General Discussion

Community Spotlight: Matt Lambert

The Community Spotlight is an opportunity to feature one of our amazing TrueContext Community members and learn more about who they are, how they got to be working with TrueContext, and about the great work they have been doing.

This episode of the Community Spotlight highlights Matt Lambert, Vice President of Operations at Primeline Utility Services.

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Who is Matt Lambert

Matt Lambert grew up in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States of America. Though he played a lot of sports as a kid he quickly realized that he wasn't going to be able to turn his love of sports into a profession. He attended the University of Alabama where he studied finance and right out of school went into public accounting. He received his Certified Public Accountant (CPA) designation and started providing auditing services. After a few years of doing this he decided he wanted to get into work that was more operations focused, more strategic and forward-looking. It was this change in direction that got him working at Primeline Utility Services.

His background in finance and accounting was exactly what Primeline Utility Services was looking for as it allowed Matt to quickly understand the business side of both Primeline as well as Primeline's customers. In addition, Primeline is still in the process of consolidating the businesses they have acquired onto a single accounting system. Matt was originally hired in more of a finance and accounting position, but due to Primeline's open management, he was able to take on more of an operational role over the course of his career there.

As the Vice President of Operations at Primeline Utility Services, Matt is able to do work he loves, supporting his field forces with technology to make their days easier and give a better product to his customers.

What is Primeline Utility Services

Primeline Utility Services is in the utility services field, working a lot with building infrastructure as well as providing other services for large utility customers in the United States. The primary customer base for Primeline Utility Services are investor owned utilities (IOUs) but they also work with smaller cooperatives and municipalities that run their own utilities.

Building overhead transmission and distribution power lines is the primary service that Primeline Utility Services offers, but they also work with gas businesses and do some engineering as well.

What challenges does Primeline Utility Services face

Safety is very critical to Primeline Utility Services, and one of the main focuses of Matt's group. They have workers in the field who face dangerous conditions every day just by the nature of the work they do. A huge challenge for Primeline has been to make sure that everyone knows about Universal Stop Work Authority (SWA) and other processes they have in place to keep everyone safe every day.

The other major challenge is regulatory in nature. The challenge Matt finds, specifically in the United States, is that politicians aren't exactly sure what they should be encouraging and if there are any areas where they don't want to see as much activity. An example Matt provides is gas in the Northeast of the country. From Primeline's perspective the right thing to do is to get affordable power in whatever form makes sense to the end customers. There are, however, some regulatory movements in the industry that are making things more complicated.

How has TrueContext helped solve these challenges

Over the full course of Matt's seven years with Primeline he's been able to help to continue to incrementally improve Primeline's approach to safety. This starts with the job briefing that all their crews fill out before they pick up a shovel or do any work activity at the job site each day. When Matt started these briefings were completed on paper forms, providing no data insights. TrueContext allows these briefings to be completed digitally. They are now customized forms created by Primeline, and in some cases by the customer or crew. This ability to customize the data being collected and the interface used to collect it means that those completing these briefings can properly assess what dangers may be faced on any given day. By identifying what dangers need to be addressed and mitigated the crews are able to approach each day in a way that's going to keep them safe, that's going to keep the public safe, and give visibility to management on the back end.

This ability to collect data and give visibility to management means that management can look at who is doing a good job with these briefings and staying safe. It also creates opportunities to inform and train others to maintain best practices across the group. TrueContext plays a very vital role in regards to crew safety at Primeline.

Using The Conditional Logic Feature

The primary feature used at Primeline Utility Services when it comes to building these briefing forms and safety workflows is Conditional Logic. Matt says, "we went from having these paper forms that had to be standardized and capture every possible variable on one sheet to a dynamic form and workflow where based on the answer to the first question or the 10th question, whatever it might be, our users in the field are only going to see what's relevant to them."

Conditional Logic is based on the structure If This, Then That. It allows you to create a task or action that happens only when certain conditions are true. It adds intelligent automation and provides context for your field workers, enhancing their effectiveness, increasing their accuracy, and enforcing specific workflows.

If you've never used Conditional Logic, or are still new to setting up Conditional Logic we have two great lessons on Conditional Logic in the TrueContext University.

• Conditional Logic - Level 1
  This lesson will give you a great overview of the concepts and best practices for building Conditional Logic statements to super power your workflow.
• Conditional Logic - Level 2
  Building on the topics covered in Level 1, this lesson will show you how to build more complex Conditional Logic statements and really take advantage of this feature.

Additionally, be sure to go through our product documentation where you can find even more resources on Conditional Logic, like the following:

• Building Conditional Logic Rules
• Create and Manage Conditional Logic
• Best Practices for Conditional Logic Rules

#CommunitySpotlight
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Pat Cooney
Community Engineer
TrueContext
community@truecontext.com
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