Analyze thousands of sites in an hour

Shapemaker just created a new tool which enables you to analyze your whole portfolio, analyzing thousands of sites per hour. This allows a whole new way of managing your portfolio of sites, which we’ll go deeper into in this blog post. First, let me introduce Shapemaker and then I’ll elaborate on how we do this and some use cases of this.

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Shapemaker in a nutshell

Shapemaker is a SaaS product which automates structural analysis of telecom sites. “In short”, we do site-specific assessments, assessment of wind loading, run FEA analysis, calculate capacities according to the Eurocode and local annexes, perform design checks and generate a report with the necessary information to sign off a project, all automatically. All we need the user to input is the geometry, the ancillaries and the location. This has made Shapemaker a crucial tool for our users when handling co-location requests. One of our users reports that the time to respond to co-location requests has reduced from weeks to hours or minutes. According to the customer, they would only need a few hours if the site was not onboarded in Shapemaker or just a few minutes if the site was already onboarded to answer a co-location request.

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Thus far, this has been the main value Shapemaker provides. We make it easy for our customers to perform structural analysis on their sites. We let them try out different antenna configurations in minutes, or even seconds, and we’ve made Shapemaker so user-friendly that anyone can use it.

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Scaling analyses to whole portfolios

Lately, we’ve been working on scaling this analysis to the whole portfolio. Being cloud-native from the beginning has made our infrastructure capable of handling a very high load. The typical FEA software is constrained by the user's computer, while we can adjust the available power as we want. In other words, we’re able to scale up our analysis capability depending on the current load.

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Using some smart queuing and distributing tasks across multiple data clusters, we’re able to analyze thousands of sites per hour, with the potential to increase this, if needed. 

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Use-cases

1. Update Equipment: Re-analyze all structures with new ancillary data. Got new and updated ancillary data? Make the change in our ancillary database and re-analyze all structures with said ancillary. 
2. Strengthening Kits: Simulate adding kits across specific tower types. Want to see the effect of installing a strengthening kit on all your structures of type x? Add the strengthening kit to all your structures of that product type and run the analysis on affected sites. Use our Shapemaker Insights feature to see how this affects your total rest capacity, the utilization distribution and the rest capacity distribution
3. Tenant Changes: Evaluate the impact of switching antenna types. You might wonder what would happen if your tenants swapped out antenna type X with antenna type Y. 
4. Mergers & Acquisitions: Quickly assess the tower portfolio state and provide an overview for better portfolio valuation.

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With Shapemaker’s ability to scale structural analysis across entire portfolios, TowerCos and telecom providers can now achieve a previously unattainable portfolio management level. By analysing thousands of sites in just hours, operators can make rapid, data-driven decisions to address everything from co-location requests and equipment upgrades to mergers and acquisitions. This capability ensures that decisions are based on the latest, most accurate data, providing a competitive advantage and enabling proactive infrastructure management.

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What would you do if you could analyze your entire portfolio in hours?

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