Fulcrum Technologies
Revolutionizing Visibility for Telecom Providers

In an increasingly competitive industry, the best way for a telecom carrier to improve its bottom line is to become more efficient and make better decisions about its investment in network infrastructure. Often, equipment is ordered as kits or bill of materials (BOM), and as a result, it can be nearly impossible to ensure whether all the items for which a carrier is invoiced were actually received. It is equally difficult to manage the individual parts of the equipment asset that makes up their network, such as the rectifiers, radios, and cards. What happens when individual items are swapped out, replaced, or when more is needed? How are warranties and depreciation schedules tracked when all this activity takes place across a massive geographic area? These questions and an infinite list of others indicate the magnitude of the challenges faced by telecom carriers who are tasked with making critically important decisions based on inaccurate and incomplete data about the equipment assets that constitute their network. To help telecom carriers solve these challenges, Fulcrum Technologies, a leading provider of network asset lifecycle management solutions offers a mobile application called CATS.

CATS provides all the functionality needed for comprehensive asset lifecycle management best practices and records data about the details of any activity involving network equipment wherever the event takes place. By guiding technicians, warehouse personnel, and even contractors through the collection of unique data defined by the transaction they are engaged in, CATS assures that information about the network is accurate and up-to-date so that the management can make the best decisions possible. Fulcrum’s application seamlessly communicates information with other existing software applications that lack the capability of capturing data related to the status of equipment in real-world scenarios. “We integrate the information we manage into financial systems like Oracle ERP, SAP, and PeopleSoft,” states Brent Bauer, co-founder and CEO of Fulcrum Technologies. These applications need current data as network upgrades are almost constant, which means equipment is replaced frequently.

We are passionate about what we do and we have more experience than any other company

For more than twenty years, Fulcrum has focused solely on solving asset management challenges faced by telecom carriers. Fulcrum specializes in recording accurate data about telecom networking equipment and the changes that take place, validating and managing that data, communicating it with other systems, and then helping users view it in the manner and at the level of detail, that is consistent with the way they work within their organization. Fulcrum has more experience in this particular area of discipline than any other vendor and has embodied that experience within the CATS software suite. CATS has incorporated the lessons learned by tens of thousands of users performing various asset transactions. As a result, the application is able to guide users through relevant data in a step-by-step manner that reflects best practices and built-in efficiencies gained through automated data-collection technologies. CATS goes beyond asset tracking to become the repository for all information about network equipment throughout its lifecycle.

This information is vital to several telecom carrier departments such as finance, network operations, network engineering, and supply chain who make decisions every day on what equipment to purchase, reallocate, reuse, and discard, and whether to make payments for equipment that may or may not yet be received or repaired. Fulcrum helps carriers make decisions about where to invest their network budget. “We are passionate about what we do and we have more experience than any other company,” concludes Bauer.