You build the network. Blue connects the field to the office. Blue is an AI operations employee that lives on a box at your shop and works over plain text messages. It keeps the 811 book current, builds the daily production sheet, answers spec and safety questions to the page, turns prints into quote inputs, holds the master schedule, and gets what the crews did today to the office today. No app. No login. No network integration required.
Precision is past the stage where the owner is the office. There's a CFO, a safety director, superintendents running crews across two offices, a fleet with its own manager, and a sister company coming for utility and power work. What every shop that size still has is a gap between the field and the office: what the crews did today reaches the people who bill it, schedule it, and answer for it a day late, through a phone, a text thread, and a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds every morning.
A turnkey fiber shop generates coordination faster than a phone tree can carry it. Indiana 811 tickets live 20 days with two working days' notice, and every crew holds a stack with staggered update-by dates. The daily production report is rebuilt every morning by texting every foreman and waiting. A drill operator with a depth question calls the super, who calls the office. Footage bored and splices closed today show up in billing next week. Meanwhile a three-person crew is standing.
A locate status, a spec, a go/no-go — every round trip through the super idles a crew you're already paying. That's the line closest to real money, and it's the one we measure.
Telecom work causes roughly 60% of all HDD utility strikes nationally, and an expired or never-updated ticket is the classic root cause. Your clients and your insurer know that number too.
Quantities, job-done, receipts, change conditions, who worked where — all of it exists at 4pm on a foreman's phone and reaches billing, scheduling and payroll's inputs a day or a week later, retyped.
Text a work order and prints; Blue proposes the tickets, draws each dig corridor on a map, and publishes a review page the super approves from the truck. Filing is human-approved, every time. Then Blue runs the clock: a Monday digest per ticket owner — reply ALL and the whole book refreshes. Status by ticket number, positive-response read-back, and a hard warning before a crew breaks ground on a dead ticket.
7:15 ask to every foreman, nudge only the ones who haven't answered, compile one sheet (xlsx or PDF) with WR, client, location, crew, UG/OH — released by a named superintendent and emailed to the client's distribution list. "Same as yesterday" is a valid answer.
Job-done and quantities from the foreman's text land as clean inputs for billing; a supply-house receipt photographed in the truck becomes a drafted bill with a duplicate check; change conditions and delays get logged with a timestamp. The office stops re-keying and starts reviewing.
Load your safety manual, each client's construction standards, splice specs and equipment manuals. Any roster member texts a question and gets the answer with the source page attached. If Blue can't cite it, it says so and routes to the super.
Blue already reads engineering prints to find poles, footage and corridors for 811. Pointed at a bid: takeoff quantities from the print (bore footage, aerial spans, splice points, conduit counts), matched to your unit-price book, drafted into a quote for the estimator to finish — with the bid deadline on the calendar and a reminder before it.
Blue holds the crew calendar: what each superintendent is committed to, by week, against the crews and rigs he has. It flags the over- and under-loaded weeks, the weather and ground-condition slips, and drafts the rebalance for the super to approve. A weekly one-pager per unit, and one view across units for whoever runs the master schedule.
Start-minus-N-day reminders for ROW and county permits, railroad crossings, inspection windows; DOT annuals and driver-file dates; service intervals on drills and plows by hours or dates. The per-unit maintenance scheduler is next on our build list — the reminders themselves run today.
A storm call at 2am gets logged the moment it lands: who called, where, what's down, who's rolling, when they arrived. The super gets the alert; the office gets the record; the client gets a response time you can prove.
Cash-flow forecast, unbilled-work detector, bills-due and vendor-bill capture, monthly and quarterly reviews — the same workflows our owner-operator customers run. Your office decides which to turn on; nothing money-touching happens without a named approver.
Every scenario below is a workflow that exists today — most of them running daily at our utility-contractor customer — reframed for fiber construction.
Blue texts every foreman for today's location, WR, client and crew. By 7:50 it has compiled one sheet, named who hasn't answered, and sent it to the superintendent to release.
Every WR whose tickets hit their update-by date this week, grouped by whoever filed them. One text, one reply. Blue refreshes the book and records every new ticket number before it moves on.
A drill operator asks by text. Blue answers from the client's construction standard — page attached — instead of a phone tree.
"Done on 26-091, 1,840' bored, 2 splice cases closed" from the truck. Blue records it against the WR, drafts the billing line for the office, and files the Ferguson receipt photo as a bill draft.
Blue reads the ticket's positive response and says which utilities have marked and which haven't. Date-valid and actually-marked are different questions; Blue keeps them separate.
Text Blue the prints. It pulls bore footage, aerial spans, splice points and conduit counts off the sheets, matches them to your unit-price book, and drafts the quote for the estimator to finish — deadline on the calendar.
