Lit Fibre drives lightning-fast growth in full-fiber network rollout

The Challenge

Established only in 2021, Lit Fibre has set an ambitious goal of reaching 500,000 homes by the end of 2026. To enable this rapid growth, the start-up company wanted to avoid common pitfalls, as Chief Delivery Officer Neil Grose explains: “Large-scale telecoms projects are all too often managed through a combination of spreadsheets, emails, and walls covered with maps and handwritten notes. That approach works, but only because armies of people drag the project across the line. It also leaves you dependent on the Excel skills of your project managers, and it’s not repeatable or scalable.”
When large projects are managed across a disconnected set of tools, it becomes almost impossible to gain a clear view of activities, not least because of the lack of standardization. Given the scale of Lit Fibre’s ambitions and investments, the company wanted a more rigorous approach that would provide clear and accurate visibility and control over progress and costs.

“Unless you can meticulously track every meter of cable laid into the ground, you can very easily end up paying for something twice,” says Neil Grose. “You don’t have an audit trail and ultimately your cost-per-home metric goes up.”

Lit Fibre set out to deploy a construction management solution that would seamlessly integrate with its design tools and enable it to control activities and costs through the entire installation process. Its future vision was for a truly collaborative working partnership with its build partners, facilitated by technology.

The Solution

When Lit Fibre’s CTO asked Neil Grose’s opinion on Vitruvi™ Construction Management System, he recalls: “My eyes lit up. I immediately and completely understood what it was for, what problems it was going to solve, and the scale we could take it to. I was pretty excited to get my hands on it.”

Effectively starting from a blank sheet of paper, Lit Fibre simultaneously designed its end-to-end processes and controls and implemented them in Vitruvi. This included building an API to integrate with Keypro KeyCom – Lit Fibre’s system of record for planning and managing the fiber network.

“The Vitruvi solution is completely flexible and configurable to whatever you want to achieve,” says Neil Grose. “And if there isn’t already a button for what you want, Vitruvi can quickly create it for you. If you can describe it in words and create a rule that’s repeatable, they can automate it behind the scenes. These rules and automations are a critical feature for us, because they are what enable us to work in a repeatable way at scale.”

The Results

Today, around 30 people at Lit Fibre use Vitruvi, with a further 200 users among its build partners. The company handles all survey and design activities in-house, using KeyCom to create work programs in chunks of 500 homes. At the click of a button, these finished designs for cabling to 500 homes are pushed into Vitruvi, where the planning team turns them into work packages for assignment to build partners.

Vitruvi creates the relevant bills of materials and labor, with cost estimates based on each partner’s rate card.

“With Vitruvi, the process of creating work packages takes less than five minutes, which is incredible given all the complex governance and rules we’ve set up,” says Neil Grose.

Lit Fibre’s project management teams then take up the baton, working with their build-partner counterparts in Vitruvi to manage the contract labor force. The external project managers use Vitruvi to assign jobs to their cablers, who receive detailed push notifications on their mobile devices giving them full instructions on the upcoming work. The cablers use Vitruvi on site to check off work items as they complete them, adding photographic evidence as required based on business rules in the system. This saves time and effort for the cablers, while giving both build partners and Lit Fibre confidence that work is being completed to the expected quality standards.

Data-Driven Insight

In addition to saving considerable time and effort in the creation of comprehensive work packages, Vitruvi makes it easy for Lit Fibre to keep track of its broadband rollout. “If you’re managing projects with spreadsheets and emails and meetings, it takes a huge amount of effort to work with build partners to validate the quality of work delivered,” says Neil Grose.

“With Vitruvi, we have confidence that the work is being completed, without expending significant time and effort.” 

With data relating to work items and costs captured reliably and consistently in Vitruvi, Lit Fibre can easily access detailed and accurate information on all aspects of its infrastructure rollout. Managers can see progress against installation targets and timelines, and can verify that work is being completed to the expected standard – both of which ultimately feed into customer satisfaction. “As a by-product of working through the operational stages coded into Vitruvi, our internal and external teams also generate all of the project management data we need,” says Neil Grose. “They’re happy because they don’t need to do any additional reporting work, and we’re happy because we now have much better insight into how close we are to completing a set of projects. Ultimately, better insight translates into tighter control over costs and greater confidence in delivering a fast, high-quality service to our paying customers.” 

Pushing Up Efficiency

With Vitruvi, Lit Fibre has full visibility into, and control over, its distributed collaborative construction environment. “Construction in telecoms can feel like semi-organized chaos,” says Neil Grose. “One response is to live with that chaos and just feed in more resources to achieve the targeted outputs. Or, as we have done, you can deploy a system like Vitruvi to massively increase your efficiency, help your external build partners, and get out what you put in.” Unlike many of its competitors, Vitruvi does not need to employ commercial controllers or quantity surveyors to keep track of costs. “With Vitruvi, all of the heavy lifting that would normally be handled by armies of people is baked into the business rules,” says Neil Grose. “Those rules protect us from cost over-runs, and project managers can provide the necessary commercial governance.”

Faster Payments 

Payment terms and cash flow are among the biggest issues for build partners in the telecoms industry. On-the-ground construction staff expect to be paid at least weekly, but most large clients offer payment terms ranging from one to six months. As a result, build partners normally pay out money to staff weeks or months before they receive the corresponding income – creating negative cash flow and increasing their risk. “One of our foundational goals was to offer the fastest payment terms in the industry,” says Neil Grose.

“We wanted to make Lit Fibre the preferred client for our build partners by helping them to achieve positive cash flow.” 

Once project stages are complete and approved, the build partners use Vitruvi to generate the corresponding invoices to Lit Fibre. Since invoices are based on data that has passed through all the relevant rules in the system, Lit Fibre has full confidence in their validity and accuracy – enabling faster payments without increasing business risk. Neil Grose says, “Our aim at Lit Fibre is to pay our build partners as quickly and accurately as possible so that they can invest in building their businesses to meet our growing needs. And because we can offer faster payment terms, our build partners typically offer more favorable rates. All this would have been impossible without the confidence and governance that Vitruvi gives us. Our business strategy depends on rapidly building up our scale, and this ability to attract the best talent in the industry without over-spending is a critical enabling factor.”