March 24, 2023

Risk Management for Utilities with the Most Comprehensive Risk Management Solution

  • Jason Adams, Executive Vice President, Irth Solutions

Risk management in the damage prevention industry has changed drastically. Today, data plays a critical role in decision-making.

We used to rely on our gut feelings and local field knowledge to assess risk. Many field personnel spent decades on the job acquiring the experience and expertise to identify risk trends and reduce damage. When experienced field personnel retires, it creates a significant knowledge gap.

Today, data fills the gap.

How is Risk Management for Utilities Valuable?

Bringing value to our customers is our goal. We provide unmatched information and data about potential damages to limit risk.

First, we identify our customers’ challenges. Is their objective to identify the highest-risk tickets so they can deploy resources to limit damages? Are they trying to cut costs by eliminating tickets sent to a contract locator? Maybe they are focused on building operational efficiencies inside their business, like reducing truck rolls or increasing the efficiency of those truck rolls. 

A company looking to screen 811 tickets needs a process to identify the tickets with the highest risk without minimizing the importance of others. Nearly all tickets that reach an 811 call center pose some risk to your critical infrastructure. To fully understand the level of risk from an excavation, you must consider other variables that heighten the risk of a dig, such as certain excavation techniques, the dig’s proximity to your asset, and more.  

With in-depth risk management data, your company can prioritize tickets and make highly accurate and safe decisions, such as rolling a truck out to watch and protect or notifying contract locators to ensure supervision occurs during a higher-risk excavation. Identifying tickets with the lowest risk is equally important to ensure those tickets are assigned to locators after high-risk tickets.

SmartScore: Efficiently Sift Through Data to Understand Risk

SmartScore allows our customers to identify trends and assign actions when those trends are spotted. For example, if a one call ticket is to install an invisible fence, many of our large customers would assign a low risk to that ticket because their assets are buried much deeper in the ground. SmartScore works by assessing valuable variables, such as:

  • Work type
  • Excavator
  • Time of day
  • Location
  • Type of excavation
  • What parties are on that ticket
  • And more

SmartScore can accurately identify high-priority tickets needing attention by assessing these variables.

Insights with Artificial Intelligence (AI): Enhance Risk Management

Fueled by the data our systems collect from millions of tickets and corresponding incidents, Insights with AI is a predictive model that determines risk by combining machine learning, risk data, historical trend analysis, and customer-specific data.

By comparing the raw data from the tickets and the relationship to incidents, Insights with AI determines how risky an activity is. As the algorithms consume more data, it gets even better at predicting risk. Our system is smarter because we work directly with 811 call centers and use their generic, raw data.

The Utility Industry’s Most Comprehensive Risk-Scoring Software

With millions of tickets processed annually plus the anonymized data from 811 call centers, we collect the most data to fuel our risk management tools. From SmartScore to Insights with AI, we offer the industry’s most comprehensive risk score analysis.

The result – the only 360-degree risk management solution for utilities using a predictive model and an actuarial model to gain complete insight into damage risk and more depth in risk scoring. You can make the best decisions for your company to reduce risk and lower damages.

Are you interested in learning more? Contact us today to see our risk management tools in action.

Are you curious how your damage prevention and risk management efforts can be improved with the depth of our data? 

Irth's market-leading SaaS platform improves resilience and reduces risk in the sustainable delivery of essential services that millions of people and businesses rely on every day. Energy, utility, and telecom companies across the U.S. and Canada trust Irth for damage prevention, training, asset inspections, and land management solutions. Powered by business intelligence, analytics, and geospatial data, our platform helps deliver the 360-degree situational awareness needed to proactively mitigate and manage risk of critical network infrastructure in a changing environment. Irth has been the top provider for 811 (one call) ticket management and utility locating software since 1995.

© 2023 Irth Solutions, L.L.C. All rights reserved | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy