Did anyone here about USIC buying the Translore locate management software from the CCS Group? Some of their competition used Translore and had no idea until the next billing cycle and had to write checks to USIC. Shrewd move.
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Did anyone here about USIC buying the Translore locate management software from the CCS Group? Some of their competition used Translore and had no idea until the next billing cycle and had to write checks to USIC. Shrewd move.
my boss just got the bill and called them because of the conflict of interest. they can see what everyone charges, so were looking if anyone has any suggestions. We might even pay a tech guru to make us our own program already have the cost of that just not sure if its what we want.
Inside access to private records of the competition? Is that even legal? Typical MegaLo-cating maneuver. Screw quality. Let's just undermine the competition.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Edward
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Edward
Be prepared for a development time that will last for years. Also you will need a larger IT staff than you think. Remember you must have both a development team and a team that will deal with keeping the clunky software functioning 24/7/365. Be prepared to trash can the entire software program and start over.
More expensive and time consuming than anyone plans on.
I found out from a company that was in a bidding situation against USIC. They were the incumbent and USIC was trying to snipe the contract. Buying Translore gave USIC access to their current ticket price. Needless to say, he was a little ticked.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Edward
We provide locate management software and every once and a while one of our customers will decide to leave us and develop their own software because they think what we do is easy. After their budget explodes and they still have an inferior product they usually come back. Unfortunately the locators are the ones that have to suffer during this whole process.Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfessionalLocator
That's why you contract out something like that. My brother-in-law is a programmer for a company in Austin that does this exact thing. A dept. makes the software and then he works out glitches that are reported here and there so they can push out an update and keep it all running.
Everyone I've heard of that uses translore hates it anyway and wants something else.
Digtrack (www.digtrack.com) or P800xQuote:
Originally Posted by Tom Edward
digtrak works all right. Needs a few tweeks but its functionalQuote:
Originally Posted by GWJ_CAS
I show up at the "office" every morning and pick up my stack of paper tickets and hit the road.
The boss told us last year we were going to a computer program by April 2014. I asked him the other day why we hadn't and he said they wanted to charge over a dollar per ticket. I did over 800 tickets last month by myself. I can only guess that over 3000 tickets were issued (that we actually located). That is over $3,000 for the month just for a program to manage tickets. WOW that is a lot of money.
All I know is what he told me but if my math is correct then that is, as I said above, A LOT OF MONEY.
It's like leasing a car and then having to pay per mile.
Needless to say, he couldn't see paying that much money for a ticket management program.
Another way is to check the local utility commissions for the required financial filings of the various public utilities. You are looking for the agency that regulates utility rates and grants rate increases. Expenditures are listed and sometimes they are broken down into categories. Find the category that states how much was paid to have lines located. See if it can be broken down further to see if the expense listed includes the utility company's auditors, damage investigators and billing staff. This only gives the overall expense of having a contractor locate the lines but overall cost is all they are interested in when someone makes a bid.Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Get from the onecall center how many tickets were issued and of them how many were emergencies and if possible make a subset for after hour emergencies. The costs being paid per ticket can roughly be reverse engineered from this data. While not exact it is enough to make a bid where the gross cost can be estimated and under bid.
the glitches and future problems are what stopped us from having our own program written years ago. To the cablevine i cant imagine doing tickets with anything else but real time on demand computer software. I wont say what we payed per tickets but way less then a dollar so i would say that he got a bad quote and should shop around. the bosses brother got a monthly contract with translore and cost him way less then what we pay.
Equally it allows a bid where you don't bid too low and still out bid the incumbent.Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfessionalLocator
my company uses kortera but not sure if it is theirs or they pay another company
ProfessionalLocator is right on point here - it will likely take much more time and money (2x or more) than whatever they quoted you. Operations and maintenance are a big deal too. We were considering something similar and after researching ended up going with DigTix (digtix dot com). It's purely cloud-based so we cut our IT spending to $0. The features are great and they even do custom development at an affordable cost. You do not have to provide your prices anywhere in the application to do billing, which avoids shady tactics like what we see here with USIC / Translore.Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfessionalLocator