All enquiries are equal, but some are more equal than others
Over 4000 new people every month register on LSBUD to start their safe digging journey. These people come from all walks of life- from the utility network operators and their professional utility contractors, all the way through to designers, architects, farmers and domestic occupiers.
To us, there must always be equal access for those digging a hole. It is not equitable or sensible to suggest that someone working for one organisation (say a statutory undertaker) deserves to work safely more than someone working on behalf of themselves.
If you were an asset owner, dedicated to keeping your assets free from damage, what policy would you follow? Would you state that Bob working for the local council deserved to work safely but Jane working on the local farm doesn’t.
Or maybe that a landscaper when working on behalf of the council could have access but for their next job working for a developer, that access would be revoked?
So when we hear that utility strikes can be a thing of the past simply by helping statutory undertakers and their supply chain, we vehemently disagree.
When analysing our numbers at LSBUD, we often focus on the enquiry numbers. (Another record year in 2022 which is the 20th time in a row by the way ;-)). Recently though, we extended that analysis to review the users and the way they used the service. The results surprised us all.
There were several large company user accounts that submit thousands of searches every month- as expected for large organisations that centralise their search process- in fact the top ten accounts in the given period represented 11.4% of the searches.
Outside of this, the top 100 accounts submitted 34.25% of the searches.
What was most telling though is that 74% of the users submitted less than 1% of the searches. 40% doing just a single search in the quarter across the three months analysed. Just one search! These are the users that are hardest to find and can be the most rewarding to see using the service as they likely pose the highest risk when excavating.
Beyond the employment status of the user, there are plenty of other factors that impact on the risk of the work, such as the activity type, training received, company culture, asset type, damage records etc. that all need to be taken into consideration when providing access to asset data. That’s a subject of interest for another day.
Whilst not all enquiries are equal, in terms of access to data, for LSBUD, all users are equal and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
#safedigging #safediggingforall #searchbeforeyoudig
