The SCTE has just produced a video in its SCTE Primer Series that explains how cable companies can quickly save time and money in their field service operations.

The Primer, presented by Rev2 CTO Robert Cruickshank III, describes a methodology that helps MSOs identify the source of network problems so that they can be rectified immediately, rather than responding to multiple, isolated trouble calls that are only symptoms of the problem.

The source of a network outage tends to be quickly obvious, but MSOs frequently miss the sources of chronic but intermittent problems, Cruickshank told CED. A series of trouble calls might be due to a common problem, but if those trouble calls are spread out over time, or if the problem manifests in multiple ways, the operator almost certainly won’t detect the pattern. Alternatively, a problem might be persistent, but it might fail to exceed some threshold level that would trigger an alarm.

Rev2 has expertise in collecting and analyzing the relevant data, a process it calls risk concentration analysis.

“The risk concentration analysis methodology carefully classifies, scores and combines common MSO dispatch metrics such as maintenance activities, telephone calls from troubled subscribers, truck rolls to troubled subscribers and network telemetry data,” explained Cruickshank. “By correlating the data, the methodology can tell us where there are concentrations of risk throughout the MSO’s service delivery infrastructure.”

MSOs tend to have all the data they need to solve these types of problems. They typically don’t, however, because they are organizationally unprepared to collate and analyze it, Cruickshank said. It is almost always distributed across a number of different systems managed by different parts of the organization that do not report to each other.

The good news is that, from a technological point of view, drawing the relevant information from all of those systems is not difficult to do at all, Cruickshank said.

Cruickshank joined Rev2 this summer from Cablevision, where – as vice president in charge of the company’s Customer Service Operations Center – he helped deploy the Rev2 product suite.

The video primer – titled “What is … risk concentration analysis for dispatch operations?” – is available for download and viewing to SCTE members on the SCTE website.