811 locates management made easy: AI import on the web, one tap in the field

How fiber contractors run 811 locates end to end in Speedlr: bulk AI import of ticket emails and PDFs on the web, and offline locate handling on mobile.

Every fiber build in the United States runs on 811. Before a crew puts a shovel or a directional bore in the ground, a locate ticket has to be filed, the facility owners have to mark their utilities, and the marks have to be valid on the day the work happens. Miss one step and you are looking at a damage claim, a stop-work order, or a fine that dwarfs the day's production.

The problem is rarely the rules. The problem is volume. A mid-sized FTTH contractor can be juggling hundreds of open tickets across several one-call centers, each arriving as a differently formatted email or PDF, each with its own dig-by date, expiry date, positive-response status and affected-member list. Most teams manage this in a shared inbox and a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is always one day out of date.

Speedlr treats locates as first-class operational records rather than attachments. A locate ticket in Speedlr has a ticket number, a one-call center, a requested dig date, an expiry date, a geographic footprint, a linked work order, a responsible crew and a positive-response state per member utility. Because it is a record and not an email, it can be filtered, mapped, escalated and reported on.

Bulk AI import on the web is where most of the manual work disappears. You drag the ticket emails, PDFs or exports into Speedlr and the AI reads them: ticket numbers, addresses, coordinates, dig-by and expiry dates, member lists and remarks are extracted and normalised into locate records, then matched to the right project and work order. What used to be an afternoon of copy-paste for a batch of tickets becomes a drop, a review screen and a confirm. You still approve what the AI proposes — nothing is created silently — but you review a structured table instead of retyping from a PDF.

Once the tickets exist, the map does the triage. Open locates render alongside the design in GIS, colour-coded by status and expiry, so a scheduler can see at a glance which spans are clear to dig this week, which are waiting on a member response, and which expire before the crew is due on site. Renewals get raised before they lapse rather than after a crew has already rolled to a dead ticket.

In the field, the mobile app is what keeps the record true. A crew opens the work order, sees the linked locate ticket and its status, and can photograph the marks, confirm that all members have responded, flag missing or unclear paint, and capture the white-lining evidence with a timestamp and GPS position. Door tags and yard signs raised for the same address are attached to the same record. All of it works offline, which matters because rural aerial and buried routes are precisely where signal disappears; the queue syncs when coverage returns.

The compliance benefit is that the evidence is assembled as the work happens. If a damage claim arrives six months later, the defence is not a hunt through an inbox — it is the ticket, its expiry, the geotagged photos of the marks, the crew that was on site and the completion timestamp, all on one screen.

The operational benefit is bigger. Locates stop being an administrative bottleneck sitting between design and construction, and become a scheduling input like any other. Crews are dispatched to work that is actually diggable, standby time drops, and the production plan stops being invalidated by paperwork nobody could see.