The 2021 Street Works UK Conference and Awards were sponsored by Skewb, who would like to share the following piece.

UK companies face a herculean task to meet the government’s ambitious Build Back Better agenda. The strategic infrastructure plan that underpins this agenda requires significant amount of works on the public highway. It is imperative therefore that utilities and other promoters of works on the public highway adopt innovative ways of working, with a view to delivering to their ambitious plans whilst minimising disruption to the public and optimising costs, both operational and environmental, of their Street Works operations.

Skewb provides consulting and turnaround services to Utilities and other promoters to optimise their Street Works operations. Our street works experts can provide a holistic range of Street Works solutions to clients, ranging from organisational design of Street Works teams to training and outsourcing of permitry operations. Our key focus is to use innovative approaches in our proprietary Skewb OPUS suite to support the attainment of business outcomes including, optimising the operating costs, reducing cost of failure, improving in HA and customer reputation and increasing operational efficiency within Street Works teams.

Once engaged with Skewb, our street works experts will use our tried and tested methodology comprising quantitative and qualitative approaches to assess the maturity and effectiveness of different capability domains associated with Street Works operations. The quantitative assessment is conducted through a robust week-long exercise of loading the client’s permit data from DfT’s Street Manager into Skewb OPUS’ Efficiency Calculator to derive a set of performance indicators that will identify improvement opportunities from planning of permits through to engaging with the Highway Authorities with the joined aim to minimise the occupancy of highways by Utility Works.

Clients may also choose to use products from Skewb’s innovative Skewb OPUS platform to accelerate the attainment of targeted business outcomes. Skewb OPUS contains a suite of modular components, each designed by street works practitioners to address specific challenges that are typical within Utilities. For example, the Opus Workbench application which is integrated with DfT’s Street Manager, is designed with guided “Red Book” work flows to ensure that users who are new to street works can raise and manage permits in a controlled and predictable manner, thereby reducing potential fines and penalties.

Our strategic partnership with One Network also affords our street works Experts with innovative solutions that can improve the planning processes for street works as well as real time management of permits.

Our commitment to clients is to power-up their street works operations, improving operational efficiency by up to 30% and reducing their operating costs around street works by a similar order of magnitude.

Please contact us either via our booking page https://skewbopus.co.uk or through the following email
address opus@skewb.uk.