“I’m sorry, I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus”, I said to the client, “but it really looks like you got very lucky.” Our client, an environmental company we’d recently been hired by, stood there stunned, with a nervous grin on his face. Stunned because of how close his company had just come to disaster, and grinning with a gratitude that comes with the realization that nobody got hurt - but could quite easily have been.
So, just what was it that made our new client’s day? Well, I had just located a buried electric duct-bank for him which was situated within inches of some soil borings and monitoring wells that had been drilled the previous year. The utility locate company that scanned the area at that time had missed the duct-bank entirely. In fact, as I also discovered upon the completion of my own locating survey, there were three additional utilities that had not been marked by the other locate company.
Now, the aim of this article is not to gloat over a competitor’s omissions. Heck no! We’ve been in the utility locate business for over 25 yearsso we’ve experienced some humbling misses of our own. We’re in a business where this can happen. We don’t like it obviously, but it must always be considered. Our objective is to minimize to the greatest degree possible any such occurrences; and we believe we’ve done a pretty good job of it.
The goal of my writing here is to explain how we at Utility Survey Corp. have reduced our misses to a rarity by treating any “miss” we had in the past as a learning experience. Something we could improve and grow from; to provide the best service we can to our clients.
And that “growing” meant asking ourselves hard questions about our own performance, how to improve, soliciting client feedback, keeping abreast of the latest equipment and training, and brainstorming with our equipment supplier specialists to adopt better techniques to maximize results.
All of these things simmered in our “Company Crockpot” to bring about our proprietary "10-Step Utility Locating Protocol™"All of our technicians are trained to follow this strict and effective utility locating procedure. In fact, so successful was it, that we put everything we’d learned from this process into producing10-Step Protocols for all the services we provide. They’ve been tested on numerous projects, refined where required, and have successfully proven to minimize the potential for utility strikes. All this brings to our clients a service we believe is second to none. And - we’re very proud of that.
In summary; at Utility Survey Corp. we have turned past mistakes into positive learning experiences. Experiences that have led to ever improving ways to solve problems; acquiring advanced equipment and training, and developing protocols that give us the successful outcomes our clients both need and expect.
Please take the opportunity now to download a free copy of our proprietary "10-Step Utility Locating Protocol™" by clicking the image below.
Stay tuned also for our next blogpost... 3 Tips to Ensure a Great Utility Locate!