County ROW permit for the 135 crossing: 4 weeks out. Two drills due for service by hours. Unit 14's DOT annual is next month. Blue reminds the right person, once, at the right time.
Blue compiles what every superintendent is committed to next week against crews and rigs, flags the overloaded and the light weeks, and drafts the moves.
This is the whole interface. No dashboard, no portal — the same thread a foreman uses to text his super.
DEMO CONTENT IS ILLUSTRATIVE · A REAL DEPLOYMENT ANSWERS FROM PRECISION'S ACTUAL TICKETS, STANDARDS & ROSTER
Every roster member carries a permission set. Blue answers what that person is allowed to know and does what they're allowed to ask for — and nothing customer-facing or money-touching happens without a named approver. Client prints are scoped to the unit working them and audited on every send.
| Role | Blue will… | Blue won't… |
|---|---|---|
| Superintendent | Release the daily sheet · approve 811 proposals · answer the refresh digest · get call-out alerts · approve schedule moves · change the roster by text | File a ticket or move a job without his approve |
| Foreman / operator | Report for the sheet · log quantities, job-done and delays · ask spec & safety questions (cited) · check a ticket's status · send a receipt photo | See pricing, finance, or another unit's prints |
| Estimator / PM | Get takeoff drafts from prints · bid-deadline reminders · master-schedule and capacity views across units | Submit a bid or commit a crew on its own |
| HR / Safety | Load and update safety manuals · audit any answer against the source · get DOT and driver-file reminders | Make a safety decision — Blue cites the standard; the qualified person decides |
| Fleet | Get service and inspection reminders keyed to units, hours and dates | Order parts or schedule vendors on its own |
| Office / Finance | Receive field inputs the same day — quantities, job-done, receipts, delays · turn on any of the finance workflows (forecast, unbilled work, bills due, month-end) when wanted | Send, pay, or post anything without an approved draft |
Blue runs on a Mac mini we install at the Bargersville shop. Your roster, your 811 ledger, your clients' standards and prints stay on hardware you can point at. We maintain it remotely over a private tunnel; encrypted off-site backup covers theft, fire, or a dead drive.
One superintendent and his crews, plus the office people who receive what they produce. Two weeks to baseline how things actually run today, ten weeks live and instrumented, then a scorecard reported as measured — including anything that underperforms.
Documents loaded, unit configured, foremen onboarded by text. We measure today's sheet build time, lookup frequency, locate round-trips and field-to-billing lag before Blue changes anything.
Every question, answer, citation, sheet, ticket and field report is logged with a timestamp. No self-reported numbers.
Hours returned, tickets that lapsed with a crew still on the job, sheet build time, field-to-office lag, citation rate, adoption. Delivered as-is. If the numbers aren't there, we'll say so and pull the box.
| Metric | Target | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets lapsed with a crew still on the WR | 0 | The strike-risk number your clients care about |
| 811 round-trips through the super | −60% | The most visible daily friction |
| Daily sheet build time | 45 min → < 10 min | Measurable every working day |
| Field event → office record | next day → same day | Quantities, job-done, receipts, delays |
| Spec/safety answers cited to the page | 100% — or Blue declines | Your safety director can audit any answer in seconds |
| Foreman adoption | ≥ 75% texting Blue weekly | An unused tool returns nothing |
For scale: a three-person crew standing 20 minutes twice a day waiting on a locate answer is about $2,000 a month at a $100/hr burdened crew rate — before counting a lapsed ticket, a missed permit window, a bid that went out late, or the superintendent's first hour back. We'll put your rates in the model, not ours.
It's early. Forge is a young Bargersville company with two customers live — a concrete contractor and a utility-line contractor's Indianapolis unit. You'd be the third, and the first fiber shop. You get founder-level attention on your setup, and you'll occasionally see a rough edge before we sand it.
Some of this is proven daily; some is a pilot. The 811 book, the production sheet, the cited answers, the reminders and the field-to-office inputs run today. Quoting from prints and cross-unit capacity balancing use the same machinery pointed at new work — we'd build them with your estimator and your supers in the loop, and we've labeled them that way on this page.
The 811 filing itself stays human-approved. Blue proposes, draws, publishes the review page, and runs the refresh clock. A person hits approve on every filing. We think that's the right posture for a long time.
Blue doesn't make safety decisions or submit bids. It surfaces the cited standard and drafts the numbers; the qualified worker and the estimator decide. It also won't do timekeeping or hours — deliberately out of scope.
We're a family company a few miles down the road, built for operators who came up through the work. The three phones above aren't a storyboard — that's the product doing the job the way it does it every day. Starting is the same motion: a text. Say the word and inside two weeks Blue is on a box at the shop, your standards loaded, one unit's crews texting it — with 90 days to prove it's the best field hire you never had to make.