Jimmy Wang - Damage Prevention is "Risky Business"

What is the biggest risk behind damage prevention? It’s striking, it’s having the responsibility falling on you the construction end of damaging utility lines.

Jimmie Wang is one of the most knowledgable people in the damage prevention space, who has a very different point of view about the indsutry. Jimmie has been in the damage prevention industry for a little over 20 years. He started in the contract locating world and worked with various private equity firms helping to sell as part of the management and owenrhsip for companies in the space. Leading everything from mergers and acquisitions to product developments - leading him to having a depe understanding of utilities and facility owners, and even one call tickets - Making him an expert in making the industry better.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

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How can the damage prevention realm make life easier for those involved?

We're essentially spending more on the transmissions and the  damage prevention of those transmissions, which typically means locating.I think we have to be honest with ourselves and say that all the stakeholders are working pretty hard at what they're doing and are putting in authentic, genuine efforts. However the quantum leap improvements that have been spurred with tech, new technologies and new data, and not by doing something harder or doing more of something harder or doing more of something.

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The industry is fixated in it’s old ways

There are available data and technology solutions for this industry that really have not been embraced or have not been embraced enough. For example - predictive analytics or some of the mapping tools, companies like 4M Analytics are not embraced enough because I think we're fixated and attached to our old ways.

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Extensive sharing of data in our industry is non existent.

How did the US airline industry get to be so safe? There were a bunch of reasons, but there were two major reasons. One was extensive and pervasive sharing of safety data between the airlines and the TSA. The second was extensive usage of data and technology If you take that to our industry; do we have extensive sharing of data between the facility owners, the other stakeholders, and the government agencies? No, actually, not only do we not have extensive sharing of data safety or otherwise, we have extensive protection of data, right?

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