Stories from the Field: Turning Audits into a Goldmine
By: Sean Selbo, Carma Operations Manager
I’ve Audited Data Centers the Hard Way...
I’ve spent a lot of time in data centers doing audits the way most people still do them: with spreadsheets.
And it’s a nightmare.
If you’ve never done a spreadsheet audit yourself...let me paint the picture:
This is meticulous, physical work. You’re wedging your hand into panels to see tiny labels. You’re balancing a laptop, trying to type that label. At one point, the best solution I had for this was to work with someone else, where one of you is literally yelling the label names out so the other can type them.
And you’re trying to go fast, but you need to be cognizant that you are touching potentially live circuits that have service and revenue affecting consequences should they go down. Reducing distractions and staying completely focused is critical.
Nothing about that is ideal, and it dramatically slows down mining NetEx and updating your data.
NetEx Savings Are There...The Process is Broken
Carma started as a pro services company where my team was constantly out in the field, helping our customers audit their inventory and mine NetEx.
We were always incredibly thorough and saved our customers money. Because the value was always there in stranded capacity, mismatched records, unused vendor expenses, you name it.
But we knew there was a problem: spreadsheet audits were killing our efficiency.
Even when you try to standardize a spreadsheet template for an audit, once you send it out to different sites, you’re almost guaranteed to get back completely different versions of that sheet. People interpret fields differently. They add columns. They leave notes in random cells. They name things their own way.
Not only does it take forever, but it takes tremendous effort to normalize that data into anything useful.
And data centers don’t stay still. That spreadsheet is a snapshot of a moment in time and obsolete almost instantly.
That was the tipping point. We built our Field App specifically to solve the challenges we were experiencing in the field.
Replacing the Spreadsheet Audit
One thing that sets Carma apart is our deep industry knowledge that’s baked into our products. So, we knew we needed to build an audit tool that could become the industry standard.
We took real pains from the field and built our Field App to solve them.
Don’t want to scream out label names or hope you typed them right the first time? We created an OCR Scanner that takes a picture of a label and translates it to text with incredible accuracy.
Want to cut out the back and forth between the field team and your network engineers? Our app lets you add audited records to a work queue on our Carma application, keeping communication constant and making work more seamless.
Don’t want static data to live in spreadsheets that no one ever looks at again? The Field App syncs with Carma in real-time, creating a complete paper trail of audit results and keeping your data dynamic and accurate.
The Ripple Effect
When we improved our tools and processes, the value wasn’t that we magically found more NetEx. What changed was the time it took to find savings.
There have been times where I’ve been having to audit ten racks in a cage by myself, and it takes a month. With the Field App, I can cut that time in half.
Not to mention that using Carma’s Field App on a regular basis keeps data accurate, preventing the need for repeated, full-scale audits.
Imagine the impact of that across all your techs and all your sites.
Complete the same audit scope in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the headcount
Reduce travel days for audits
Free up labor hours tied up in “capture” mode
Deliver findings to leadership faster
Maintain the data quality across your sites easier
Built Different
The best part of the Field App isn’t any one feature (although that OCR Scanner alone is game-changing). It’s that it was built for the field, by the field.
It’s not a product that was built by people who have never been in a data center. It was created by people who have actually done the work.
That matters because getting field techs to learn more tools is a big ask.
But we made something really special. It’s intuitive, designed for the flow of how audits actually happen, and is designed to make a tech’s life easier.
And when you can save your teams hours of backbreaking work, reduce friction between other teams, prevent rework, and get better data quality out of it, that’s a win for the field and for your business.
Author Bio: Sean Selbo
Sean is Carma’s Operations Manager with extensive experience in telecommunications as a network field engineer. At Carma, Sean has supported our customers with field audits, training users on the platform, and providing in-depth support to customers with his deep industry knowledge and product expertise.