and fix miles of pipes and cables.
WATCH: IQGeo focused on developing product line and global expansion
To do their job, they are given various bits of key information, such as where the pipe has been run, what work has been carried out in the past and what needs doing to it this time.
Surprisingly though, most of these details are given on bits of paper, which the workers then add to as they make any changes.
“You end up with all these stacks of paper which have been updated in the field and brought back to the office, where some poor designer’s got to input it into the system,” explains Richard Petti.
Petti is the chief executive of IQGeo Group PLC (LON:IQG), the company behind a piece of software called myWorld that aims to eliminate the need for these cumbersome paper-based data entries.
No paper needed
myWorld provides a detailed view of all their critical physical assets laid out on an easy-to-use map. Various coloured lines are displayed on the interactive map, showing the location of cables, pipes, manholes etc.
By clicking on the assets, fieldworkers can see all the relevant details, such as who’s using the cable and how long it is.
Perhaps more importantly, both office-based staff and fieldworkers can go into the app and log any changes for others to see.
“It’s easy to use and can be used by people in the office or out in the field, so you get your end-to-end collaboration where all of the data goes through the whole business.”
By digitising the process and removing a step – no one has to enter data from a piece of paper into the system – Petti says myWorld has been shown to improve productivity by as much as 25%.
It’s not just good for cutting costs, though. It’s been claimed that a devastating wildfire in California last November was caused by a faulty transmission line, something which Petti believes could have been remedied earlier had myWorld been used.
45 customers
So far, there are 45 companies around the world which use the software, including Canadian telecoms firm Telus, as well as Cox and Altice, two top-three North American cable providers.
“Altice call myWorld their night vision, because if they’re doing jobs after the sun’s gone down and they can’t see where things are, they just look [at the app].”
According to Petti’s research, there are around 3,500 telecoms, water and energy providers around the world that could benefit from using its technology.
The plan is to get more of these potential customers on board over the coming months and years, and IQGeo certainly has a strong enough balance sheet to aid it in that quest.
Valued at little more than its cash
At the end of 2018, it sold off its RTLS SmartSpace digital manufacturing platform in a deal worth up to £35mln, which has left it with just shy of £31mln in the bank.
“Ultimately, we felt it was too complicated trying to grow these two very complex businesses under the same umbrella,” says Petti.
While a chunk of the proceeds has been earmarked for shareholders, Petti and his team are also planning to invest heavily into upgrading the product suite.
They hope this will help win more contracts – worth hundreds of thousands of pounds in most cases. The company has traditionally added ten clients a year to its books, although it is cautiously optimistic that it will top that figure in 2019.
Landgrab
That – customer growth – is the priority right now rather than profits, as IQGeo battles to establish itself as a leading player before the market matures and the hierarchy is established.
On top of the extra investment, management now has more time to focus on growing the myWorld business, which should also serve as a boon this time around.
“There was a lot of focus on the RTLS side of the business [last year],” says Petti.
“Now that the disposal is behind us, we can really focus on the performance of the geospatial (myWorld) side of the business and I’m confident that we’ll see more software being sold to more logos (customers) at higher margins, both this year and in the future.”